132 Language and Words Trivia Questions and Answers
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Easy Language and Words Trivia Questions
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In shipwright, wheelwright and playwright, what does the ending '-wright' mean?
A maker or builder
Wright comes from the Old English wyrhta, a worker or maker, from the same root as work. A playwright builds a play the way a shipwright builds a ship, which is why it is never spelt playwrite.
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What does the A in NASA stand for?
Aeronautics
NASA stands for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Aeronautics is flight within the atmosphere, which is why the agency that flies to the Moon still has aircraft research in its name.
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An abbreviation built from initial letters and said as a word, rather than letter by letter, is called what?
acronym
An acronym is spoken as a word: laser and radar both started life as acronyms. When the letters are said one at a time, as in ATM, the term is initialism.
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What is a poem or text whose line-initial letters spell a message called?
acrostic
An acrostic hides a word or message in the first letters of successive lines or phrases. Similar devices can use final letters, but the initial-letter form is the classic acrostic.
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What is the name of the symbol '&'?
Ampersand
The symbol & is called an ampersand and represents the word 'and'.
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What do you call a word made by rearranging all the letters of another word?
Anagram
An anagram is a rearrangement of the letters of a word or phrase to make another word or phrase.
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What is the character or force that opposes the protagonist called?
Antagonist
The antagonist creates the central opposition faced by the protagonist, but need not be a villain. The opposing force can also be a society, nature, or an internal conflict.
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In clock times, what do the abbreviations AM and PM stand for?
Ante meridiem and post meridiem
They are Latin for 'before midday' and 'after midday', which is why noon is neither.
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What is the term for a word that means the opposite of another word?
Antonym
An antonym is a word with the opposite meaning to another, like hot and cold or arrive and leave. The word comes from Greek roots meaning 'against' and 'name'.
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Which punctuation mark can show possession or a missing letter in a contraction?
Apostrophe
An apostrophe is used in possessives and in contractions such as 'do not' becoming 'don't'.
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In which direction do the letters of an Arabic word run?
right to left
Arabic script is written from right to left, while numerals within Arabic text are commonly written left to right. Hebrew and Persian are other examples of right-to-left writing systems.
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Which term describes a word or expression retained from an earlier period but now uncommon?
Archaism
An archaism is a word or expression retained from an earlier period that is no longer commonly used. It may survive in historical writing, religious language, or deliberately old-fashioned speech, such as “thou” in English.
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What is the repetition of vowel sounds in nearby words called?
Assonance
Assonance is the echo of the same vowel sound through words close together, as in the long o running through 'the old stone road home'. It works anywhere in the word, not just at the start, and poets use it to bind a line together by sound rather than rhyme.
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Which punctuation symbol is commonly used to point to a footnote?
Asterisk
An asterisk is a star-shaped symbol often used to call attention to a note or qualification.
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Which consonant is often silent after M at word endings?
B
The final B in climb, thumb, dumb, and crumb is a spelling remnant. Earlier pronunciations included the consonant, but it was later lost in ordinary speech.
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The English word ballet was borrowed from which language?
French
Ballet entered English from French, which in turn took it from Italian balletto, meaning little dance. The deeper origin is the Italian ballare, to dance.
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Someone raised speaking both Welsh and English at home is described as what?
Bilingual
Bilingual comes from the Latin bi-, meaning two, and lingua, meaning tongue. Roughly half the world's population uses two or more languages in daily life.
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How many raised dot positions are in a standard Braille character cell?
six dots
Standard Braille uses a six-dot cell arranged in two columns of three. Eight-dot Braille also exists for expanded computer and punctuation notation, but the traditional standard cell has six.
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The geographic word canyon was borrowed into English from which language?
Spanish
Canyon comes from Spanish cañón, meaning a large gorge or tube. The ñ in the Spanish spelling is a distinct letter-like character, not simply an accented n.
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Which part of speech connects words, phrases, or clauses?
Conjunction
Conjunctions such as and, but, and because connect pieces of language and show relationships between them. Coordinating conjunctions join equal units, while subordinating conjunctions introduce dependent clauses.
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What is a pair of successive poetic lines called?
Couplet
A couplet is a two-line unit, and many famous couplets rhyme. In a heroic couplet, the two lines are typically written in rhymed iambic pentameter.
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What material was most commonly used for cuneiform writing?
Clay tablets
Wet clay was soft enough to receive marks from a reed stylus and hardened into a durable record. This is why large numbers of Mesopotamian texts survived.
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Which writing system is used for modern Russian?
