The Online Etymology Dictionary is my new favorite toy. To discover the history of a word is to discover the poetry of our origins one word at a time. I looked up 13 words that crossed my path this week. (A random list from my random life.) Here's what I found.

1. The meaning of the noun familiar, as "demon, evil spirit that answers one's call" was first recorded in 1584.

2. A tally mark dates from 1440 and means a "stick marked with notches to indicate an amount owed or paid. The meaning of "a thing that matches another" was first recorded 1651 and is said to be from the practice of splitting a tally with the debtor and creditor each retaining one of the halves.

3. Friend is an Old English word for freogan, which means "to love, to favor." It is related to the Old English word freo, or "free."

4. Prodigious is from the Latin word prodigiosus, which means, "strange, wonderful, marvelous."

5. To animate means "to fill with boldness or courage" and comes from the Latin word animare, which means to "give breath to."

6. The word ghetto (1611) comes from the Italian word that meant the "part of a city to which Jews are restricted."

7. Belief used to mean "trust in God" while faith meant "loyalty to a person based on promise or duty." Faith, as a cognate of the Latin word fides, took on the religious sense beginning in the 14th century, and belief had by the 16th century become limited to "mental acceptance of something as true" from the religious use in the sense of "things held to be true as a matter of religious doctrine" (c.1225).

8. Anonymous is from the Greek word that means without a name.

9. The word angel "mounted courier," both from an unknown Oriental source, perhaps related to is a fusion of the Old English engel and Old French angele, "both from L. angelus, from Gk. angelos "messenger," possibly related to angarosSkt. ajira- 'swift.'" (Got that?)

10. A fellow means partner, as in "one who puts down money with another in a joint venture."

11. Mamma is nearly universal among the Indo European languages. It may be a natural sound in baby-talk or perhaps an imitation of the sound made while sucking.

12. Gossip is from the Old English word godsibb, which meant "godparent." It was later extended to mean "any familiar acquaintance" (1362) and especially to woman friends invited to attend a birth, and even later to "anyone engaging in familiar or idle talk" (1566).

13. Soul comes from the Old English word sawol, the "spiritual and emotional part of a person, animate existence." Of uncertain origin, the word soul is sometimes said to mean originally "coming from or belonging to the sea," because that was supposed to be the stopping place of the soul before birth or after death.

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