Generate a random word origin from 100 everyday words -- each with the surprising story behind where it came from.
This generator draws from 100 etymologies across five sources -- From People & Myth, From Places, Borrowed & Travelled, Accidents & Mistakes, and Trades & Old Life. Each explains how an ordinary word got here: the sandwich named for a gambler, the quarantine that was literally forty days, the salary connected to salt.
Every result here is drawn using crypto.getRandomValues() -- the Web Crypto API's cryptographically secure randomness -- instead of Math.random(), so it's genuinely unpredictable, not just statistically random. Learn more.
Win a pub argument, find a fact worth repeating, prep an English or history lesson, or feed a genuine curiosity about why English is such a magpie. The entries also flag popular etymologies that are myths, like the 'rule of thumb' story.
Generate draws one word at random using the site's cryptographically secure randomness, never repeating the word currently shown in single-result mode. Each draw traces the route from origin to modern meaning, and the Source filter narrows where it came from.
A sample of what this generator can draw, spread evenly across the full list:
'Nightmare' is a good one -- the 'mare' is a crushing spirit from Germanic folklore, with no connection to horses. 'Clue' is another: it was a ball of thread, as Theseus used in the labyrinth.
No, and the entries say so where it matters. 'Sabotage' from wooden shoes thrown into machines is probably folk etymology, and the 'rule of thumb' wife-beating story is definitively a myth.
Successive invasions and an empire: Old English took Norse and Norman French, then trade and colonisation added Arabic, Hindi, Nahuatl, Malay, and dozens more. English has never had an academy to stop it.
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