A

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
A1 H
You use this adjective to describe something that’s truly top-notch or I
first class (you know, something like “This is an A1 book!”). You may
also see it written as A-1 or A 1, and you may hear folks describe some- J
thing as A number 1. All these variations come from the eighteenth K
century when an Englishman named Edward Lloyd (whose name lives
on as the founder of the famous insurer Lloyd’s of London) began pub- L
lishing Lloyd’s Register, an annual list of ships and their equipment. M
Yes, people actually read that kind of thing back in those days. Anyway,
each ship was given a two-part rating: the first part referred to the ship N
itself, and a rating of A meant that the ship’s hull was brand-spanking O
new or fully restored; the second part referred to the ship’s equipment,
and a rating of 1 meant that the ship was fully stocked with the latest
P
gear (“well and sufficiently found” in the quaint and indecipherable Q
prose of the day). The worst rating given by Lloyd’s Register was C3,
but (not all that surprisingly) that designation never took off as a syn-
R
onym for something not very good (“Britney’s new album is C3!”). S
T
abracadabra
U
If you’re a magician who’s a bit on the old-fashioned side, you can use
the word abracadabra right before you perform a trick as a way of ensur- V
ing the “success” of the trick. The rest of us can use the word to refer W
to any kind of nonsense or balderdash. (Not surprisingly, a search
of the literature reveals that the phrase “legal abracadabra” is quite X
common.) The traditional explanation for the origin of this curious Y
word (no one knows exactly where it came from) is that the two “abra”
parts are based on the first letters of the Hebrew words ab (“father”), Z
 accomplice

ben (“son”), and ruach acadosch (“holy spirit”). Another good guess is
that it comes from the Chaldean phrase abbada ka dabra, which means,
curiously, “perish like the word.” Abracadabra doesn’t show up in
English until 1696, but it’s much older than that, first appearing in a
second-century Latin poem by the Roman physician Quintus Severus
Sammonicus (they don’t make names like that anymore!). It’s thought
that abracadabra was used as a kind of charm, but only if it appeared in
the following form:
ABRACADABRA
ABRACADABR
ABRACADAB
ABRACADA
ABRACAD
ABRACA
ABRAC
ABRA
ABR
AB
A
Write it like that on a piece of parchment or inscribe it on a handy
amulet, suspend it around your neck, and you’d soon be rid of your
toothache or fever or whatever. Take two abracadabras and call me in
the morning …

accomplice
See complicity.

adultery
You may be surprised to hear that there’s no adult in adultery. That’s
because the word adultery, “extramarital sex,” goes back to the Latin
term adulterare, “to pollute, corrupt, or defile.” (This in turn comes
from alterare, “to alter.”) Having relations with someone outside of
one’s marriage was seen as defiling—or adulterating—the marriage
vows, and the verb eventually turned into the noun adultery. There’s no
adolescent in adultery, either, but there is an adult, because that word
traces back to the Latin adultus, a form of the verb adolescere, “to grow
up,” which was the source of the word adolescent.
 algorithm 

aegis A
The word aegis (it’s pronounced EEjis) means “protection, support, or B
patronage.” For example, They returned to their homes under the aegis of
the U.N. peacekeeping force or The charity ball was held under the aegis of the C
Chamber of Commerce. Things are always “under” the aegis because the D
word comes from Greek mythology, where it represented the shield of
Zeus himself.
E
F
algebra G
See algorithm.
H
algorithm I
This term will be familiar to anyone who has taken Computer Science J
101 (remember flow charts?); it refers to some logical sequence of steps
K
that leads to the solution of a problem. The idea is to then translate
those steps into programming code so that a computer can be dragooned L
into performing the grunt work of producing the actual solution. What M
term could be more high-tech? Strange, then, that the word wasn’t
coined at IBM in the 1950s, Microsoft in the 1980s, or somewhere in N
Silicon Valley in the 1990s. No, this word’s pedigree goes way back to O
the ninth century! Back in 830, an Arab astronomer named Mohamed
ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi wrote an important book on mathematics P
that, through various translations (and a few hundred years), brought Q
Arabic numerals to the attention of Europe, thus blessedly ending
the dominance of Roman numerals (the Super Bowl notwithstand- R
ing). The use of Arabic numbers and the decimal system was named S
after al-Khwarizmi, and became known as algorism, which turned into
algorithm. By the way, the name of al-Khwarizmi’s mathematics trea- T
tise was (take a deep breath) Al-Kitab Almukhtamar fi Hisab al-Jabr w’al U
Muqabala (this translates roughly as The Compendious Book on Calculation
by Completion and Balancing), and it provided the math geeks of the day
V
with techniques for manipulating equations. The al-Jabr portion of the W
title eventually turned into the word algebra.
X
Y
Z
 all over but the shouting

all over but the shouting

When someone tells you that “it’s all over but the shouting,” you know
he’s telling you that although some situation or event is not yet done,
the outcome or result of that situation is clear. And yet when the end
does come, there’s often no shouting at all. What’s up with that? It
turns out that there used to be shouting—lots of it. In England way
back in the day, towns would make major decisions by a kind of live ref-
erendum. All the folks would gather in the town square or perhaps the
village green and debate the matter at hand. They would then come to
a decision based on a voice vote, and because of this, these gatherings
were known as shoutings. If, before the gathering, the outcome of the
vote was known or obvious, then the situation was said to be all over but
(or bar) the shouting.

