What is a 'ghost word'?
The Second Edition of the 20-volume Complete Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use. An estimated 240 of these are ghost words.
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Where does the word tycoon come from?
The word tycoon is derived from the Japanese word taikun (大君?).
Irish English: What is cat melodeon?
Don't shoot me I'm only the piano accordion player! Cat/ Cat melodeon (a): dreadful, no good, awful, very bad. Bernard Share’s dictionary of Irish slang Slanguage quotes Victoria White in the Irish Times calling cat melodeon “the greatest expression in Hiberno-English.” The word cat is used to express disappointment in the quality of something: the food is cat in that place. Where does Cat Melodeon come from? The Cat Melodeon players In his book on Irish traditional music, Ciaran Carson suggests it is a joking reference to the musicianship: of piano-accordion players (who often refer to their instruments as melodeons) to play two notes at once. Source As the nephew of a fine melodeon player, I think this is cat altogether - you throw in altogether for emphasis, by the way. When was it first used? Strangely some dictionaries cite the first use in print as being in the 1980s. This is decades after I first heard it. My guess is that it has been common in sp
Origin of the word Jubilee?
The Levites sound the trumpet of Jubilee (1873 illustration) J ubilee is an interesting example of a word that evolved to cover two distinct but connected meanings.