Words and their different meanings

Wait… That’s not what that means: English words that change by country

The English language can travel as far as humans do. In fact, it has been doing so for thousands of years. Words can contain more than one definition, and even more than two or three are sometimes accepted. The important matter is to understand each other, and that is not just a problem of words, but of context, place, and relationships. How many times has it happened to you to be using all the right words in a conversation and still end up completely confused? Let's look at some words that may have confused us on more than one occasion!

If you've ever dunked your biscuits in milk, you know exactly what comfort looks like. But ask for the same thing in London and watch the confusion unfold. In the UK, a biscuit is what we'd call a cookie. Ours? They'd call it a scone.

The word itself has a messy history. Before 1800, nobody could even agree on the spelling: bisket, bisquet, biscuit. It described a sweet baked treat made with flour, eggs, and sugar. "Bis" also means twice in Latin, because the original biscuit was bread baked twice to survive long journeys.

Nothing feels more American than grabbing a bag of chips on a vacation road trip, somewhere between a gas station and nowhere. But in London, the scenery is totally different. Order chips in a London pub and you'll get something closer to what we call French fries: hot, thick, and usually next to a piece of battered fish.

Here's the real twist: what the British call "crisps" is exactly what we call chips. The words essentially swapped sides of the Atlantic. The word itself traces back to simply "chipping" a potato into pieces. By the 1860s, fish and chips had become a British institution.

Tell a British person nice pants! And they will probably cover his mouth and start laughing, either from embarrassment or from amusement. In the UK, "pants" mean underwear. What we call pants, they call trousers. Consider yourself warned.

Back in the old days, both countries used the same word "pantaloons", borrowed from Pantalone, an old merchant character from Italian theater who wore long, baggy trousers. Americans shortened it to pants and kept the meaning. Over in Britain, they kept a more intimate definition. There is more: in modern British slang, calling something "pants" means it's terrible.

The meaning of jumper literally jumped from one piece of clothing to another. In the US, we call a jumper a sleeveless dress, often worn over a shirt. Many school uniform regulations include jumpers for girls. Instead, the UK version is different. There, "jumper" means a pullover, jacket, or sweater.

How many tasks did you table this week? Well, let’s table that issue for now; we'd better talk about this tomorrow. In this phrase, to table something means to postpone under consideration, but what if it meant the exact opposite? In fact, it does.

The American Heritage Dictionary lists two meanings for the phrase "on the table". The first one is the one already mentioned, and the second one is to put something up for discussion right now. Confusing to say the least, isn’t it?

No surprise that the UK and the Commonwealth use the definition we don’t use. Because why would it be simple?

One goes on a baby’s head, the other on a Lamborghini: both are called a bonnet. The important thing to know is that in both cases, something important is being covered. In America, a bonnet is a hat. The kind of hat that has a brim and a ribbon that ties under the chin.

We have all seen them on babies, on ladies, and on pioneers. Instead, in the UK, a bonnet is the hood of a car. That part that covers the engine. So, phrases like "pop the bonnet" have nothing to do with the cute accessory; it simply means opening the hood of a car.

The word trolley can mean very different things depending on where you are. It can be a little train or a streetcar in the USA, often used in street rides and city tours.

On the other hand, on the British side, a trolley is nothing more than a cart. Its most common use is for a shopping cart. So, "catch the trolley" and "grab the trolley" have completely different meanings. Does anyone have any idea about this one?

You probably heard "this song is a total banger" before. "Take on Me " by A-ha and "Funkytown" by Lipps inc are, with no doubt, total bangers. But what if I told you a banger can come with potatoes? In fact, bangers and mash is one of the most famous dishes in England. So the meaning must be different. Or rather, the word simply has more than one meaning. Banger can be a music hit for the Americans and a sausage for the British at the same time. You just have to be careful how and when you use this word.

If someone lives in a huge apartment in New York and has a fancy car, wears fancy clothes, and goes to fancy restaurants, you might think he’s a refined or classy person, and you will probably not be wrong. But, if I go on a trip to London, I will hear this word is rather used as a verb, not as an adjective. Why is that? Because the British use of this word is different. Fancy means to want or to desire something. "Fancy a cup of tea?" or " fancy going to the cinema?" So, in London, the real question is not to be fancy, but what you fancy doing.

So which came first: angry or crazy? We’ve reached the last word, and here is the story behind mad. In Britain, mad has always meant crazy, referring to someone suffering from madness, a serious mental illness. That meaning never left. Ask any British person today, and a mad person is still someone out of their mind. They also use mad to mean enthusiastic. Passionate. That is where "Jack is mad about Mary" comes from. He is not angry at her. He is completely gone for her.

Using mad to mean angry? That is actually on us. It is an Americanism. Somewhere along the way, Americans took the word and redirected it straight toward anger. And we never looked back.

12 ways to invent a name

Do you prefer "Sherlock" or "Sherringford"? Behind 12 fictional names

Image: MJ S

Did you know that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was torn between naming his famous detective "Sherringford" or "Sherlock"? Or that James Bond was actually named after an American ornithologist? We repeat names like "Moby Dick" or "Harry Potter" with such ease that we forget some writer, at some point, sat down and scribbled out a list of possibilities.

Let’s explore the stories behind the naming of 12 beloved characters!