allure
An alluring person is one who is highly attractive and enticing. The verb
allure made its way into English by way of the French verb aleurrer, “to
bait.” It was originally used by falconers and referred to a device or bait
to lure the birds into returning, from which we get the current sense of
“enticing.” I suppose this means that the person doing the alluring must
have to watch the other person like a hawk!

aloof
The word aloof means “detached, distant,” and we use those terms
metaphorically. That is, the person isn’t literally distant, just emotion-
ally or socially distant. However, at one time aloof really did refer to
something that was literally distant. Back in the mid-sixteenth century,
sailing captains would ask their helmsmen to keep the ship’s bow to the
wind to avoid being blown toward the lee shore. In the sailing lingo of
the day, luff referred to either the windward direction or to the wind-
ward side of the ship. So to steer with the bow to the wind meant to
steer in the direction of the windward side. To make this so, the cap-
tain would give the order to “steer aluff,” where the word aluff is a com-
bination of the prefix a-, meaning (in this case) “in the direction of”
and luff. A hundred years or so later, aluff had become aloof, but it still
 Amazon 
referred to steering the bow of a ship into the wind. Remember that the
goal of steering aloof was to keep some distance between the ship and
A
the shore, so it didn’t take long before aloof also came to mean “at some B
distance; apart.” The current sense of being emotionally detached or
distant followed in quick order, so that by 1602, William Shakespeare,
C
in his play Hamlet, had the character Laertes say “I stand aloof, and will D
no reconcilement.”
E
Amazon F
These days, this word refers to the world’s second longest river, the G
world’s largest (online) retailer, or a physically imposing woman who is H
both strong and strong-willed. This last meaning fits well with the ori-
gins of the word Amazon, which refers to a mythical race of all-female I
warriors who lived around Scythia (which would be where Ukraine sits J
today). The Greek historian Herodotus described them as particularly
fierce fighters and called them Androktones, or “men-killers.” Homer K
mentions the Amazons in The Iliad and says that they “fight like men.” L
The origin of the word Amazon is disputed, but the most interesting
idea is that it combines the prefix a, meaning “without,” and the Greek M
term mazos, meaning “breast.” (The latter gave us the now-obsolete N
word mazology, the study of mammals—now called mammalogy—one
characteristic of which is the existence of mammary glands, that is to O
say, breasts.) This harkens to the legendary tendency for your average P
Amazon warrior have her right breast removed so that it wouldn’t get in
the way when wielding a bow and arrow. Now that’s dedication!
Q
R
The Amazin’ Amazon
S
If the Amazon is the second-longest river in the world, what’s the lon-
gest? That distinction belongs to the Nile River, which at 4,160 miles T
(that’s 6,695 kilometers in metric-speak) is just a bit longer than the U
Amazon’s 4,049 miles (6,516 kilometers). Or is it? A recent (Summer
2007) report by a team of Brazilian scientists upped the length of the V
Amazon to 4,225 miles (6,800 kilometers), making it (assuming the
report is confirmed) the new champ. W
X
Y
Z
 ambulance

ambulance
You may know that the verb ambulate means “to walk,” and the adverb
ambulatory means “of or relating to walking.” Both terms came our way
from the Latin word ambulare, “to walk.” By now you may be scratch-
ing your head because the word ambulance is mighty close to ambulate
and ambulatory, but it’s a vehicle, for Pete’s sake! The thing has no legs!
Ah, but it once did, in a manner of speaking. It used to be that in a war,
if you got injured on the battlefield, your peers simply left you there
until darkness fell and it was safe to drag you out for medical ministra-
tions (assuming you were still alive to benefit from them). In the early
nineteenth century, the French decided this wasn’t a great state of
affairs. Their solution was to trick out a wagon or cart with basic medi-
cal supplies. They could quickly run the wagon onto the battlefield,
pick up a wounded soldier, and tend to his injuries while getting him
the heck out of there. The French saw this as a kind of moving hospital,
so they named the wagon a hôpital ambulant, or “walking hospital.”
During the Crimean War in the mid-nineteenth century, the British
took note of these hôpitals ambulant and borrowed the idea. They even-
tually dropped the hôpital part, and the wagons became known as just
ambulances.

