Radio and PodcastLive Radio & PodcastsOpening Radio and Podcast...
Radio and PodcastLive Radio & PodcastsFetching podcast shows and categories...
Radio and PodcastLive Radio & PodcastsFetching podcast episodes...
Words for Granted is a podcast that looks at how words change over time. Host Ray Belli uses language--more specifically, individual words--as a way of making connections among history, cult...
Listen to Words for Granted, a Society & Culture podcast by Raymond Belli. Stream 128 episodes in English, follow new audio stories, and play episodes online on Radio and Podcast.
Browse this show under Society & Culture podcasts.
50 episodes are loaded now from a catalog of 128. More episodes can be opened from this page.
Explore Society & Culture podcasts, United States podcasts and English podcasts.
In this episode, Ray talks with linguist Valerie Friedland about accents—what they are, where they come from, and why everyone has one. They...
In this episode, author Danny Bate walks through the alphabet's evolution from its origins in Egyptian hieroglyphs to the letters of the Eng...
In this episode, Ray chats with Mignon Fogerty, aka the Grammar Girl. "Good grammar" may seem like the epitome of prescriptivism, but when i...
What can we learn about the nature of translation by reading a warning message in hundreds of different languages? In this episode, Keith Ka...
Rhetoric has a bad reputation. We tend to think of it as a linguistic tool used by polticians and marketing execs to maipulate the masses. W...
Instead of criticizing deviations from Standard English as "wrong," what if we celebrated them as expressive lingusitic innovations? In this...
What goes into building a language learning curriculum? How do designers choose features within a language learing app? Are some approaches...
As Lead of Language Research at Grammarly, Courtney Napoles is building systems to better help people from around the world communicate. In...
Place names are not random––behind the name of every country is a story of how it came to be. From stories of invasion and rebellion to the...
In this interview with linguist Danny Bate, we go deep on all things gender––grammatical gender, that is. Why do some languages have gender...
Trivia refers to obscure or useless information, but this definition is a far cry from the word's etymology. Trivia, or tri-via , literally...
In this episode, I speak with Tracey Weldon, linguist and board advisor on the Oxford Dictionary of African American English project. We dis...
What does "standing under" have to do with "understanding?" Nothing at all, which is why most of us probably overlook the obvious fact that...
In Old English, the word "world", or weorold , did not refer to a place. It was a compound word comprising wer , meaing "man", and ald , mea...
Have you ever wondered how writing was invented - or, how many times it was invented? How many undeciphered scripts has the ancient world le...
The etymology of "grotesque" is hiding in plain sight: "grotto-esque". Originally, the word was used to describe a style of ancient art that...
In Ancient Greece, an "idiot", or idiotes , was a "private person", which meant someone who did not hold a political office. In this episode...
Though people of extraordinary talents and intellect have always existed, the modern sense of "genius" didn't emerge until the relatively re...
Most Malay loanwords in English describe the local flora, fauna, and food of Southeast Asia. "Amok", however, is different. Amok, which desc...
"Hyperbola" and "ellipse" are geometrical curves, while "hyperbole" and "ellipsis" are rhetorical terms. At face value, it's not clear how t...
The meanings of "parabola" and "parable" have very little to do with one another, yet these words are etymological doublets of a single Gree...
Before Google was the name of one of the world's biggest tech companies, "googol" was an obscure math term that meant "ten to the one hundre...
The word "average" has anything but an average etymology. If the leading theory is correct, "average" ultimately derives from an Arabic word...
English may be spoken by a whopping 1.5 billion ESL speakers around the world, but that doesn't mean it's an "easy" language to learn. For n...
In many English works printed before the late 19th century, a letter unfamiliar to us today, ſ, is often used in place of the letter S. Howe...
If you've ever encountered the ligatures æ and œ in old texts, you may have wondered: what are they called? Where do they come from? How exa...
F*ck. Sh*t. C*ck. These are some of the most profane words in the English language, but what exactly makes them profane? Is there something...
Before the letter W was invented, the rune wynn was borrowed into the Latin AngloSaxon alphabet as a way of representing the /w/ sound. The...
In Modern English, we use the TH digraph to represent the voiced and voiceless dental fricative sounds. However, English previously had two...
You can't have the English language without the ABC's, right? Wrong. In this overview episode, we look at the history of the alphabet and th...
'Pasta' is first attested in English during the 1800's, which is later than one might expect. However, in prior centuries, a handful of its...
In today's episode, we look at the etymologies of our meal words––not to mention "meal" itself. (As it turns out, "meal" has a long history...
In this interview episode, I speak with Tim Brookes, founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project. Among many other things, we discuss why pr...
In ancient Greek botanical literature, there is a reference to a spiny plant called a kaktos . This word would pass into Modern English as "...
In this episode, we explore the etymology of the most culturally ubiquitous fruit, the apple. Etymologically, the ubiquity of the apple is f...
In the episode, we explore the etymology of 'cheese,' a Latin-derived word that entered the Germanic languages through trade long before the...
The word 'egg' plays a part in one of the most famous anecdotes in the written record about the evolution of the English language. In this e...
This episode features a conversation I had with Kevin Stroud of the History of English Podcast at this year's virtual Intelligent Speech con...
The idiom 'dead ringer' comes down to us from horse-racing slang, but a widely believed folk etymology links the idiom's origins to being bu...
The idiom 'red herring' is used to describe a distraction from the matter at hand. Literally, a 'red herring' is a kipper––that is, a smoked...
Of all places, why do we put the 'proof' in the 'pudding?' Like many idioms whose origins date back several centuries, the connection betwee...
In today's episode, I talk with Simon Horobin, Oxford professor and author of "Bagels, Bumf and Buses: A Day in the Life of the English Lang...
The etymology of 'break a leg' is disputed, but some theories hold up better than others. In today's episode, we look at a handful of plausi...
As we all know, the idiomatic meaning of 'apple of the eye' has nothing to do with apples. As it turns out, the origins of the idiom also ha...
"In a pickle" is one of the oddest sounding idioms in English. It means "in a predicament or bad situation," but it's not clear what pickles...
This episode begins a new series on the etymology of English idioms. In this general overview of idioms, we discuss why idioms are syntactic...
The word 'cannibal' comes to us by way of a familiar historical figure: Christopher Columbus. The word is ultimately a Hispanicization of th...
In common usage, a 'philistine' is a derogatory term for an anti-intellectual materialist. The word derives from the ancient Middle Eastern...
As a common noun, 'bohemian' describes an artistic, carefree lifestyle usually marked by poverty and unorthodoxy. The word is derived from B...
As someone who came of age during the late 90's, my first encounter with the word 'gothic' was through alternative music and fashion. Howeve...
You can listen to Words for Granted episodes online on Radio and Podcast. Open an episode and the site player will stream the available audio.
Words for Granted is listed as a Society & Culture show. The show language is listed as English.
This page lists 128 episodes for Words for Granted. More episodes are available from the View more button when the list continues.