It’s a big month for the letter Q – think Pride Month and LGBTQ – here’s how it doesn’t follow English conventions when languages such as Mandarin are transcribed into the Latin script.

Gin is a distilled spirit whose name derives from the juniper berries that flavour it. Called genever by the Dutch, its name was shortened when it was embraced by the British, who created the gin and tonic.

It is generally accepted that doughnuts evolved in America, but why the ‘nut’? As National Doughnut Day approaches, here are the origins of the word for the fried dough product.

Turtles, tortoises and terrapins all belong to the taxonomic order Testudines, originating in the Latin word for ‘shell’. Here’s a history of the words ahead of World Turtle Day.

Machiavellian and gerrymander are examples of eponyms – words derived from people’s names. Lisa Lim considers some recently coined eponyms, and how their meaning can quickly evolve.

The word from which the English ‘fast’ comes didn’t originally mean to abstain from food or drink, while its Arabic equivalent encompassed all that and more.

TikTok users are sharing traditional, indigenous or less mainstream languages on the platform, and thereby helping to preserve and promote cultures in danger of dying out.

American conceptual artist Mel Bochner’s text-based works prompt critical reactions about language and communication. So too, in its own way, does the graffiti of Hong Kong’s “King of Kowloon”.

Pangolins are said to travel all around the world underground in Chinese legend. They are now the most trafficked mammals worldwide, their greatest threat lying in traditional Chinese medicine.

The orange’s history starts in the Himalayan foothills, with citron the first species to head west and mandarin oranges the last major one to, arriving in England from China in 1805.

The legendary kraken lives on: a new Covid-19 variant, thought to be the most transmissible yet, has been named after the creature, but how was the ocean terror created?

From the climate emergency to pandemic, lockdown and insurrection, past WOTY picks feed into Collins English Dictionary’s choice this year of permacrisis.

Twitter’s founders considered calling the service Jitter and Twitch before settling on its current name – but deciding what to call posts on the platform was trickier.

From the cubist collages of artists in the early 20th century, word art has evolved to become a vehicle for questioning societal norms and provoking thought.

Lettuce, the ‘queen of the salad plants’, has come a long way from its weedy form first used in ancient Egypt – a favourite of Brexit puns, now it’s used as a measure of political shelf life.

While the origins of the word ‘octopus’ are fairly straightforward, what isn’t so clear is the correct form of the plural.

TV chef Jamie Oliver made pukka his catchphrase, but what does the word mean? A lot of different things, if you trace it back to its roots in Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu.

The whale shark owes its name to its size; in some other cultures it is the ancestor of all fish, while in Taiwan, where diners covet its flesh, its name is ‘tofu shark’.

Pox was coined as a plural form of the Middle English pock, meaning a pustule, blister, ulcer or vesicle. Monkeypox is so called because it was first found in monkeys, but they are not major carriers of the disease.

Avocados are found all around the world, but their origins are in Central America. The Aztecs called them āhuacatl, and guacamole is derived from combining that word and the Aztecs’ word for sauce, ‘molli’.

‘Monsoon’ comes from an Arabic word via Portuguese and Dutch, while a ‘trade wind’ was originally unconnected with commerce, coming from a German word for ‘path’ or ‘track’.

Synonymous with cheap and artificial, and of the modern scourge of pollution, plastic doesn’t have many positive connotations today – but its original meaning derives from art and sculpture.

The Tongan word ‘tabu’, meaning sacred or forbidden, gave birth to the English ‘taboo’, eventually becoming used in the description of topics such as menstruation and race.

Sustainable development initiatives in Coral Triangle countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines rely on local languages, but hundreds of them are in danger of dying out.

‘Shanghaied’ – to abduct forcibly, to constrain or to coerce someone into a position – as a word has been in decline since the late 1900s, but its usage may be coming full circle.

The genus name of the traditional Mother’s Day flower, Dianthus, has some macabre origins, while several theories surround the origin of the name ‘carnation’.

Deadly periodic fever had been documented for centuries before an Italian doctor named it malaria based on the theory that breathing vapours from stagnant waters caused it. The mosquito-parasite link came later.

Historically a black swan was a metaphor for something thought not to exist – in Roman times a good wife, later an ‘honest lawyer’. Then explorers discovered black swans were real.

The war between Russia and Ukraine has seen the popular name of the incendiary devices, also known as petrol bombs, bottle bombs or the poor man’s grenade, shunned by Ukrainians.

Words that serve to distinguish outsiders from insiders have often played a dark role in war and genocide. One is being used in Ukraine now to identify Russian soldiers and saboteurs.