7 Fun Word Origins Every Writer Should Know

Did you ever stop in the middle of a sentence and think, “Wait—where in the world did we ever get a word like that?” Writers use words to tell stories, but each of those words has a story of its own. As the 19th-century essayist Thomas Carlyle observed, “The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.”

(25 Common Writing Mistakes Writers Make.)

Many of those metaphors tucked inside a single word can be surprising, others picturesque or poetic, and still others are downright entertaining. The metaphors and lively stories behind such words are the kind I love sharing each week on the radio show and podcast “A Way with Words” and in my new book, Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland.

Here are some of my favorites, specifically selected for writers.

Open up the word magazine, and you’ll find it comes into English via Middle French, and ultimately from the Arabic word makhāzin, which means “storehouses.” By the 17th century, magazine meant a place used for the storage of arms and munitions, and by the 18th, the word was applied to a publication that was a “storehouse” of articles on lots of topics. This also explains why the place where a gun’s ammunition is stored goes by the same name.

The gibberish that serves as a placeholder while awaiting your pristine prose comes from a mangled passage of the great Roman orator Cicero. In De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, or “On the Ends of Good and Evil,” Cicero talks about the value of enduring short-term pain for a lasting payoff—just as we writers must do. Centuries later, some unknown typesetter later took that passage, which starts with dolorem ipsum, or “pain itself,” then scrambled some of the rest and started using it as dummy text, which looked real but ran no risk of being confused with regular text.

The practice was so handy it caught on. (By the way, that family name Cicero? It comes from the Latin word cicer, or “garbanzo bean,” apparently because one of Cicero’s predecessors had a bean-shaped growth on his nose. Latin cicer also found its way into English as garbanzo’s synonym, chickpea.)

If your poem is included in an anthology, you can be doubly pleased that it’s part of a literary bouquet. One of the loveliest words in English, anthology in its most literal sense means a “gathering of flowers.” The word comes from Greek anthos, or “flower,” also found in such words as chrysanthemum, or “golden flower," and anthurium, or “flower with a tail.”

If you read the blurbs on the back of a book, you have one Belinda Blurb to thank. Belinda’s not a real person, though. She’s a clever invention by an author who used her as a marketing ploy to promote his latest book. In 1907, humorist Gelett Burgess wrote fake jacket copy for his new book and promoted it at a national gathering of booksellers. The gushing copy praised the contents of the book with breathless hyperbole, and above it all, in giant letters were the words: “YES, this is a ‘BLURB’! All the Other Publishers commit them. Why Shouldn’t We?”

Below that there was a picture of a woman with her hand cupped to the side of her mouth as if shouting, with a caption that read: MISS BELINDA BLURB IN THE ACT OF BLURBING. The effort paid off handsomely, and blurb became lodged in the language of publishing.

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Wondering why that editor didn’t respond to your query? Or maybe you’re still waiting to hear back from a potential agent. In either case, maybe you should check your spam folder, and while you're doing so, take a moment to reflect on this word’s amusing origin.

The idea of spam as “junk mail” goes back to a madcap British TV show from 1970 called “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” In one sketch, a couple goes out to breakfast and asks the short-order cook what’s on offer that day. The cook replies, "Well, there’s egg and bacon. Egg, sausage, and bacon. Egg and Spam. Egg, bacon, and Spam. Egg, bacon, sausage, and Spam. Spam, bacon, sausage, and Spam. Spam, egg, Spam, Spam, bacon, and Spam—” at which point, some Vikings also who happen to be in the restaurant (don’t ask), break into a loud, lusty song about the wonders of spam. (Search for “Monty Python,” “Spam,” and “ridiculous” online and you watch all the silliness and sing along yourself.)

A few years later, after someone mistakenly sent the same email to hundreds of people, the term spam took on the added meaning of something as repetitive and unappetizing as the spam in the comedy sketch.

At the end of a long day of writing, maybe you’re ready for a cocktail. But did you ever wonder how that drink got its name? Etymologists suspect it derives from the fact that the word cocktail originally applied to a horse with a docked tail—that is, with the tail cropped so short the hairs stood up perkily like the tail of a rooster or cock. Unlike thoroughbreds, cocktails were unpedigreed, working horses.

Around the same time, in the early 1800s, mixed drinks were regarded with some disdain because they were adulterated—after all, why dilute perfectly good booze with other ingredients? Over time, people began likening those watered-down beverages to less-than-purebred horses, and the name cocktail stuck.

One last term every writer should have in their vocabulary: banana problem. If you have a banana problem, you’re unsure whether something is finished. Maybe you’ve rewritten the same sentence way too many times when you should have stopped 20 minutes ago or tossed one too many pinches of salt into a perfectly good broth. 

In the tech world, the term banana problem denotes badly written code for terminating a computer process. This handy expression was inspired by the joke about a little kid who insisted, "I know how to spell ‘banana’. I just don’t know when to stop!” 

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