Approximate Knowledge
The level of competitiveness varsity was first applied to sports in 1891. Varsity is a clipping of univarsity, a regional pronunciation of university found in slang since the 1700s. The institution for higher education university was borrowed into English from Norman French université around 1300....
Approximate Knowledge
The enthralling quality mesmerizing is first attested in 1829, as well as its base form mesmerize. The figurative usage of mesmerizing as an adjective for something spellbinding or transfixing begins appearing in 1846. Today, we think of the verb mesmerizing as a synonym of hypnotizing. However,...
Approximate Knowledge
The grassland prairie is a 1761 borrowing from Modern French prairie, meaning “meadow”. You can trace the word backwards through time, maintaining its meaning, through Old French praerie, Vulgar Latin prataria, and Classical Latin prātum. It refers to a specific kind of meadow often found in...
Approximate Knowledge
The musician DJ is first seen in print in a 1948 issue of Billboard magazine as an abbreviation of disc jockey. Until around 1980, it was typically rendered D.J. to mark it as an abbreviation. The less common form deejay shows up a little earlier, in 1946. The musician disc jockey is first seen...
Approximate Knowledge
The word for the thing you’re reading right now, blog, is first found in 1999 as a clipping of weblog. Some 1999 usages render it as ‘blog to mark the contraction. In spite of the 2001 dot-com crash, the term spread as rapidly as the phenomenon. In 2004, blog was Merriam-Webster’s second ever...