SOME INTERESTING FACTS ON ETYMOLOGY:

1. The oldest words in the English language are around 14,000 years old, originating in a pre-Indo-European language group called Nostratic ("our language") by experts. Words from this language group that survive in modern English include apple (apal), bad (bad), gold (gol), and tin (tin).
2. The word arctic is derived from the ancient Greek word for bear, arktos. The reason is that the constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, lies in the northern sky.
3. Part of a Roman soldier's pay was called salarium argentium, "salt money", which was used to buy the then-precious commodity, and so pay today is called a "salary".
4. The word "daisy" comes from the Old English "daeges eage", meaning "the eye of the day", as it reminded people of the sun.
5. The word "kindergarten" comes from the German for "children's garden". Friedrich Froebel, who coined the term, originally was planning to use the term "Kleinkinderbeschäftigungsanstalt" instead.
6. The first use of the word "robot" to describe advanced humanlike machines was in 1920, in R.U.R., an early science fiction play. It comes from the Czech word robota, meaning "compulsory labour".
7. The word "tragedy" is derived from two Greek words meaning "goat song".
8. The word "abracadabra" originated in Roman times as part of a prayer to the god Abraxas.
9. The largest number in the English language that with a word naming it is a googolplex, which is 10^{10^100}, which would be written as 1 followed by 10¹⁰⁰ zeroes.
10. A billion in America is different from a billion in Great Britain. An American billion is a thousand million (1,000,000,000), but a British billion is a million million (1,000,000,000,000). Most of the other names for large numbers are also different between the U.S. and the U.K. The American names are now finding increasing usage in Great Britain, however.

Post by,

T.Rajkumar (CSE)