17 Facts About Words That'll Low-Key Blow Your Mind

The acronym OMG goes all the way back to 1917.

1. "Sphinges" is an acceptable plural for "sphinx".

Lifetime

Sure, you can also say sphinxes, but it's so much less likely to make you (and everyone else in earshot of you) cringe.

2. And if you really want, you can use "durst" as a past tense for "dare".

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Only diehard Limp Bizkit fiends will probably do this, though.

3. SOS doesn't actually stand for "save our souls (or ship)".

CBS

That's because it's a backronym! Acronyms are formed from phrases or names that exist beforehand, like NASA and NATO, but backronyms are words assigned to a set of initials that spell out a particular word or words after they're coined. People like to say "SOS" is an acronym for "save our ship (or souls)", but SOS was chosen as a distress signal because it was so easy to send that chain of letters in Morse code. Other popular backronyms include SAD (as in Seasonal Affective Disorder), AMBER Alert, and APGAR test.

4. The word "apron" was originally "napron".

Nickelodeon

Too many people thought they were hearing "an apron" when someone said "a napron," so in the 15th century, the word officially dropped the "n".

5. "Pumpernickel" is derived from the German words for "fart goblin".

Universal Pictures

"Pumpern" is a German verb for "to fart," and Nickel, was a name for a goblin (or the devil). Put the two together, and what do you get? A delicious dark rye bread, apparently.

6. The acronym OMG goes all the way back to 1917.

ABC

Don't blame the depraved teens and millennials for OMG being in the dictionary — its first recorded use was by none other than Winston Churchill in a letter he wrote at the beginning of the 20th century.

7. The word "sleight" in the phrase "sleight of hand" is a fossil word — it doesn't have any meaning in the English language anymore.

NBC

A fossil word is one that's survived because it's part of an idiom, but is obsolete otherwise. "Sleight" was a Middle English word meaning trickery or cunning, but now, it basically means nothing. Other fossil words include ado, bandy, bated, beck, and bygones.

8. And then there's the word "dord," a ghost word that was coined in 1934.

Paramount

What's a ghost word, you ask? It's basically a word that was created by mistake or accident. Dord is probably the most famous example of one; it was defined in Webster's New International Dictionary as a noun meaning "density" even though it wasn't really a word. What happened was that a card that said "D or d" moved from the "abbreviations" stack to the "words" stack when words for that dictionary edition were being defined. Lexicographers realized the mistake in 1939, but the legend behind it persists.

9. A single piece of confetti is called a confetto.

ESPN

How cute! Similarly, the singular versions of graffiti and spaghetti are graffito and spaghetto.

10. There are seven ways to spell the sound "ee" in English.

Pixar

Get ready for this: The sentence, "He believed Caesar could see people seizing the seas," contains all of them.

11. The word "goodbye" is derived from a contraction of the Old English phrase "God be with you".

Universal Pictures

Back in the day, people would bid each other farewell with a kind "God be with ye." Over time, they got lazy and shortened it to "godbwye," which eventually became the "goodbye" we know and use today.

12. A group of jugglers can be called a "neverthriving".

20th Century Fox

I said it CAN be, not that it should be, ok? The collective name was recorded in the 15th century and apparently is still sometimes used.

13. The technical name for brain freeze is sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia.

FOX

The next time you get brain freeze from eating ice cream too quickly, say you have sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia to really freak out whoever you're with.

14. The word "noon" originally referred to 3 pm.

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It's a long story, but essentially, "noon" originally signified the ninth hour of daylight, which before the 1200s or so, was around 3 pm. The word for "nine" in Old English was "non," which, as with a lot of words, eventually morphed into the word we know today, noon.

15. There was no word for the color orange in English until the 16th century.

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The fruit got its name in the 1300s, but for some reason, it took another 200 years for people to start using the word "orange" to describe color, too.

16. There is a phrase for the opposite of déjà vu, and it's jamais vu.

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As expected, it describes the phenomenon of a familiar situation or experience that feels new.

17. And sausages were nicknamed "bags 'o mystery" in the 19th century.

Twitter: @HaggardHawks

Why they aren't still called that is the real mystery.