Ever since my first week in 9th-grade Latin class, I have enjoyed dissecting words. I enjoyed learning just what words really mean and how these meanings had evolved. I already spoke English and Portuguese, so Latin seemed to fill a “gap” of understanding. It allowed me to see the relationships between words and the people who speak them today, and the people who used them in the past. My love of languages continued through high school and into college and graduate school. As I studied French, German, and Greek, each again broadened my perception of language and how words reflect a people’s beliefs and customs.

In 1981, when my husband, Charles Baker, and I started the monthly magazine now called CALLIOPE, we decided to include in each issue a column on words and their origins. That column, “Fun With Words,” still appears in each issue of CALLIOPE today. “Fun With Words” became a mini-education for me as I researched words in languages that I did not speak or read. I had long known that “fossil” traced its roots to the Latin noun fossa, which translates “ditch” and symbolized something that had been dug up from the ground. But I had no idea that “bandanna” and “bungalow” each traced its roots to Hindi, a language spoken in India, or that “typhoon” was an adaptation of the Chinese phrase taifeng, meaning “great wind.” Another surprise was discovering that the cloth named “mohair” was an adaptation of the Arabic word mukhayyar, meaning “fine cloth.”

It is a treat for me to research new words for each issue of CALLIOPE, but, as the years passed, I wanted to find a way to gather together all I’d learned and pass it on to new readers. We decided to create this book, which features not only a lively discussion of word origins, but also new information that is related in some way to the word derivations on a particular page. We call these tidbits PS, as in “postscript” (you can see its origin here).

Lou Waryncia, the editorial director at Cobblestone Publishing; Marc Aronson, the publisher of Cricket Books; Ann Dillon, the art designer at Cobblestone Publishing; and Carol Saller, editor at Cricket Books, encouraged me. I wish to thank all four for their support and input.

Just as the “Fun With Words” column cannot include all words related to the theme of a CALLIOPE issue, so this book cannot include the origins of all English words and phrases. I have included my favorites and encourage all of you to use them as a starting point for investigating the fascinating history contained within every word we read and write. You will soon find that an awareness of what word or phrase is appropriate and effective in a particular situation gives you a distinct advantage in school, on the job, and with your friends.

This book is a result of my lifetime of journeying through the words we use into the lives and history of people all around the world. I hope it is also the beginning of your quest to look inside words to the stories they tell.

Rosalie Baker