Cyrillic
The alphabet is named after Saint Cyril, but it was actually devised by his followers in the First Bulgarian Empire around the 9th century, adapting Greek letters for Slavic sounds not found in Greek. It also writes Ukrainian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Mongolian, and Kazakh.
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What type of sentence makes a statement or gives information?
Declarative
A declarative sentence states something and normally ends with a full stop. 'The Earth orbits the Sun' is declarative; 'Does the Earth orbit the Sun?' is interrogative.
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Which script is commonly used to write Hindi?
Devanagari
The script's letters hang from a horizontal bar called the shirorekha, and it is also used for Sanskrit, Marathi, and Nepali. It descended from the ancient Brahmi script and is technically an abugida, where each consonant carries a built-in vowel sound unless marked otherwise.
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What literary term names a section added after a play or novel's main action?
Epilogue
An epilogue is a section added after the main action of a play or novel to wrap up events or provide a final comment. The word comes from Greek roots meaning “after” and “speech.”
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What is the study of the origins and historical development of words called?
etymology
Etymology traces words through earlier languages and historical changes in form and meaning. It can reveal unexpected connections, such as window ultimately relating to an eye of the wind.
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What is the literal meaning of the Greek root 'phobos', which gives us the word phobia?
Fear
Phobos was also the Greek god of fear and panic, and gives his name to one of Mars's two moons.
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Which common English word contains five consecutive vowels?
queueing
Queueing contains the sequence u-e-u-e-i without a consonant interrupting it. It is formed from queue plus the -ing ending.
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Which language is written using the Hangul writing system?
Korean
Hangul is the alphabet used for modern Korean. King Sejong and his scholars introduced it in the fifteenth century as a writing system easier to learn than the Chinese characters then in common use, with letter shapes that sketch the position of the tongue and lips.
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What is the term for a word that sounds the same as another but differs in meaning or spelling?
Homophone
Homophones share a pronunciation but differ in meaning, and usually in spelling too, as with pair and pear, or their, there and they're.
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What does the idiom "bite the bullet" mean?
Accept something painful and get it over with
To bite the bullet is to face something unpleasant that cannot be avoided and get through it. The phrase is usually traced to battlefield surgery before anaesthetics, when a wounded man was given something to clamp his teeth on.
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What is a fixed phrase whose meaning cannot usually be understood literally called?
Idiom
An idiom carries a settled meaning that its individual words do not add up to: breaking the ice has nothing to do with ice. Every language has thousands of them, and they are usually the last thing a learner picks up.
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What does the abbreviation 'i.e.' mean in English?
That is
Style guides differ on what follows it: American usage almost always adds a comma right after the two letters, while British usage often leaves it out. Either way, the phrase should only preface a restatement of what was just said, not a brand new example.
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What type of sentence gives a command or instruction?
Imperative
An imperative sentence tells someone to do something, as in Close the door. Its subject is often an understood you rather than a stated noun.
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What part of speech expresses a brief emotion or reaction?
Interjection
Interjections are words or short expressions that convey an immediate reaction, such as 'oh!' or 'alas!'.
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A blacksmith is named for the metal worked. Which metal is the black one?
Iron
Iron is the black metal, named for the dark oxide scale that forms on its surface when it is heated in the forge. A whitesmith worked the pale metals such as tin.
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A jovial person is cheerful and good-humoured. Which god's name is buried in the word?
Jupiter
Jovial comes from Jove, the alternative name for Jupiter. Astrologers held that anyone born under the planet Jupiter would have a merry, generous temperament.
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What initial letter is silent in both a leg joint and a cutting tool?
K
Merriam-Webster identifies K as silent in words such as knee and knife.
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The Japanese word karaoke literally means what?
empty orchestra
Karaoke combines kara, meaning empty, with oke, a shortened form of orchestra. The name refers to singing along with recorded accompaniment rather than a live band.
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The word kindergarten was borrowed from which language?
German
Kindergarten is German for children's garden: Kinder means children and Garten means garden. Friedrich Fröbel used the term for his early-childhood education system.
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Which letter is silent in both 'would' and 'could'?
L
The l in would and could is written but never pronounced. In would and should it is a genuine leftover from the older forms wolde and sholde; could never had one, and picked the letter up by copying its two neighbours.
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What is a word adopted from another language called?
loanword
A loanword is borrowed and used in a receiving language, often with changes in pronunciation or spelling. English has loanwords from hundreds of languages, including algebra and ballet.
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By number of native speakers, which language is ranked first worldwide?
