Are your words as "vulgar" as you think? 10 shocking etymological origins

Etymology—the study of word origins—reveals that the terms we use daily often started with meanings that were drastically different, sometimes even comical or celestial. When we look into the lineage of our vocabulary, we find traces of Viking warriors, Greek myths, and even the breaking of river ice. Continue reading to discover 10 words with fascinating origin stories.

When we think of a galaxy, we imagine vast, swirling clusters of billions of stars across the vacuum of space. However, the origin of the word is much more domestic. The term comes from the Greek galaxias, which is derived from gala, meaning "milk".

This linguistic connection stems from Greek mythology. According to legend, the Milky Way was created when the goddess Hera was nursing the infant Heracles. When she pulled away, a spray of milk streaked across the sky. To the ancient Greeks, the glowing band of light in the night sky was literally the "milky circle". While we now know that galaxies are composed of stars and gas, our scientific terminology remains rooted in an ancient story of a mother and her child.

While most of us associate marmalade with a bitter orange preserve enjoyed at breakfast, the word’s history has nothing to do with citrus. It comes from the Portuguese word marmelada, which was a preserve made from marmelo, the word for "quince".

In the 15th and 16th centuries, quince paste was a thick, solid confection often imported into England. As the centuries passed and international trade expanded, bitter Seville oranges replaced quinces as the primary ingredient in these preserves.

To go "berserk" is to lose all control, acting with a wild, frenzied energy. The origin of this word is found in the terrifying Viking warriors of Old Norse lore. The term berserkr is a compound of ber- (meaning "bear") and serkr (meaning "shirt" or "garment").

These "berserkers" were legendary fighters who entered battle in a state of trance-like fury, wearing bear skins rather than armor. Some historians believe their frenzy was induced by hallucinogenic mushrooms or heavy drinking, but the result was a warrior so fierce they were said to be immune to fire and iron. Today, the word has transitioned from a specific type of Norse soldier to a general description of chaos.

In modern English, weird simply means strange or freaky. But in Old English, the word wyrd meant "fate" or "destiny". That is to say, it was a noun, not an adjective. A person’s wyrd was the unchangeable path laid out for them by the universe.

The shift toward the modern meaning of "strange" was largely influenced by William Shakespeare. In Macbeth, he introduced the "Weird Sisters", three witches who could see and manipulate the threads of fate. Because these characters were supernatural and unsettling, audiences began to associate the word "weird" with the uncanny and the bizarre.

If a bomb explodes, it bursts with violent force. However, the word’s Latin ancestor, explodere, had a much more vocal meaning: "to clap out". In the world of ancient Roman theater, explodere meant to drive an actor off the stage by clapping, hissing, or shouting.

For centuries, "explode" referred to the rejection or driving out of an idea or a person through noise. It wasn’t until the 17th and 18th centuries, with the advancement of gunpowder and physics, that the word began to describe a physical, violent burst of pressure.

Today, if someone is described as "vulgar", it usually means they are crude, offensive, or lacking in manners. But originally, the Latin vulgaris, from vulgus, the "common people", simply meant "common" or "ordinary".

For a long time, the "vulgar tongue" was simply the local language as opposed to the prestigious Latin used by the church and scholars. Over time, however, the word took on a snobbish, class-based connotation. The elite began to view anything common as inferior and unrefined, leading to the modern definition where "vulgar" is a synonym for "distasteful".

One might assume that "Arctic" is an indigenous word for the frozen north, but actually, it’s Greek in origin. Arktos is the Greek word for "bear". Yet, the region is not named for the polar bears that lived there, but for the constellations that hang above it.

In the northern sky, the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear, is an important landmark. To the ancient Greeks, the Arctic was simply the land under the Bear. Interestingly, the name for the southern pole, Antarctica, literally means "opposite the bear".

"Camouflage" is a relatively young word in the English language, entering common usage during World War I. It comes from the French camoufler, which was slang for "to disguise". In turn, some etymologists link it to camouflet, a term for a puff of smoke blown into someone’s face to distract them.

Before it was a military tactic used to hide tanks and soldiers, camouflage was a term used by thieves and actors to describe the art of changing one’s appearance. The war transformed it into a technical endeavor involving artists and biologists to create patterns that could deceive the enemy’s eye.

When we come down with the "flu", we rarely think about astrology. However, the word is a shortened form of influenza, which is Italian for "influence". In medieval times, people believed that outbreaks of disease were caused by the "influence" of the stars and planets.

Later, the term was refined to influenza del freddo, "influence of the cold". Eventually, the English language dropped the astrological baggage and the "cold" reference, leaving us with a punchy, three-letter word for a respiratory virus.

A "debacle" is a sudden, disastrous failure or a total collapse. The word’s history is rooted in the natural world. It comes from the French débâcle, which originally referred to the breaking up of ice in a river.

When a frozen river began to thaw, the ice would crack and rush downstream in a chaotic, unstoppable flood. This literal breaking loose was a violent and messy event. By the 19th century, people began using the term metaphorically to describe any situation where things fall apart quickly and uncontrollably.

