The word ‘quidnunc’ first appeared around the year 1710, in Irish writer and politician Sir Richard Steele’s journal The Tatler: ‘The infignificancy of my manners to the reft of the world, makes the laughers call me a quid-nunc, a phrafe which I neither underftand, nor fhall ever enquire what they mean by it.’ Since then, several writers…
The word ‘pip’ means a ‘spot’ or a ‘speck’. The markings on dice and dominoes are also called pips. The word also refers to the symbols on playing cards that give it a specific value, the small seeds of some fruit, the image of an object on a radar screen, each of the stars on the shoulder…
The unit pound is abbreviated ‘lb’ which comes from the constellation Libra. The word libra means ‘balance scales’ in Latin. The ancient Romans used the term libra pondo to refer to weight. Libra meant ‘weight’ and pondo meant ‘pound’. This was eventually shortened to libra which came to be abbreviated as ‘lb’.
The name dinosaur is derived from two Greek words: deinos meaning ‘fearfully great’ and sauros meaning ‘lizard’. It was coined by the English anatomist Richard Owen in 1842. Owen recognized that the huge fossilized bones unearthed at several places in nineteenth-century England were markedly different from the bones of the other existing reptiles.
The phrase ‘in the limelight’ means at the centre of attention. However, limelight was actually a form of light which was invented in 1825 by burning a cylinder of lime (calcium oxide) that produced brilliant light. This light was used in lighthouses and theatres. In the theatre, the limelight was used to focus a performer…
The term bungalow gained currency in India in the seventeenth century when the English East India Company officers started coming to India. It is derived from the Hindi word bangla, which means belonging to Bengal. Bungalows are generally one and half-storeyed houses with a front porch. The architecture of bungalows is archetypal of eastern Indian…