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin is a tonal language: the same syllable can mean different things depending on pitch, with four main tones plus a neutral one. Standard Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect and is officially called Putonghua in mainland China and Guoyu in Taiwan.
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What figure of speech makes a direct, nonliteral comparison by saying one thing is another?
Metaphor
A metaphor treats one thing as if it were another to create an image or insight, as in time is a thief. Unlike a simile, it does not need like or as.
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Which letter appears most often in written English?
E
E accounts for roughly 12% of all letters in English text, followed by T, A and O. Codebreakers lean on that ranking to crack simple ciphers, and it is what makes a full-length novel written without a single E, as Georges Perec managed, such an oddity.
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What is a newly coined word or expression called?
neologism
A neologism is a newly coined word, or a new sense of an old one, that has not yet settled into general use. Selfie and podcast were both neologisms within living memory; once a word is fully at home in the language, it stops being one.
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What part of speech names a person, place, thing, or idea?
Noun
Nouns provide the names that other parts of a sentence describe or relate to. They can be concrete, such as 'river,' or abstract, such as 'justice.'
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Wednesday is named after Woden. Which Norse god is that?
Odin
Wednesday was Old English Wodnesdaeg, the day of Woden, the Anglo-Saxon form of Odin.
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A person's 'Achilles heel' is their what?
One point of weakness
Achilles was dipped in the river Styx as a baby and made invulnerable everywhere the water touched, except the heel his mother held him by. That heel killed him.
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What is a word that imitates or suggests the sound it describes called?
onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia includes words such as buzz, hiss, and splash. Different languages can represent the same sound differently because their sound systems and spelling conventions differ.
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What is a word or phrase that reads the same forward and backward called?
palindrome
A palindrome has the same sequence of letters when read in reverse, usually ignoring spaces and punctuation in phrases. Civic and level are familiar one-word examples.
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English gets the word 'panic' from which Greek god?
Pan
Pan, god of shepherds and wild country, was blamed for the sudden groundless terror that seized travellers in lonely places and flocks at night. The Greeks called that fear panikon, 'of Pan'.
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What is a sentence containing every letter of an alphabet called?
pangram
A pangram uses every letter at least once; The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is a famous English example. Pangrams are useful for testing typefaces and keyboards.
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Which English tense describes an action already finished before another past action, as in "she had left before he arrived"?
Past perfect
The past perfect is built from "had" plus a past participle, and its job is to push one past event further back than another. Because the tense itself carries the order, a sentence can be told out of sequence and still be clear: "he arrived, but she had already left" leaves no doubt about which happened first.
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What figure of speech gives human qualities to an animal, object, or idea?
Personification
Personification makes an abstract idea or nonhuman thing act like a person, as in the wind whispered. It is common in poetry, fables, and advertising.
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In Italian musical terminology, what does piano instruct a performer to do?
softly or quietly
In Italian musical terminology, piano tells the performer to play softly or quietly. It is commonly abbreviated as “p” in written music and contrasts with forte, meaning loudly.
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The name LEGO is a contraction of a Danish phrase. What does it mean?
Play well
Ole Kirk Christiansen named his wooden toy workshop from 'leg godt' in 1934. The interlocking plastic brick came nearly twenty years later.
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What is a word formed by blending parts of two other words called?
Portmanteau
A portmanteau blends sounds and meanings from two words, as in 'brunch' from breakfast and lunch.
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What does PS stand for, at the end of a letter?
Post scriptum
Post scriptum is Latin for 'written after', meaning it was added once the letter was already finished.
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What is a word part added to the beginning of a root or base word called?
Prefix
A prefix is a word part added to the beginning of a root or base word. For example, adding “un-” to “happy” forms “unhappy,” meaning not happy.
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Which part of speech expresses a relationship such as place, direction, or time?
Preposition
Words such as in, under, toward, and after are prepositions. They usually introduce a noun phrase that completes the relationship, as in under the table.
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What is the introductory section of a play or novel called?
Prologue
A prologue comes before the main narrative and can establish background, setting, or a framing voice. The corresponding concluding section is an epilogue.
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What is the central character in a story called?
Protagonist
The protagonist is the character whose goals and conflicts drive the main story. A protagonist need not be morally good, and the narrator may be a different character.
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What is a four-line stanza in a poem called?
Quatrain
A quatrain contains four lines and may use many different rhyme schemes. The word comes through French from a root meaning 'four.'
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Which letter is usually the rarest in general English text?
