Appropriately, word is one of the most commonly used and earliest recorded of all English words, listed amongst the top 3 per cent of those most frequently encountered in the language, and first attested in documents dating from as far back as the ninth century. For such a seemingly straightforward term, historically word could be used in quite a complex series of contexts and senses besides simply referring to an individual unit of language; some of these uses are the ancestors of idiomatic expressions still used in English today. A word in Old English, for instance, could also be a remark or spoken utterance (a sense retained in the modern phrase to have a word); a promise or guarantee (as in to give one’s word); gossip or news (to hear word of); a command or instruction (to send word); or a divine proclamation (the word of God).
On its first appearance in English in the mid-sixteenth century, the word apology initially meant ‘plea’ or ‘defence’, or else ‘formal justification of something’, and was often used in the titles of literary works discussing or supporting a person’s actions or beliefs. In this original sense, the word dates back via Latin to the Ancient Greek apologia, which referred specifically to a speech made in defence of something – the Apology of Socrates, for instance, was a formal explanation of Socrates’s charge of ‘corrupting the young’ and ‘not believing in the gods in whom the city believes’, famously recounted by his pupil Plato. The word itself is comprised of the Greek apo, meaning ‘off’ or ‘from’, and logos, which in Ancient Greek could variously denote a speech, a thought, a sentence or a word.
A relatively recent coinage dating from the 1970s, a cruciverbalist is someone who compiles or enjoys crosswords. The term is based on a literal Latin translation of the word ‘crossword’, and is formed from the Latin crux, meaning ‘cross’, and verbum, meaning ‘word’, presumably with some influence from the considerably older seventeenth-century term verbalist, describing someone who deals with or is particularly skilled in using words. Cruciverbalism, meanwhile, is a somewhat frivolous name for the compilation of crosswords first used in the 1990s.
Adopted from French, a jeu-de-mots is literally a ‘game of words’ – that is to say, a pun or similar instance of clever or witty wordplay. Dating from the early nineteenth century in English – the term was first recorded in Sir Walter Scott’s 1823 novel Peveril of the Peak – jeu-de-mots is one of a number of unusual words and phrases used in English to describe wordplay, including quiblin and quiblet, literally ‘small quibble’ (early 1600s); clench (mid-1600s); pundigrion (late 1600s); and calembour, named after a clever wordsmith from traditional German folklore, the Abbé de Calemberg. The phrase to play on words, meanwhile, is taken from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (III. v).
First used in English in the fourteenth century, the word lecture originally applied to either the actual action of reading or to what would now be known as lection, that is, how well a particular text or written work reads. It was not until the sixteenth century that the lecture came to be used to describe reading aloud, with the first reference to a specific spoken discourse delivered to an audience dating from the 1530s. The word itself is derived from the Latin word for ‘reading’, lectura, which is in turn descended from the Ancient Greek verb legein, meaning ‘to speak’, and ultimately the same root as the Greek logos, meaning ‘speech’ or ‘word’.
Both lexicography, meaning ‘writing or compilation of a dictionary’, and lexicon, ‘dictionary, or list of words’, first appeared in English in the seventeenth century and derive from the same Ancient Greek root, lexis, meaning ‘word’, ‘diction’ or ‘phrasing’. The same root is also the origin of a number of other English words, including the linguistic conditions dyslexia, first described in Germany in the 1870s; paralexia, in which words or syllables are substituted for one another while reading; and alexia, the name for a loss of the ability to comprehend language, coined in 1865.
The word logo is a relatively recent addition to the English language dating from the early 1930s. It is believed to be an abbreviation of either one of two earlier words, logogram or logotype, both of which are ultimately descended from the Greek word for ‘word’, logos. A logogram is a sign or symbol used to represent a single word, as in symbol-based writing systems like those of Chinese, Japanese or Egyptian hieroglyphics, or else for brevity or speed in writing, such as the equals sign (=) and ampersand (&). A logotype, alternatively, was a printer’s term for a combination of two or more letters – usually common sequences like ‘re’, ‘on’, ‘an’ and ‘th’ – which could be cast from a single piece of type. Precisely of which one of these two words logo is the shortened form is unknown.
Found in both Twelfth Night (II. iii) and The Merry Wives of Windsor (II. ii), nayword is a Shakespearean term thought to have had a number of different meanings including a ‘proverb or saying’, a ‘catchphrase’ and a ‘byword’; perhaps its most literal meaning, however, is a ‘password’, as nayword is a contraction of the phrase ‘an aye-word’ (as in ‘a yes word’) implying that it would be used to be granted access to something that is otherwise kept secret. Other equally obscure terms formed from the word word include hereword, a ‘term of praise’ (c.1100); bodeword, a ‘command’ or ‘message of instruction’ (c.1200); bug-word, a ‘word used to frighten, or said to tempt ill-fate’ (mid-1500s); non-word, a ‘word of no meaning’, or a ‘word unused until now’ (late 1800s); metaword, a ‘word used to describe another’ in linguistics (1950s); and fuzzword, a ‘term of deliberately misleading or ambiguous jargon’ (1980s).
On its first appearance in the language in the 1700s, the word palaver originally referred to a quarrel or dispute or else to cajoling and persuasive chatter. Its more modern meaning of an ‘uproar’ or ‘commotion’ did not begin to appear until the late nineteenth century. The word’s precise origin is unclear, but it seems likely that it was somehow adopted into English either from some West African Pidgin English or from nautical slang, yet in either case it is presumably based on the Portuguese word for ‘word’ or ‘talk’, palavra.
Adopted from German in the 1940s, schimpfwort is a general name for an insult or term of abuse. It is a compound of the German words for ‘insult’, schimpf, and ‘word’, wort, but is usually considered a literal German translation of the English term ‘swearword’. Wort appears in a handful of other words and phrases that have been at least partially adopted in English, although most tend only to be found in fairly obscure or specialized contexts: wordsalat (literally ‘word salad’), for instance, was a phrase coined by the nineteenth-century German neurologist Carl Wernicke to describe the unintelligible language produced by patients who have suffered trauma to the language-processing part of the brain; wortspiel is literally a ‘wordplay’ or ‘word game’; and, in linguistics, wörterund-sachen is the name of a type of language study focusing on the regional dialect names of everyday ‘words and things’.
Although in Modern English it is only used for words conveying an action or sense of being, the word verb derives from the Latin word verbum, which originally meant simply ‘word’. This root is also the source of adverb, proverb, biverb (an odd term for a name comprising two words), verbal and even verbicide, an obscure nineteenth-century term for the misapplication of a word or the clumsy distortion of its meaning.