Piblokto is a word that English has taken from the Polar Eskimo language of northern Greenland. It is defined in the OED thuslyly: Piblo...

I've always, for some whimsical reason, liked to imagine hedge funds as rustic financial institutions based at the edge of fields. Etym...

Oh, the things you find in old dictionaries! This from Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811): Cundum . The dried gut of a s...

Here is some Cambridge University slang from the eighteenth century: TO CUT, (CAMBRIDGE). To renounce acquaintance with any one is to CUT...

Dust used to be the subject of poetry. Hamlet, in his great prose speech, asks of mankind: And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of d...

An epitomy was, originally, a brief summary of a book - a sort of Reader's Digest precis for people who couldn't be bothered to re...

Dr Johnson's dictionary contains the splendid word grum which means... well I hardly need to tell you what it means: a bit grim and bi...