The word farm did not originally mean a piece of land. It meant a rent. The Oxford English Dictionary traces it to the Anglo-Norman farme, an agreement on a fixed payment for the let of a property, and only later did the word slide from the payment onto the ground that produced it. Which is … Read more
The superhero name is only about a hundred and twenty years old, and it began with a flower. In 1905 Baroness Orczy published The Scarlet Pimpernel, whose hero Sir Percy Blakeney lived a double life and left a calling card after every rescue: a small drawing of the scarlet pimpernel, a common wayside flower. That … Read more
The word demon is a mistranslation that stuck. In ancient Greek a daimon was not evil at all. It was a spirit somewhere between a god and a mortal, and in its most famous form it was the inner voice Socrates described: a companion that never told him what to do, only warned him what … Read more
Every Saiyan is named after a vegetable. That is not a fan theory, it is the creator saying so out loud. Akira Toriyama explained his own system in the Daizenshuu guidebooks: the word Saiyan is built by rearranging yasai, the Japanese word for vegetable, and once he had decided that, every member of the race … Read more
Every map needs more than towns. It needs the river the towns are built on, the wood nobody walks through after dark, the pass that closes in winter and the inn at the bottom of it. Those names are harder to invent than character names, because a place name has to sound like it was … Read more
Explore 800+ kitsune names with meanings! Cool, unique & powerful Japanese fox spirit names for characters, DnD, anime & gaming inspiration.
There was never a halfling. There was a hobbit, and then there was a letter from a lawyer. The original 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons called this species hobbits. In 1977 the holders of the Tolkien rights sent a cease and desist, and TSR quietly rewrote its books: hobbit became halfling, ent became treant, … Read more
The word guild has nothing to do with craft, trade or brotherhood. It means payment. Old English gield meant a service, offering, tribute or compensation, and it comes from Proto-Germanic geldja-, a contribution. The earliest guilds Tacitus describes were sacred banquets that you had to pay into to attend. The word for the subscription became … Read more
Tolkien taught Anglo-Saxon at Oxford for twenty years, and it shows in one detail most readers never notice. The Rohirrim do not call their country Rohan. That is what Gondor calls it. Among themselves it is the Mark and the Mark is Mercia. Mercia was a real Anglo-Saxon kingdom covering the English Midlands. Its name … Read more
Here is something most Victorian name lists get wrong: Victoria was not a popular Victorian name. In 1844, English birth registers recorded over 63,000 girls named Nancy. Victoria got 148. The Queen’s name was considered too grand for ordinary families — so while Albert climbed steadily after the royal wedding in 1840, Victoria never did. … Read more