Z
Z is uncommon in ordinary English vocabulary, appearing mostly in loanwords and a small set of native words. Q, X, and J are also relatively rare, which is why they score well in Scrabble.
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From which language does the word robot come?
Czech
Robot entered English from Czech robot, related to robota, meaning forced labor.
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In linguistics, what is the study of meaning in language called?
semantics
Semantics studies meaning in words, phrases, and sentences. It differs from pragmatics, which focuses more on how context affects meaning in use.
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What punctuation mark can separate list items that include commas within them?
Semicolon
A semicolon can separate items in a list when those items already contain commas, making the list easier to read. It can also link two closely related independent clauses without a conjunction.
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What is a 14-line poem called?
Sonnet
A sonnet is a 14-line poem, traditionally following one of several established rhyme schemes.
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Which mark opens a question in written Spanish?
¿, an upside-down question mark
Spanish opens a direct question with ¿ and closes it with ?, so a reader knows a question is coming before reaching the end of the sentence. Exclamations get the same treatment with ¡ and !. The Real Academia Española recommended the practice in 1754 and it stuck.
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In a clause, what is the term for the whole part built around the verb, everything that is not the subject?
Predicate
In 'the dog chased the ball quickly,' the predicate is 'chased the ball quickly,' bundling the verb with its object and any modifiers. Grammarians further split it into the simple predicate, just the verb chased, and the complete predicate, the whole phrase.
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What term names a word part attached after a base?
Suffix
A suffix is a word part added to the end of a base word, such as “-ness” in “happiness.” Suffixes can change a word’s meaning or grammatical function.
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The words 'museum' and 'music' both come from which group of Greek goddesses?
The Muses
The Muses presided over poetry, song, dance and learning. A mouseion was a seat of the Muses, and mousike was their art.
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What is the wavy mark over the n in the Spanish letter enye called?
Tilde
The tilde began as a small n that medieval scribes wrote above a letter to stand in for a second one and save parchment. In Spanish the result counts as a letter in its own right, sorted after n, and it turns the sound into the ny of canyon.
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Which part of speech typically expresses an action or state?
Verb
A verb anchors the predicate of a clause and can describe an action, such as 'run,' or a state, such as 'seem.' Verbs also carry tense in English.
Medium Language and Words Trivia Questions
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The mathematical word algebra comes from which language?
Arabic
Algebra comes from the Arabic phrase al-jabr, associated with restoring or completing parts of an equation. The phrase appears in the title of a ninth-century work by al-Khwarizmi.
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What literary device repeats initial sounds in nearby words?
Alliteration
Alliteration repeats initial sounds in nearby words, as in 'wild and woolly.'
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A draper deals in what?
Cloth
A draper sells fabric by the length, and the trade gave English the surname Draper. Buttons, pins and thread were the stock of a haberdasher.
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What shape gives cuneiform its name?
Wedge
Cuneiform literally means wedge-shaped. The angled end of a reed stylus made triangular impressions in wet clay.
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Which Latin abbreviation introduces an example rather than a restatement?
e.g.
Exempli gratia literally means 'for the sake of example.' Because it only flags a sample rather than a full list, anything placed after e.g. is illustrative, never exhaustive.
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What punctuation mark shows that part of a quotation or sentence has been omitted?
Ellipsis
An ellipsis is usually written as three spaced or closely grouped dots. Besides marking omissions, it can suggest a trailing-off thought in informal writing.
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The word emoji was coined in which language?
Japanese
Emoji combines Japanese e, meaning picture, with moji, meaning character or letter. The symbols originated in Japanese mobile communications before spreading worldwide.
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What is a word derived from a person's name called?
eponym
An eponym is a word or name derived from a person's name, such as sandwich, named after the Earl of Sandwich. The term can also refer to the person whose name supplied it.
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Who created the constructed international language Esperanto?
L. L. Zamenhof
L. L. Zamenhof published Esperanto in 1887 under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto. He designed it to be relatively easy to learn and useful for international communication.
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What literary technique gives hints about events that will happen later in a story?
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing plants clues that gain significance when later events occur. A flashback does the opposite in time by taking the narrative back to an earlier event.
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A costermonger sells what?
Fruit and vegetables
A costermonger sells fruit and vegetables from a barrow or a street stall. The name comes from the costard, a large ribbed variety of apple.
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What is an -ing form of a verb used as a noun called, as in swimming is fun?
Gerund
In swimming is fun, swimming names an activity and acts as the subject, so it is a gerund. The same -ing form can instead be a participle when it helps form a verb or describes a noun.