Image: Quang Viet Nguyen

If "James" sounds like a bland name for a top-notch spy, and "Bond" is a surname you’d probably forget after a first introduction, then Ian Fleming knew exactly what he was doing.

The point of the character’s name was to be unremarkable—even boring. A suave spy trying to blend in with his surroundings couldn’t very well walk around with a name like Sherlock or Indiana.

But Fleming didn’t invent the name: he borrowed it from a book about birds, written by American ornithologist James Bond.

Image: Jacques LE HENAFF

The solemn hero of To Kill a Mockingbird was meant to be linked with wisdom and justice. Harper Lee chose the name, which means "from Attica," for its association with Greek and Roman philosophers. It was a name that evoked rationality and moral clarity.

She countered it with "Finch," soft and grounded—and another bird. The contrast in those names perfectly suits the man who defended Tom Robinson in court and read to his children by lamplight.

Interestingly, Atticus was based in part on Lee’s father, Amasa Coleman Lee, a lawyer who once defended two Black men accused of murder.

Image: Erik Mclean

What about Homer Simpson? He was also based on the creator’s dad—as were Marge, Lisa, and Maggie. They were all named after Matt Groening’s own family. When deciding names for his cartoon dysfunctional family, Groening had the funny idea of borrowing his relatives’ names.

He intentionally left himself out of it: for his role as the devilish only son in the family, he changed "Matt" to "Bart" (an anagram of "brat").

Image: Lucas Medeiros

Sherringford Hope was the name Sir Arthur Conan Doyle first gave his detective. The character was clear in his mind, but he took his time coming up with the defining name.

"Holmes" was an English name associated with London in many people’s minds, partly because of the popular book Holmes’s Great Metropolis. And "Sherlock" happened to be the surname of two inspectors solving crimes in England at the time, so Doyle likely picked it from the newspapers on purpose.

Image: Ale Matei

J.M. Barrie’s "boy who wouldn’t grow up" had a carefully crafted name, too. Barrie had a close relationship with Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and her five sons, whom he entertained with imaginative stories about pirates and treasure.

He borrowed the name "Peter" from one of them, though the adventurous boy’s character was modeled after all of them. Meanwhile, "Pan" is the name of the Greek god of the wild who played pipes and lived outside the rules of civilization—just like the boy.

Image: Yuanpei Hua

Even years after the Harry Potter books became a cultural phenomenon, many people struggled to pronounce the name of the female sidekick, Hermione. J.K. Rowling didn’t clarify its pronunciation until the fourth book!

But she didn’t invent the name. In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Queen Hermione is noble and wrongly accused, making this a subtle nod to the misunderstood girl power of the character.

Side note: "Harry" came from Rowling’s childhood crush on the name, and "Potter" was the surname of neighbors she liked as a kid.

Image: Frankie Lu

Victor Hugo wanted the name of the ex-convict at the heart of Les Misérables to carry a sense of ordinariness. He was meant to represent the everyman—hence "Jean" (the French equivalent of "John").

The surname "Valjean" implies that the name "Jean" had been carried in his family for generations—basically, as unremarkable as a name can get. Hugo once noted that Les Misérables was not about exceptional people, but about dignity in the lowest places.

Image: svklimkin

The name of the white whale that haunted Captain Ahab’s dreams was borrowed from a real whale, with just a slight name tweak.

Mocha Dick was a real-life albino sperm whale known to 19th-century whalers. It earned a reputation for fighting back when attacked. The name came from the island of Mocha, southeast of Chile, near which it lived. It was first documented in an 1839 account by explorer Jeremiah Reynolds, whose tale Melville likely read.

Image: Bruno Guerrero

During the making of Tim Burton’s iconic Beetlejuice (1988), a studio executive wanted to call the movie "Scared Sheetless." Fortunately, they went with Beetlejuice, a playful twist on Betelgeuse, a red supergiant star in the Orion constellation.

The movie needed a name that sounded grand and imposing in its original form (Betelgeuse), but cheeky, silly, and very Burton-esque on the movie poster.

Image: Sam McGhee

Truman Burbank, the hero of The Truman Show, was always meant to be two things at once: an ordinary man and a massive metaphor. His first name is a not-so-subtle play on "True Man." Burbank may reference the California city, known for its ties to media and television production, adding a subtle layer to the metaphor.

It was the perfect label for a man who is the only authentic soul in a world built entirely on lies.

Image: Tommy van Kessel

George Lucas wanted the Dark Lord’s name to carry symbolic weight, and it does: "Darth" was meant to signal rank, like a title (later extended to Darth Maul, Darth Sidious, etc.), but it also evokes "death."

The funny thing is that, even though "Vader" resembles the Dutch and German words for "father," it wasn’t originally planned by the creators to associate Darth Vader with, well… having a son. That storyline was only introduced in the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back.

Image: Irene Strong

Cosmo Kramer, Seinfeld’s sliding-door wild card, was based on a real person: Kenny Kramer, a neighbor of co-creator Larry David. Kenny was quirky, opinionated, and eccentric enough to inspire one of TV’s most memorable sitcom characters.

David initially didn’t want to use the name "Kramer," fearing the real one would demand money or publicity (which, in hindsight, would have been perfectly in character). But "Kramer" just sounded right—and eventually, the real Kenny appreciated the nod.