words origins and their changes

Born by accident: 10 English words that started as mistakes

There are many words we use today that actually came from small "mistakes," like "shamefaced", "penthouse", or the verb "edit." Back then, as words moved between languages and writing wasn’t as common, changes in spelling, pronunciation, or transcription were usual. Sometimes these shifts were unintentional, and other times they were adjusted to sound more familiar with what people thought the word meant. Let’s see these 10 words you probably didn’t know were born as accidents.

The word "shamefaced" looks like it's referring to your face turning red with embarrassment, but that's not actually its first meaning. The original word was shamefast, and that second part, fast, used to mean "held firmly in place." So it wasn't about your face showing how ashamed you were; it was about being held back, or frozen, by shame. Around the 16th and 17th centuries, English people stopped recognizing the old meaning of "fast" and replaced it with "face," which sounded more accurate, but the meaning remained the same.

It may be hard to believe, but the meaning of "penthouse" was originally associated with a small attached structure rather than with luxury apartments. It comes from the French apentis, which referred to a simple construction against a wall, usually with a sloped roof. In the Middle Ages, it was adopted by the English and appeared in forms such as pentis or pentice, already altered in sound.

Time went through, and speakers reshaped it into "penthouse," connecting it to the familiar word "house," even though that link wasn’t originally there. As the form changed, the meaning shifted too. Instead of a modest attached structure, it came to describe a top-floor space, and eventually a high-end apartment at the top of a building.

The verb "edit" didn’t exist as it does now. English already had the noun editor, which came from Latin and meant someone who prepares text for publication. By the late 1700s and early 1800s, English speakers began assuming that if there was an "editor," there should also be a verb "to edit". So they removed what they thought was the "-or" ending and formed a new verb: edit. This is an example of back-formation, where a shorter word is created from a longer one by mistake. Even though "edit" wasn’t the original form, it quickly became standard, and we actually use it more frequently than its original noun.

The Old English word for the snake was nædre. People would say it with the article, like "a nædre." At some point, listeners got confused about where the word actually began and started hearing it as "an adder." So the "n" shifted from the noun to the article, and eventually disappeared from the word itself.

So, it went from "a nædre" to "an adder," and finally to just "adder." This happened in past centuries when language was heard more than written, and people naturally reinterpreted where one word ended, and the next began.

A singular–plural mistake happened with the word "biceps." From Latin, where bi- means "two" and -ceps means "headed". The word is already singular, referring to a muscle with two points of attachment. When it was adopted into English, however, "biceps" was mistaken for a plural form, and "bicep" emerged as a new singular. This is another example of back-formation, when a shorter form is created by removing what people think is a plural ending.

This is a case of misdivision. The fruit has its roots in Asia, and its name travels from Sanskrit, to Persian, to the Arabic naranj. In Spanish, it stayed almost the same; it is called naranja. But in French, naranj came to be norange, and people often said it with the article "une norange". Time passed, and people started to say une orange. When English borrowed the word from French, it adopted this "mistaken version" and has remained orange until today.

After the Norman conquest of 1066, when William the Conqueror of Normandy invaded England and brought French influence to the English language, the English adopted the word cherise from the French (a variant of what today is called in French cerise). As it sounded like the word ended in "s", English thought it was plural and invented the "cherry" as its singular form.

The word "island" didn’t always have an "s" in it. In Old English, it was written as igland or yland, meaning "land surrounded by water." By the 1500s, the spelling started to change. Writers added an "s" because they thought the word was related to "isle," from the word "insula" in French. The "land" part was also kept to make the meaning clearer and avoid confusion with other similar words for water. With time, the spelling "island" became standard. Even though the "s" was added by mistake, it stayed in the word; that’s why we still write it, but never pronounce it.

In early English, sneeze was written as fnese, along with forms like fneosung (sneezing) and fnora (a sneeze). So what happened? In medieval handwriting, there was a long "s" that looked a lot like the letter "f." Because of that, people often misread the word and begin writing it with an "s" instead. That reading mistake stuck and became the standard spelling. Even though the word echoes the sound of a sneeze, its modern form actually comes from writing confusion.

Gravy comes from a French word, grané, which means "spiced". This word was also misread due to medieval handwriting and the similarities between the letters"n" and "u". So, the word came to be misspelled as graue. Today, we use either "u" or "v" depending on the sound they represent, although in medieval times these letters varied according to their position in the whole word. If it was at the beginning of it, the "v" was used, and the "u" if it was in the middle of it. It didn’t matter how it sounded. Because of these changes, grané evolved into gravy as we know it today.

Language in motion

From Nerd to Robot: 10 words coined by famous writers

Image: Ghinzo

As masters of language, writers sometimes find that their imagination and creativity go far beyond the vocabulary the world has to offer. In order to put their ideas into writing, they have to create new words that eventually become part of the dictionary. Here are 10 terms and expressions used in modern language that you probably didn’t know were invented by famous writers.