Linguistic innovation

Shakespeare said it first: 10 words coined by the Bard

Rumor has it that William Shakespeare coined over 1,700 new English words or, at least, he was the first to put them in writing. If you have ever heard this fact, it might make you think of sophisticated-sounding terms like sanctimonious, equivocal, or radiance, all invented by the Bard. But many of the words we use in everyday life have Shakespearean origins, no matter how mundane they might seem. Let’s explore Shakespeare’s mark on our daily vocabulary.

First recorded in: A Midsummer Night's Dream

When Shakespeare first used the word ‘bedroom’ (around the 1580s), the common way of referring to a space intended for sleeping was ‘chamber’ or ‘bedchamber’. Why did the bard choose a different word then? He was not referring to what we now understand as a bedroom. In Act 2, Scene 2 of A Midsummer Night's Dream, when Lysander asks Hermia for "bed-room", he is asking to lie next to her in the bed. The change from ‘space in the bed’ to ‘a room intended for sleeping’ occurred a few decades later, and the current use of 'bedroom' was set around the 1610s.

First recorded in: A Midsummer Night's Dream

We commonly use this word to describe the behavior or attitude of someone very confident and bold, and its first recorded use was not that different, though it bore a negative connotation. In Act 3, Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck uses the word "swaggering" to mockingly describe the rustic manners of the actors rehearsing a play. A few years later, Shakespeare used "swaggerer" in Act 2, Scene 4 of Henry IV, Part 2, to describe the noisy, boastful, and brawling Pistol. Nowadays, ‘swagger’ is most of the time used with a positive connotation.

First recorded in: Coriolanus

If Shakespeare ever heard Kelly Clarkson singing "doesn't mean I'm lonely when I'm alone," he would think the verse redundant, because he coined the word ‘lonely’ to mean ‘alone’. In Coriolanus (Act 4, Scene 1), the titular character says "I go alone, like to a lonely dragon, that his fen makes fear'd and talk'd of more than seen". While Coriolanus used the word to compare himself with a solitary or isolated creature, ‘lonely’ evolved to mean ‘sad for lack of company’ in the early 19th century.

First recorded in: Macbeth

While linguists believe that ‘assassine’ was already in use in the 1570s, ‘assassination’ was first recorded in print around 1605 in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. A word of Arabic origin (from hassassin, ‘hashish-user’) that pejoratively described a group of mercenary killers, it had entered English through the Italian assassino. In Macbeth (Act 1, scene 7), the main character, while contemplating killing the king, refers to the potential murder as an ‘assassination’.

First recorded in: Troilus and Cressida

While in modern times we understand fashionable as ‘following the latest trends’, Shakespeare’s use was slightly different. In Act 3, scene 3 of Troilus and Cressida, the character Ulysses describes time as "a fashionable host", using the term to mean ‘popular’. While its meaning has changed slightly since then, the association with something popular remains.

First recorded in: Venus and Adonis

Was Shakespeare the first to record this word? Yes and no. In 1575, a scholar named William Patten had recorded the term ‘eye ball’, but Shakespeare was the first to use it as a single word in the 1593 poem Venus and Adonis, "Look in mine eyeballs, there thy beauty lies". How did people refer to the eyeball before that? They simply called it the ‘eye’.

First recorded in: Julius Caesar

Historians are certain about this one: the word ‘generous’ was not coined by Shakespeare, but he was responsible for making it popular and cementing its meaning as ‘freely giving’. From the Latin generosus (‘of noble birth’, ‘honorable’), the term had entered English through French with that original meaning. Shakespeare had used it as ‘honorable’ or ‘high ranking’ in Love's Labour's Lost (c. 1594), but he later used it in 1599's Julius Caesar (Act 2, scene 3) to describe the unselfishness and altruism of Caesar, who had made provisions for every Roman citizen in his will.

First recorded in: The Taming of the Shrew

Before Shakespeare’s time, English people certainly undressed, but they used words like unclothe, strip, or the Old English unscrydan to describe the action. The French dresser (´to arrange’, ‘put in order’) entered English in the 14th century, and shifted from general to personal order in the following century, eventually being used solely for clothes. Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1590) contains the first written record of the opposite verb, ‘to undress’, in its prologue: "Madam, undress you, and come now to bed."

First recorded in: Titus Andronicus

Although ‘vary’ (from the Latin variare, ‘to change or make different’) was already in use during the 1500s, Shakespeare is widely considered the first to record its adjectival form with the meaning ‘something that contains many different things’. In 1591’s Titus Andronicus (Act 3, scene 1), the character Marcus compares the voice of his now-mute niece Lavinia with a bird that sang "sweet varied notes".

First recorded in: Love’s Labour’s Lost

The Greek kritikos, meaning ‘able to judge’, was already used in English before Shakespeare’s time, but it referred to skilled judges or literary correctors. In Act 3, scene 1, of Love’s Labour’s Lost, Berowne, initially cynical about love but having fallen for Rosalind, describes his former self as "A critic, nay, a nightwatch constable", making this the first recorded use of the word to mean someone who points out flaws or looks upon others with contempt.