The controversial terms, unlike “West Bank,” were in common use until 1948.

Donald Trump, Paradise Lost, and the origins of a phrase.

Neither Jewish nor Christian traditions call the Decalogue by its biblical name, but the phrases they choose reveal something about their different approaches to divine law.

The question is not whether Zionism was settler colonialism; it’s what sort of settler colonialism it was.

Brought from Arabic via Algerian pirates and Italian merchants, it only acquired its current meaning at the end of the 18th century.

By way of an ancient Roman holiday and two very similar Hebrew letters.

The word was invented in translating the Psalm recited by the Pilgrims.

The incompatible narratives of Judaism and Islam, and what the Bible has to say about them.

The contrast between New Testament forbearance and Hebraic hard-heartedness is an idea that won’t die.

Even as it becomes clear who will emerge victorious.

She comes from the Song of Songs. But what is she doing there?

And one has a historical background that is not unrelated to the plight of the hostages in Gaza.

Americans like the veteran Democratic strategist should not project their problems onto peoples who already have enough of their own.

All nouns and adjectives in Hebrew are gendered. Why do those genders keep switching?

Could “It’s easier to take the Jew out of exile than to take exile out of the Jew” and “You can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy” have shared roots?

I can’t think of a single serious Hebrew composition written by a Christian other than “In Praise of the Hebrew Language.”

Like Ladino, Haketiya grew out of the Spanish of Jews exiled from Spain. Like Yiddish, it has a range of loving, spiteful, sarcastic, ironic, anxious, and superstitious expressions.

A rivalry between the Jewish numerical and European pagan-astronomical nomenclatures for the seven-day week has played out over millennia across the world.

It was only in the early-to-mid first millennium BCE that both the ancient Babylonians and the ancient Hebrews began dividing their lunar months into seven-day periods.

In trying to take references to October 7 out of the Israeli singer’s now-famous song “Hurricane,” the competition both accidentally improved it and made her a cause célèbre.

Compared to the wit of the anti-Vietnam slogans of the late 60s, the anti-Israel chants of today are aggressively tedious. What does that say about the chanters?

The truth of the tale of Hillel and the “Hillel sandwich.”

Jews in Arab lands spoke much the same Arabic as their neighbors. But the notion that they thought of themselves as Arab Jews, pushed now in some circles, is a historical absurdity.

The holiday noisemaker bears a suspicious resemblance to the Spanish carraca.

Hebrew is full of goats these days, and English and French aren’t too far behind. Where’d they all come from?

Two or three thoughts on the “dehumanizing” discourse.

It is apparently too much to expect fifteen expert jurists to understand how human language is commonly used.

A Jewish lawyer coined the term because there was no word that described the murder of a whole people. But the definition he favored is so loose it can apply to almost any conflict.

Some years in the Jewish calendar, like the current one, have an extra month. How’d that come about and why?

The long-running case of the word for private detective can finally be considered closed.

Rarely heard in the speech of most Israelis in the past, b’sorot tovot, an ironic “good news,” has suddenly become a common way of saying goodbye.

The name of the biblical tribe of murderers, the arch-rivals of ancient Israel, has been much discussed in the wake of October 7. Is that appropriate?

Most wars, including the current one, are just called “the war” at first. The names that stick usually come years and sometimes centuries later.

A meḥdal occurred in 1973. It has now, in an eerily similar way, occurred again. What exactly does it mean in English?

An ancient prayer for rain mentions an angel named Af-bri. But where did he come from?

In the wake of the Yom Kippur War, the words yom kippur shel, “the Yom Kippur of,” have referred in Israeli speech to any debacle that might have been prevented by better judgment.

In both Hebrew and English.

What might the great scholar have been intending with a recently discovered list he made of seemingly random words from random European languages?

A misunderstanding about mirrors, with far-reaching, metaphysical consequences.

A reader’s question prompts Philologos to turn up a crucial link between the three.

Why is a phrase from a tractate in the Talmud so similar to one in Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians?

Will shnatz have arrived on the Hebrew scene just in time for it to denote something that no longer exists?