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What vocabulary term describes words with the same spelling and pronunciation but different meanings?
Homonym
Bat the flying mammal and bat the wooden club are a classic pair: same spelling, same sound, unrelated meanings. A homograph only needs matching spelling, like the tear you cry and the tear in fabric, while a homophone only needs matching sound, like flour and flower.
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What rhetorical device uses deliberate exaggeration for emphasis rather than literal accuracy?
Hyperbole
Hyperbole appears in expressions such as I've told you a million times. The exaggeration is intended to communicate intensity, not to report a precise number.
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In "She left because it rained", what is "She left"?
Independent clause
An independent clause has a subject and predicate and expresses a complete thought. A dependent clause cannot stand alone because it functions within a larger sentence.
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Which language family includes English, Hindi, Persian, and Greek?
Indo-European
All four descend from Proto-Indo-European, which is why words such as English mother and Persian madar resemble each other.
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What is an abbreviation made from initial letters and pronounced letter by letter called?
Initialism
An initialism such as FBI is spoken as separate letters. An acronym such as NASA is normally pronounced as a single word.
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Who is generally credited with deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs?
Jean-François Champollion
Champollion announced his decipherment in 1822, building on partial progress made by Thomas Young.
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The word 'plumber' comes from the Latin name for which metal?
Lead
Latin plumbum means lead. Roman water pipes were cast in lead, and the workers who bent, cut and joined them took their name from the metal.
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What is the writing and editing of dictionaries called?
Lexicography
Samuel Johnson wrote his landmark 'A Dictionary of the English Language' largely by himself, publishing it in 1755 after about nine years of work. Modern lexicographers instead track how words are actually used through huge searchable collections of text called corpora.
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Which of these words describes someone whose mood swings quickly and unpredictably?
Mercurial
Mercurial comes from Mercury, the swift messenger god, and means volatile or quick to change. Saturnine means gloomy, jovial means cheerful, and martial means warlike, each from the god of the same name.
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The word 'milliner' comes from the name of which city?
Milan
A milliner was originally a Milaner, a seller of the fine ribbons, straw and trimmings imported from Milan. The word narrowed over time to mean a maker of hats.
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What Latin phrase does the abbreviation NB stand for?
Nota bene
Nota bene means 'note well', flagging something the reader should not skip past.
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What editorial term refers to an optional mark before the last conjunction in a series?
Oxford comma
The Oxford comma is the optional comma placed before the final conjunction in a series. It can make a sentence’s meaning clearer by separating the last two items.
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A tinker traditionally mended what?
Pots, pans and kettles
A tinker was a travelling mender of metal household goods, patching and re-soldering pots, pans and kettles from door to door. The trade is the source of the verb to tinker, meaning to fiddle with something and try to mend it.
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RSVP on an invitation is French. What does it ask you to do?
Reply, please
It stands for repondez s'il vous plait, literally 'respond if it pleases you'. It asks for an answer either way, not only if you are coming.
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The English word shampoo entered the language from which South Asian language?
Hindi
Shampoo comes from Hindi chāmpo, an imperative meaning roughly massage or press. In English, the word first referred to washing and massaging the body before narrowing to hair washing.
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Why does knight still carry a K that nobody pronounces?
The K was still pronounced when the spelling was fixed
The Old English word was spelled cniht, and the initial hard C or K sound was pronounced until roughly the 1600s. Printing had already fixed the spelling by then, so words like knee and knife kept their old letter after speech moved on without it.
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What is an accidental swapping of the initial sounds of two words called?
spoonerism
A spoonerism swaps sounds between nearby words, often producing a humorous result. The term honors Oxford don William Archibald Spooner, who was reputed to make such slips.
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Which ancient language did the earliest cuneiform writing represent?
Sumerian
The British Museum notes that the first cuneiform represented the Sumerian language; Akkadian and other languages were written in cuneiform later.
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Which fear does the word 'triskaidekaphobia' name?
The number 13
From the Greek treiskaideka, thirteen. It is why many hotels and lifts skip the thirteenth floor.
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Which reference work traces English words through dated historical quotations?
The Oxford English Dictionary
The OED records how each sense of a word has been used over time, with dated quotations showing the earliest known uses.
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The word 'verdict' comes from Latin roots meaning what?
Truly said
Verdict comes from the Latin vere dictum, meaning truly said, and reached English through the legal French used in medieval courts. The same root for truth turns up in verify and veracity.
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A subpoena orders a person to appear in court. What do the two Latin words behind that name literally mean?