Image: Vika_Glitter

Dr. Seuss’ talent for telling fantastic stories through rhymes is well known. But very few people know that the creator of The Grinch and The Cat in the Hat was also responsible for the existence of the word "nerd."

In his 1950 book, If I Ran the Zoo, a little boy daydreams about what kind of animals he would have if he were in charge of a hypothetical zoo: "a Nerkle, a Nerd and a Seersucker". Although the term described an imaginary being -and the exact origin of a slang word can never be certain- it’s believed it was later adopted by students to refer to anyone with superior intelligence but not many social skills.

Image: Pixabay

Nowadays, freelance work is very widespread, especially among young people. But did you know that the word "freelancer" originated in the 19th century? The term first appeared in the historical novel Ivanhoe by Scottish novelist, poet, and historian Sir Walter Scott.

In the book, published in 1819 but set in England in the Middle Ages, Scott refers to mercenaries free of all allegiance who offer their services to anyone willing to pay them to fight for any nation. Thus, from the mixture of the words "free" and "lancers" came the term that today is given to those who work independently rather than on a regular salary basis.

Image: John Martin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the word "pandemonium" as a "wild uproar" or "a chaotic situation". The origin of this word dates back to the 17th century. In 1667, English poet John Milton first used the term to name the capital of hell, home of the main character of his epic poem Paradise Lost.

"Pandemonium" is a combination of the Greek prefix pan-, which means "all", and the Late Latin daemonium, meaning "evil spirit". Although today we no longer use the term to refer to the actual location of Satan and the fallen angels, the word continues to describe an infernal place or situation.

Image: Shahadat Rahman

Nowadays, there is no doubt that the word "cyberspace" refers to the online world of computer networks. While it may seem that the term has been in our language forever, it was actually first used by American-Canadian speculative fiction writer William Ford Gibson in the 1982 short story Burning Chrome.

Two years later, the author expanded the concept in his novel Neuromancer to describe a fictitious computer network containing vast amounts of information that could be exploited for wealth and power. Ring a bell? "Cyberspace" has since become a widely used word in many languages.

Image: Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦

While the feeling of being bored must have existed since ancient times, the word for it was not put into writing until the mid-19th century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first written record of the word "boredom" appears in Charles Dickens' 1852 novel Bleak House.

However, some historians have found antecedents that predate Dickens use of the term. Lord Byron used "bores" and "bored" in his 1823 epic poem Don Juan. And a few years later, Herman Melville used other variations of the term, like "bore" and "bored to death". While we can’t be sure who wrote the word first, its literary origin is undeniable.

Image: McGill Library

"Serendipity" is known as a fortuitous and unforeseen finding or discovery, something that happened by chance but still has value. This term was coined in 1754 by British writer Horace Walpole. It derives from a traditional Persian story in which the princes of Serendip turn to chance to find the solution to their problems.

In this case, we can be absolutely sure that "serendipity" is a Walpole creation. The author himself explains how he conceived the term in one of the countless letters he wrote throughout his life. In those letters, we can find evidence that he invented at least 200 words, although most of them aren’t used in modern everyday language.

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In 1920, when he was writing his next work, Czech playwright Karel Čapek desperately needed an original word that could define human-like machines created by a company to fulfill the hard tasks that people no longer wanted to do.

The first name that came to Čapek’s mind was "labori", from the Latin labor, meaning "work". However, his brother Josef was not very convinced and suggested "roboti", inspired by the Czech word robota, meaning "servitude" or "hard work." In 1922, the term "robot" made its way into our language when the play R.U.R. was translated into English.

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Well, maybe he didn’t invent it, but we have Mark Twain to thank for first putting in writing the term "hard-boiled" in relation to human character. As a writer of local color, Twain often used colloquialisms and regionalisms that he heard from other people and, by writing them down, made them familiar to the entire population.

In this sense, while the expression was probably known in some circles, the father of American literature was the first to use it as an adjective meaning "emotionally hardened, devoid of sentimentality".

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Although it comes from ancient Greek, the word "utopia" in its current sense was first used in 1516. Inspired by the New World, English philosopher and author Sir Thomas More imagined a fictional island society where everything worked in harmony.

"Utopia" literally translates as "no place", coming from the Greek οὐ ("not") and τόπος ("place"). The term popularized by More became so widespread that, over time, its meaning changed and is now used not only to refer to a specific place but to describe perfect scenarios or thoughts that are hard to attain.

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One of the most important pieces of English literature is also responsible for the name of a popular social network. We’re talking about The Canterbury Tales, a collection of 24 stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century.

In one of the tales, the English poet coined the onomatopoeia "twitter" to refer to the soft singing of a caged bird crying out for freedom. The neologism was later included by the Oxford Dictionary as a "short burst of inconsequential information". Fast forward to the 21st century, and American Internet entrepreneur Jack Dorsey uses the term to refer to the short, frequent posts on his now-famous platform. That also explains why Twitter’s logo was a bird!