ammonia
The gas ammonia is composed of three parts hydrogen and one part
nitrogen, but linguistically it’s composed of an Egyptian deity, salt, and
camel dung! Let me explain: ancient Egyptian mythology included a
primordial god named Amun (“the hidden one”), who was variously
represented as a ram or as a man with a ram’s head. The Greeks wor-
shipped the same god under the named Ammon. Near this god’s temple,
devotees would for some reason heat camel dung (or perhaps camel
urine) and sea salt to produce a substance called sal ammoniac, “salt of
Ammon.” In 1782, a Swedish chemist with nothing better to do com-
bined sal ammoniac with an alkali to create a new gas, which he dubbed
ammonia.
 Aprium 

antediluvian A
If you want to describe something as old, you might call it aged, archaic, B
antiquated, or even ancient. However, if you want to describe something
that’s really old—and since you seem to like adjectives that begin with C
the letter a—then I suggest the word antediluvian, “extremely old.” How D
old are we talking here? Well, since this term comes from the Latin
antediluvium, which combines ante-, “before” and diluvium, “deluge,”
E
then we’re talking about, literally, before the Biblical Flood. Now that F
is old.
G
antimacassar H
In Virtues nothing earthly could surpass her Save thine “incomparable Oil,” I
Macassar! This sarcastic bit of verse was penned by none other than
J
Lord Byron (in his 1819 poem Don Juan), and he’s talking about a
product called Macassar Oil, which first appeared earlier in that cen- K
tury. Macassar Oil was an unguent for the hair that claimed to remove L
“impurities,” provide hair with a “beautiful gloss and scent,” hold curls
in place, and even cure baldness. The manufacturers claimed it was M
made from oils imported from a place called Macassar, a port on the N
Indonesian island that we now call Sulawesi. This is unlikely, but no
matter: the product was a rousing success and before long few heads O
remained unoiled. That was bad news for the sofas and chairs of the P
day, because they soon became covered in oily stains. To fight back,
housewives covered their furniture with decorative cloths that served to Q
protect the fabric from the onslaught of Macassar Oil, so they become R
known as antimacassars.
S
April T
See September. U
Aprium V
See pluot.
W
X
Y
Z
 arsenic hour

arsenic hour
As most moms and dads know (assuming they have the time to find out
these things), the arsenic hour is the hectic time of day after the parents
arrive home from work and before dinner is served. This phrase also
has a huge number of synonyms: witching hour, sour hour, hurricane hour,
granny hour, scotch hour, sherry hour, and suicide hour. Clearly there’s a
deep well of black humor that’s the source of these terms. Arsenic?
Suicide? This forces those of us who are childless to wonder just what
on Earth is going on out there! In neological circles, the presence of
a large number of synonyms for something usually means not only
that that something is an extremely common phenomenon, but also
that it doesn’t have an official name. (The sociological term for arsenic
hour is the forgettable and far too understated transition time). Given
the apparent intensity of the experience, people feel a need to label it
somehow, so they come up with “X hour” constructions modeled, no
doubt, on phrases such as rush hour and, ironically, happy hour. It’s likely,
too, that there’s some influence here from the 1863 Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow poem, The Children’s Hour:
Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,
That is known as the Children’s Hour.

assassin
In the days of Omar Khayyam (he of the Rubaiyat fame), a band of
malcontents roamed the Elburz Mountains, not far from the Caspian
Sea. The leader of these bandits was an old school friend of Omar’s, a
man named Hasan Sabah, whose notoriety earned him the nickname
Old Man of the Mountains. That notoriety was earned in rather ghastly
fashion: from time to time, he and his followers would set upon and kill
members of the government, religious figures, and other local VIPs. To
get themselves stoked for these murderous missions, the rebels would
eat copious amounts of the drug hashish. In the Arabic of the day, a
person who ate a lot of hashish (or who was addicted to it) was called
a hashishiyun, and that name soon stuck to this band of whacked-out
 average 
executioners. Over time, the word hashishiyun came to refer to anyone
who is hired (or feels a strong need) to kill a public figure, and the
A
word itself morphed into our modern word assassin. It gives a whole new B
meaning to the phrase “stone-cold killer.”
C
August D
See September. E
F
average
G
This solid mathematical term is actually founded upon the not-so-solid
sea. Its origins lie in the French word avarie and the Spanish equiva- H
lent averia, which both originally referred to a duty or tax charged I
to imported goods. The word became the abstract noun average in
English by tacking on the suffix -age (a common linguistic process that J
has given us words such as breakage, postage, and wreckage). Over time, K
the meaning of the word average changed to any unexpected expenses
incurred while shipping goods, and then to the expenses arising from L
damage or loss to goods shipped at sea. The owners of the cargo, the M
operators of the ship, and the insurers of both would figure out a way
to distribute these expenses equitably among themselves. Eventually N
this idea of an equal distribution attached itself to the mathematical O
idea of the arithmetic mean, and our main sense of average was born.
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z