How many rabbis first translated the Hebrew Bible, and how many different translations did they produce?

One of the show’s main pleasures has to do with which of the four languages spoken by its main characters—Yiddish, Flemish, French, and English—they use with whom.

Orthodox Jews on Instagram have become obsessed with baking key-shaped challah. Is the idea derived from a decidedly non-Orthodox source?

And does their presence illuminate the book of Exodus—or is it simply a sign that ancient Egypt was a powerful nation?

Will the Hebrew language allow us to call Him, Her?

Stories circulated in Gutenberg’s lifetime of attempts to steal his invention while he was working on it. Can we know if they’re true?

Where a new grammatical feature of Hebrew speech comes from.

The ancient rabbis believed there was linguistic proof that the first man spoke Hebrew with God. Why?

Hebrew was once written in both directions. How did it fix its direction, and what does that show about the history of writing in general?

For the first time, a whole sentence in ancient Canaanite has been found. Only six words long, it brings us many words closer to the age of the Patriarchs.

What the Maccabees called their enemies reveals much about how both cultures saw themselves and what the conflict between them meant for the world.

A hue like the sea, the sky, grass, and trees, available for $14.90 per gram at Amazon.

A newly released academic study hints as much.

And could the story of the Tower of Babel actually reflect a dim folk-memory of its breakup?

I’ve been spared an encounter with the neologism until lately. But, frankly, now that I have made its acquaintance, I find it idiotic. (And don’t get me started about “goysplaining.”)

One renowned talmudic scholar called the now-beloved prayer a “foolish custom that is not to be followed.” What did he mean and how did it survive?

The word, like a small number of other Egyptian loanwords in the Bible, testifies to a period in which the early Israelite nation, or a part of it, was in intimate contact with Egyptian life.

The Blue-and-White party has transformed into . . . well, it’s unclear, at least in English.

Some have claimed that the hybrid dialect is on its way to becoming a new Yiddish, as different from 21st-century English as Yiddish is from medieval German. Are they right?

The deultimization of the Hebrew language proceeds apace.

In the end, one doesn’t know what to be struck by more: the fact that a computer can translate Hebrew at all, or the fact that when it does, it does so atrociously.

Jewish history has always known periods in which double naming existed, always in places in which Jews were relatively well-integrated in the non-Jewish society around them.

There is, unfortunately, nothing more human than most of the things called inhuman. That’s why in Jewish tradition “crimes against humanity” are thought of as crimes against divinity.

“Good Lord, the Christian woman understood!”

Only in Schopfloch, as far as I know, have a large number of originally Jewish words survived in the speech of the local populace to this day.

One never hears Jews speak among themselves of Sukkot as the holiday of Booths, or of Rosh Hashanah as New Year’s Day. Why the difference?

“An earthquake in biblical scholarship” is how the discovery has been described. That’s true, as are the connections it reveals between ancient languages and modern ones.

Why was a random Polish shtetl singled out in the 19th century to become the home of fools in dozens of Jewish fables?

The name is comical and magical at once, designating a city of broad boulevards and fancy shop windows known to Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the dairyman and others.

The Arabic word for meat is nearly the same as the Hebrew word for bread. The source of the difference reveals much about geography, culture, and human settlement.

First surfacing in the 15th century as raza in Spanish, razza in Italian, and race in French before entering English in the 16th century, it has had six different etymologies proposed for it.

The Hebrew of the Bible has many more ands than does modern English prose, a feature that’s surprisingly crucial to its literary power.

A new edition of the Hebrew Bible edited by the late Jonathan Sacks Hebraizes its names in a way that bibles almost never do. Why, and what’s at stake?

Of all the expletives, the f-word alone continues to be partially censored. Perhaps that’s because it still connotes menace in a way that other expletives do not.

The final, often-skipped stanza of the popular Hanukkah candle-lighting song Ma’oz Tsur presented the late rabbi with an unusual challenge.

The late statesman’s supposed knowledge of Yiddish bordered on the mythic. And myth it was, for his admirers routinely exaggerated his facility with the language.

In some cases, changes were minor. In others, Yiddish phrases were transformed nearly beyond recognition.

