Numbers like $\pi$ and $\sqrt{2}$ are irrational. But does that mean they’re unreasonable or just that they lack a ratio?

The Ancient Greek ἄλογος is even more ambiguous. Λόγος is used by Euclid to mean ratio, but it could also mean word, speech, story, idea, or reason reason. So ἄλογος could also mean speechless, unspeakable, unexpected, or non-reasoning.

Modern Greek mathematicians now call $\mathbb{Q}$ the inexpressible (άρρητος) numbers.

Most Chinese languages, such as Mandarin and Cantonese, pronounce 茶 along the lines of cha, but Min varieties along the Southern coast of China and in Southeast Asia pronounce it like teh. Almost all languages use variants of one or the other, depending on who they got their tea from.

The word “distribute” is etymologically the opposite of “tribute”.

In geography, a tributary is a stream or river that feeds into a larger body of water; for example, Snek’w7étkwe (the Thompson River) is a tributary of stal̓əw̓ (the Fraser River). When a river bifurcates into multiple downstream branches, such as the North and South Arms of the Fraser, those branches are called distributaries.

“Hydrogen” in German is Wasserstoff (“water stuff”), which sounds hilarious except it’s just a literal translation of the Greek hydro-gen!

The words Kohlenstoff (“coal stuff”) for carbon and Sauerstoff (“sour stuff”) for oxygen are also direct translations. Stickstoff (“suffocation stuff”), the word for nitrogen, is a German original.

My favourite etymology fact is that “helicopter” is helico-pter, not heli-copter: it’s Greek for “spiral wing”.

Julius Caesar’s given name wasn’t “Julius”. That was his full family name — the Caesars being a branch of the Julia family. His personal name was Gaius.

In his time, he was referred to as Gaius Caesar or simply Caesar by himself and his contemporaries.

International law requires all ships to display a wheelhouse poster describing the “general particulars” of the vessel.

That’s such a great phrase — it ought to catch on more widely!

Mount Baker was named by George Vancouver after his third lieutenant. Joseph Baker may have been the first on Vancouver’s ship to spot the obvious giant mountain, but he wasn’t even the first European to do so.

A year earlier, the Spanish expedition led by Manuel Quimper had mapped the area and called the peak la gran montaña del Carmelo.

If either explorer had cared to ask the indigenous groups they were around, they might have recognized Mount Baker by the name kwelshan, the term used by the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) people around Bellingham and the San Juan Islands, or swáʔləx̣, reportedly used by the nəxʷsƛ̕áy̕əm̕ (Klallam) people on the Olympic Peninsula.

The mountain itself is surrounded by the traditional lands of the Nooksack and Upper Skagit peoples. The Nooksack use kwelshán for the high open slopes of the mountain and kweq’ smánit for the glacier-covered summit.

“May you live in interesting times” is typically claimed to be a Chinese expression, but it actually originated with the British. Joseph Chamberlain — Neville’s dad — used the phrase “interesting times” frequently in speeches:

I think that you will all agree that we are living in most interesting times. I never remember myself a time in which our history was so full, in which day by day brought us new objects of interest, and, let me say also, new objects for anxiety.

Joseph Chamberlain

The word pea was originally pease in the singular and peasen in the plural. Eventually, speakers understandably interpreted the -s in pease as the plural suffix rather than just a sound in the original Latin pisum/pisa and Greek πίσον, and the English singular pea was born.

For example:

Take grene pesyn, an washe hem clene an caste hem on a potte, an boyle hem tyl þey breste, an þanne take hem vppe of þe potte, an put hem with brothe yn a-noþer potte…

Harleian manuscript 279

When the Ontario cities of Fort William and Port Arthur amalgamated in 1970, residents voted for a new name for their new city.

This table should be included under the dictionary entry for “vote splitting”.