I used to have a "Word of the Moment" section on my page, but it was too hard for me to upkeep, so I've moved all the old words here:

Bunny
A pet version of the word "bun" which was what squirrels were called in some country. That's pretty interesting.

Random word of the moment: Arsis
Arsis, to rise, the opposite of Thesis, lowering, laying down. I never knew Thesis had an opposite!

Random word of the moment: Itinerant
Travelling, an account of a journey, the root of the word is the same root of transit, I believe. I just think the word sounds really cool. Itinerant!

Random word of the moment: Spring
"Spring" and "to spring" both have the same meaning of rising.. The season spring is the beginning/rising/first season of the year. There used to be a word upspring, which meant sunrise/the beginning of the day.

Random word of the moment: Imbue
This is one of those words that I know what it means but it's hard to explain.. So how would you explain it? Kind of like saturate, only with intention behind it. Or like inject, but more subtle and spreading... Anyway, this word comes from French and Latin, originally meaning to stain. I like that! Imagine, every time you use the word "imbue," that you've actually said "stain." For example, my friend said to me that my art is imbued with power. Art stained with power! YEAH! I love words.

Random word of the moment: Audience
Audience and Obey come from the same root, audere, to listen. I think it's French. I think that's interesting that Obey and Audience are related.

So I THOUGHT that of course, "pencil" is just "pen" with a "cil" at the end. But NO! That's wrong!
Pencil is entirely different. Pencil originally meant a bunch of lines and come together to make a point. I guess you can imagine the end of the pencils where it gets skinnier and skinnier until it reaches a point. And the word has changed over time:
Pencil
Pensel
Pincel
Pinzel
In Latin, Penicillum meant paintbrush. And that word came from the word "penis" which meant "tail."

Confine
I just picked this word out of my Book of Words at random. This word is only interesting because the 'fine' is from 'finis'.

Enthusiasm
This word's got a cool origin! It's supposed to mean being all excited about something, right? Well the original meaning is Divine Inspiration! See, the 'thu' part came from theos. 'Entheos' means inspired or posessed by the gods. That's very neat. Too bad we don't have a word for that today.

Yes
We take this word for granted. At least I do. Yes comes from gese/giese/gia sie which was originally a response only to a negative question. Chinese doesn't have a word for yes! For instance, if someone asks you if your hair is blue, you say back to them, "Blue." Instead of yes.

Casualty
This word doesn't just mean people who die, but anyone who's out of action. Dead, diseased, wounded..
A very similar word is "casual." It's pretty much the same word without the 'ty' so I was curious what was up with that.. Casualties are hardly casual!
But apparently they are, because it really is derived from the same word.. Casualis, which means "occuring without design." I suppose then, they are related.

Zourimushi.
This is the Japanese word for Paramecium. Zouri means Japanese sandal and mushi is bug. So basically it means Sandal Bug. And hey, go look at a paramecium some time. Doesn't it kind of look like the sole of a shoe? Or a footprint or something?

Onion.
I love the word onion. It's just so weird and funny. There are a lot of words that led up to the current word Onion.
unyon, uynyon, union, oignon, onhon, inhon, unhon, unione, unio, and ynne.

Imperfective
I hadn't heard this word before at all, until my Japanese teacher started using it. It's one of those words used to describe English.. One of those things no native speaker has any idea about, but foreigners often know exactly what it is. I rather like the way the word sounds. Imperfective. A much better adjective than "present/future tense."

Extinct
I just think the origins of this are interesting.. It comes from extinguish. That makes sense, right? But then I'm wondering.. it used to be a word with prefix. ex-stinguere. The "stinct" part of extinct isn't really a word anymore.. That's too bad. But a related word is distinguish. Which doesn't seem like it has anything to do with extinguish. Hm.

Lunch
Lunch used to mean something like "hunk." Can't you see it? A lunch of time, a lunch of clay. Only whereas a 'hunk' can be amorphous, a lunch is more like a slice. A hunky slice. A thick slab. So you can kind of see how you can go from having a lunch of meat and a lunch of bread, to just grabbing some lunch. And then! There wasn't ever a real word as luncheon, however! There were words like puncheon and truncheon, so people decided to just start saying luncheon whenever they were having a meal between breakfast and dinner. Actually, the original word for lunch was lonja. So it was a lonjaeon, only that didn't sound much like puncheon or truncheon, so they changed it to luncheon. And then they just shortened it later to lunch.

Mathesis
I don't think it's a real word today. It comes from the word math, meaning "learn." Mathesis means "mental discipline." Whee!

Lepidoptera
Mostly, I just think this word is fun to say. It flows well together. It means scale-wing and is one of the orders of insects.

tetraazatetradecanediimidamide
My sister's friend found this word on the back of a bottle of some odd mouthwash stuff. My sister and her friend are all into chemistry so they went nuts about how cool this word is. I don't really know why it's that great, but I guess it's fun to try and say. Maybe if you're big on chemistry, you'll think this word is awesome, too.

Wasp
This is one of those words with a hundred variation stretching back into its history. Its original meaning was 'weave' because of its nest. That's kinda crazy, since wasps don't weave nests. Weave also spawned such words as web, weft, and woof. Oh, and the word "weave" like weaving through the crowd, actually comes from the word 'wave' and is unrelated to the previous 'weave.' Yeah.

Melt
The definition of this word is something that liquefies via heat. I started thinking - what about the things that don't liquefy via heat? What if something liquefied because it was cold, or because of the color green. But those things don't exist, so we don't have to worry about it. Even something like "my heart melted" is vaguely in reference to heat. I guess the wicked witch of the west melted because of milk. So I guess we'd just use the same verb if it were the case that lots of things melted for other reasons. Anyway, the word has a large history going back to mieltan and maltjan and maltr and mollis. I dunno where the word "molten" fits in to all that, but it stems from the same thing.

Butterfly
My friend pointed out to me that Butterfly is an odd word, so I looked up the origin and it says the original word basically meant, "Flying thing that shits milk" which was another way to say, "bird." I guess people used to think that butterflies were birds. But wow, what a disgusting word for such an appealing creature.

Manticore
From the Persian martya, meaning human, and xwar, meaning to eat. The mispronounciation of these words together created the Greek "mantikhoras". Whee! I think Manticores are kind of like big ugly lions with wings and scorpian tails. Except I'm not really sure if that's the traditional image or not.. That's just what I think of.

Spring Roll
I was having lunch at a Chinese place with a Japanese person and they offered her "Spring Rolls". She got all confused. Spring? In a roll? So I went and looked up where it comes from. Apparently in China, the New Years festival is also called the Spring Festival. And people eat these thin shelled egg rolls on that day. So us Westerners decided to call them Spring Rolls. Crazy. There is a different word for it in every other country as well.

Bunny
A pet version of the word "bun" which was what squirrels were called.. somewhere.. That's pretty interesting.

Random word of the moment: Arsis
Arsis, to rise, the opposite of Thesis, lowering, laying down. I never knew Thesis had an opposite!

Random word of the moment: Itinerant
Travelling, an account of a journey, the root of the word is the same root of transit, I believe. I just think the word sounds really cool. Itinerant!

Spring
"Spring" and "to spring" both have the same meaning of rising.. The season spring is the beginning/rising/first season of the year. There used to be a word upspring, which meant sunrise/the beginning of the day.

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