Before anyone thought to define units against physical constants, they were defined against whatever was to hand — literally. Most of those origins are still buried in the words. Here…
When something arrives from elsewhere, people tend to name it after wherever it came through rather than wherever it came from. Multiply that by a few centuries of trade and…
For most of recorded history, ancient Egypt was legible only in fragments. Its monuments, tombs and papyri were covered in writing, and the knowledge of how to read that writing…
No word is truly untranslatable — you can always explain it in a sentence. What these words offer is compression: a single term for something English needs a paragraph to…
Some words carry a location inside them. A city that made a fabric, a port that shipped a wine, an island that lent its name to a shape — the…
The fear of not speaking the language stops a lot of people from going places they would love. In practice, communication is far more robust than we assume, and most…