Under penalty
Subpoena is the Latin sub poena, meaning under penalty, because the early writs opened by warning the recipient of the punishment for failing to turn up. The threat in the wording ended up as the name of the document.
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To 'tantalise' comes from Tantalus. How was he punished in the underworld?
Water and fruit stayed just out of his reach
Tantalus stood in a pool that drained away whenever he stooped to drink, under branches that lifted whenever he reached for the fruit. The element tantalum carries his name for the same reason.
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The surname Turner comes from a craftsman who turned what?
Wood on a lathe
A turner shapes wood, bone or metal by spinning it on a lathe and holding a cutting tool against it. Bowls, chair legs and stair spindles are all turned work.
Hard Language and Words Trivia Questions
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What is it called when a phrase is borrowed by translating its parts, as when skyscraper became the French gratte-ciel?
A calque
A calque, or loan translation, copies a foreign expression piece by piece instead of borrowing its sound the way a loanword does.
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What is the rhetorical device of repeating a word at the beginning of successive clauses?
Anaphora
Anaphora repeats an opening word or phrase across successive clauses. Its mirror image, epistrophe, repeats at the end instead.
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Which European language is not known to be related to any other language?
Basque
Basque is a language isolate with no demonstrated relatives, surrounded by Indo-European neighbours. Estonian is Uralic, Welsh is Celtic, and Maltese is Semitic.
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What is the hook-like mark under the c in French ç called?
cedilla
A cedilla changes the pronunciation of c in languages such as French and Portuguese. In French, ç signals a soft s sound where plain c might otherwise sound like k.
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In which broad period did the earliest known cuneiform writing appear?
Late fourth millennium BCE
The earliest cuneiform signs were pressed into clay at Uruk in southern Mesopotamia around 3200 BCE. They were accounting marks recording grain, livestock and labour, long before anyone wrote literature with them.
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Which Persian ruler's multilingual inscription became the key to reading cuneiform?
Darius I
The Behistun Inscription of Darius I repeats the same text in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, which gave scholars their way into cuneiform.
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Which writing system was created by Saints Cyril and Methodius?
Glagolitic
The brothers devised Glagolitic in the 860s for Old Church Slavonic. Cyrillic, though named after Cyril, was developed later by his followers.
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Which ancient language was deciphered by Bedřich Hrozný?
Hittite
In 1915 Hrozný cracked Hittite and showed, to general surprise, that it was an Indo-European language.
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Which Bronze Age script of Crete has never been deciphered?
Linear A
Linear A recorded the Minoan language and still cannot be read. The later Linear B, which borrowed many of its signs, turned out to record Greek.
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Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of what?
Long words
The joke name pads out the real term, sesquipedalophobia, from the Latin sesquipedalis meaning 'a foot and a half long'.
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Which fear does 'arithmophobia' name?
Numbers
From the Greek arithmos, meaning number, the same root as in arithmetic and logarithm.
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Which writing system was used only by women in Jiangyong County, China?
Nüshu
Nüshu, whose name means women's writing, was passed between women in Hunan and written on fans and cloth rather than in official documents.
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The English word pajamas ultimately comes from which language?
Persian
Pajamas comes from Persian pay-jama, meaning a garment for the legs. The word entered English through colonial-era use in South Asia.
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Which ancient alphabet is generally regarded as the ancestor of the Greek and Latin alphabets?
Phoenician alphabet
Greek was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet, and the Latin alphabet came in turn from a Greek-derived script.
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What is the study of how speech sounds are physically produced and perceived?
Phonetics
Phonetics covers the physical side of speech sounds. Phonology, its close cousin, studies how a particular language organises those sounds into a system.
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English borrowed the word safari directly from which language?
Swahili
In Swahili, safari means journey or travel. Swahili itself borrowed the word from Arabic safar, also meaning journey.
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Who created the Cherokee syllabary?
Sequoyah
Sequoyah, who could not read English, worked out a syllabary of about 85 characters for Cherokee in the early nineteenth century.
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What is the figure of speech that uses a part to refer to the whole?
Synecdoche
Synecdoche names a part for the whole, as in all hands on deck, where hands stands for the entire crew.
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Thalassophobia is the fear of what?
The deep sea
From the Greek thalassa, meaning sea. It centres on deep or open water rather than on water in general.
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Which ancient script was an alphabet written in cuneiform wedge marks?
Ugaritic
Ugaritic used about thirty wedge-shaped signs, roughly one per consonant, making it an alphabet in cuneiform clothing rather than a syllabary.
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