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An adaptation of the Old English word atter meaning "poison", and closely related to the word adder for the venomous crossed viper. Lexicographers William and Mary Morris in Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (1977) favour this derivation because "mad as a hatter" was known before hat making was a recognized trade.
Eric Partridge, for example, provides a very different story, as do William and Mary Morris in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins. According to Partridge and the Morrises, the archetypical shaggy-dog story involves an advertisement placed in the Times announcing a search for a shaggy dog.
The Online Etymology Dictionary or Etymonline, sometimes abbreviated as OED (not to be confused with the Oxford English Dictionary, which the site often cites), is a free online dictionary that describes the origins of English words, written and compiled by Douglas R. Harper. [1]
This Morse key was originally used by Gotthard railway, later by a shortwave radio amateur [2] Morse code is a method used in telecommunication to encode text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called dots and dashes, or dits and dahs. [3] [4] Morse code is named after Samuel Morse, one of the early ...
e. Etymology ( / ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi /, ET-im-OL-ə-jee [1]) is the scientific study of the origin and evolution of a word's semantic meaning across time, including its constituent morphemes and phonemes. [2] [3] It is a subfield of historical linguistics, philology, and semiotics, and draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, pragmatics ...
The name "bloater" most likely arises from the swelled or "bloated" appearance the fish assumes during preparation, while at least one source attributes it to the Swedish word "blöta", meaning to wet, soak, or impregnate with liquid (as in soaking in brine). Bloaters, bucklings, and kippers. All three are types of smoked herring.
The whole nine yards. " The whole nine yards " or " the full nine yards " is a colloquial American English phrase meaning "everything, the whole lot" or, when used as an adjective, "all the way". [1] Its first usage was the punch line of an 1855 Indiana comedic short story titled "The Judge's Big Shirt".
Look up jury-rig in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. In maritime transport and sailing, jury rigging [1] is making temporary makeshift running repairs with only the tools and materials on board. It originates from sail -powered boats and ships. Jury-rigging can be applied to any part of a ship; be it its super-structure ( hull, decks ...