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Words and Numbers Trivia

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The plain black dickey worn with a clerical collar by some clergymen is called a rabat.

The female name Vanessa is Greek for "butterfly."

Rulership by words is called logocracy.

In Australian slang, to be “spliced” means to be married.

The final word given at the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee in 2000 was "demarche," a noun meaning a course of action or a diplomatic representation or protest; in 1999, the final word was "logorrhea," a noun meaning an excessive use of words.

Secure, relatively high-yielding stocks came to be called blue chips, a term taken from the game of poker, where blue chips are more valuable than white or red chips.

In British English, a booger is called a "bogey" or "bogie."

Senectitude is another word for old age.

In Cockney rhyming slang, the meaning of the phrase "Would you Adam and Eve it?" means "Would you believe it?"

In Elizabethan slang, the term "to die" meant to have an orgasm. This double entendre was often used by John Donne (The Prohibition, The Canonization), and by Shakespeare in King Lear.

The word zek is Russian prison slang for convict, derived from zaklyuchenny, the Russian word for prisoner.

The word cabbage comes from the Old North French word for “head,” caboche. That's where the term “head of cabbage” comes from.

The pointed tool used by gardeners to make holes in the soil for seeds, bulbs, or young plants is called a dibble.

The word dinosaur means terrible lizard. This is a bit of a misnomer since they were only distantly related to lizard.

The popular phrase "The blind leading the blind" comes from the New Testament, Matthew 15:14.

The first child born on January 1, 2000, will have been conceived on or about April 1, 1999.

The word electricity comes from the Greek word ELECTRON, for amber. The bases of the modern concepts of electricity can be traced to the Greeks, who discovered the fact that certain rocks - lodestone or magnetite - attracted each other.

The pretzel is named from the Latin word brachiatus, meaning "having branch-like arms."

The first children's book that was published in the United States was called Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in wither England Drawn from the Breast of Both Testaments for Their Soul's Nourishment.

Shakespeare spelled his own name several different ways.

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