Enhance Your Word Knowledge
(an extensive list of words with explanations that can expand and greatly improve your English vocabulary)
Expand Your English Word Knowledge by Learning More about Their Historical Origins
To know more about the history of words can often make their present meanings clearer and they can often be small windows through which we can see into the past.
The word write, spelled writan in Old English, first meant to scratch, and scratch was what primitive people did on their birch-bark or shingles with sharp stones or other pointed instruments.
In the more sophisticated countries which surrounded the Mediterranean, the pulp of the papyrus plant was pressed and dried into their kind of paper and it was used instead of the bark of tress, and that Latin term papyrus gave us our English word for paper. The pen, in its Latin form penna, was a feather and there are still some quill pens around, at least as collector's items.
The pencil that people use now got its name from Latin penicillum, meaning "little tail" and it referred to a time when writing was done with a tiny brush that looked like a little tail.