And why each has been preferred in different times and places.

In a recent column, the eminent scholar John McWhorter celebrates a linguistic revolution in the offing. But at what cost, and to whom?

Apart from Kol Nidrei, no High Holy Day prayer is better known than Un’taneh Tokef. But there’s a puzzle at its heart.

God’s first creative proclamation was “Let there be light,” so it might seem that the day came first. But then why does the Bible say that “it was evening and it was morning?”

The trend is disturbing, no doubt. But owning up to it is better than staying in your own comforting reality.

“Oh, just some words that my family always says when we enter a church.”

My late mother Pesya was the youngest child of immigrants to America from Kiev and Odessa, one reader writes. Here’s the story of her name.

An impassioned letter about how to refer to Israel’s Arab minority.

According to the Talmud, when God handed down the commandments, he handed them down in every language at once.

Quite a few masculine and feminine Hebrew words, when pluralized, take the form of the opposite gender. Why?

A brief look at some of the many Jewish words relating to alcohol.

Why should a Hebrew verb originally meaning to puncture have produced so many words relating to both the non-holy and to holes?

A movement of aggrieved small-business owners has grown in Israel over the last year. But the origins of the Jerusalem baker it highlights as its chief example are shrouded in mystery.

We know that the slur has something to do with Jews traveling in rural America in the first years of the 20th century. Do we know more than that?

Sure, the word is sometimes used as a pejorative term for “Jew.” But does anyone really think that banning it, as is reportedly being discussed, will prevent other terms from taking its place?

Its meaning in the Bible is “Truly said!” or “So be it!” After that it acquired its intense liturgical emotion, and then hasn’t changed much since.

From now until next September 6, we will be living in 5781 and 2021. Is that an accident, or is a deeper synchronicity at work?

As tracked through the waxing and waning value of the Hebrew words for “departees” and “descenders.”

In anti- and post-Zionist circles, the verb of choice for immigrating to Israel has been replaced by something less romantic.

Why do Yiddish speakers refer to children by terms of endearment seemingly meant for adults?

The Israeli actress recently released “Gal Gadot Teaches You Hebrew Slang,” a short video from Vanity Fair. She turns out not to be such a good teacher, but it doesn’t matter much.

Some paleolinguists have floated the idea of an original human language they call “Proto-Sapiens.” Is that what our ancestors were speaking when they built the Tower of Babel?

The liturgy of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is full of liturgical poems that stretch the bounds of the Hebrew language and the patience of worshipers.

When one Jewish summer camp “bombed” another with leaflets excoriating its lack of commitment to Hebrew and Zionism.

Whether it’s Judeo-Arabic, or Judeo-Italian, or Judeo-Spanish, or the Judeo-German better known as Yiddish, they all mix in varying amounts of Hebrew.

A versatile fellow, this Cossack, identified simultaneously with Israel’s prime minister and his bitterest opponents! Who is he and who robbed him?

A brief history of an indifferent word.

In English, one “wears” just about everything, from clothes to hats to perfume. In Hebrew, there’s a different verb for each of these items and more.

Elaborate comparisons between the stare of the judge and the stare of the kangaroo, begone.

Israeli politicians have in recent decades become obsessed with calling each other poodels.

Looking back from the 21st century on an etymological decision from the 19th century, let us utter an “alas.”

Even though it takes liberties rendering the original text, a new Danish Bible breaks from anti-Semitic Christian replacement theology in a far clearer way than ever before.

A look at the morale-raising expression of choice in today’s Jewish state.

Is there a difference between pestilence and plague?

A derived translation of the Hebrew Bible’s ḥesed, which focuses on action and deeds for others, lovingkindness as understood today focuses on internal feeling.

An Italian Yiddish was never in the cards, as the case of “Judeo-Mantuan” makes clear, because Jews were more closely integrated into Italian society than they were in Eastern Europe.

And most of them reveal a hidden admiration for the person who’s had the wit and the grit to get away with it.

What separates language from language, and language from dialect.

Why the felt need to excise profanity from the Bible is fundamentally inane.

For a word that is, in terms of its linguistic history, a relatively recent one, ghetto’s origins have been an unusual source of contention and uncertainty.

English is a language notorious for its strange spellings, and its speakers are more willing to tolerate aberrations than are speakers of other languages.

Let us sing of rodomont, Sinon, proditomania, and, in particular, grobian.

That’s what the rumor is. The truth about the ancient Arabic-speaking tribe is a little different.

And what you need to know in case you ever encounter him.

One word got turned upside down and downside up again.

Unlike, say, “World War I,” the “Yom Kippur War” caught on from the start and never faded. Aside from its naturalness, it has an associational richness that no other names could match.

Why the words for both are so similar in so many languages, and why Hebrew has turned out to be the rare exception.

The circular, braided bread known as challah has a twin. It originated in Greece, was picked up by Mediterranean Jews, traveled with them to Europe, and possibly back to Greece.

A letter from recently opened archives of the great writer makes clear how seriously he took the language, and by extension a possible move to Palestine.

Host means army, but who were God’s armies?

We hear a lot about “the Occupation” these days. There’s no need to say which. But where does the term come from, and how much is it worth?

Amid the familiar clutter of vowels and cantillation marks, a few strange dots appear. They have no obvious function, and yet they go back thousands of years. Their purpose is . . .

Variations of Hebrew’s misken, meaning “poor” or “unfortunate,” can be found from Italian to Swahili to Tagalog and far beyond.

What you notice when returning to your native country after many years away: everyone starts sentences with “So” and ends them with a question mark.

Before becoming linked to the famous architect who was trying to escape it, the German word mies (rotten) made its way from Hebrew, to Yiddish, to a thieves’ argot called Rotwelsch.

Anti-Zionist conspiracy theorists, look away!

Not packaged, not square, not oven-baked: that’s what it wasn’t. But what it was and where the name for it comes from is still something of a mystery.

It’s part of a trend away from names that once projected clear identities (Workers’ Party) and toward the politics of advertising (There Is a Future).

Take, for instance, the word tararam, meaning—what else?—“fuss” or “hullabaloo.”

There were many more illiterate Jews in the Tsarist empire than we tend to think there were.

A Mosaic reader was able to solve the mystery of the Yiddish expression tapn a vant, “to grope a wall.”

From Hebrew to Spanish to German to Italian and onward, the term is now as international as Coca-Cola.

A chance to help our language expert.

The many hypothesized sources for the saying, “To have butter on one’s head.”

It is practically impossible to utter a complete sentence in Hebrew that lacks gender.

It sounds less mercenary—which is probably also why real coins eventually gave way to chocolate ones.

It probably started with the term “Holocaust survivor.”

The tale of the pupik.

A recent archaeological discovery in Jerusalem reminds us that Jews once bore names like Antigonus, Aristobulus, and, possibly, Daedalus.

It could suggest a different story about the creation of the world.

A tip from a Mosaic reader helps pin down what the great diarist was up to on the day of his famous synagogue visit.

*What worship service did the great diarist Samuel Pepys actually witness?

At least one of them might stem from the days when Jews ululated.

For Judaism, the outward life of religious behavior comes first.

A country of Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Druze all speaking Hebrew as their native tongue? For anyone genuinely interested in Israel’s welfare, it would be a dream come true.

Philologos is quite certain the words of the prayer are in German, not Yiddish. But beyond that?

The hidden roots of the Yiddish-American expression “to shep nakhes.“

The curious case of Agendath Netaim, which the half-Jewish Leopold Bloom spends a whole day considering.

Medieval and modern Hebrew are unusually rich in abbreviations, but in a manner that is the reverse of English.

The origins of two strange names for French villages that are now suburbs of Paris.

Of shlukh and shlokh.

“If there is no overriding reason for the Major to retain an awkward-sounding German name that our people finds hard to pronounce, . . . he [should] change it to a Hebrew one.”

Figuring out the right way to characterize Pharaoh’s heart.

Which language was patient zero for the old expression, “We’ve been smallpoxed and measled”?

But not Philologos.

A strange new case of linguistic evolution.

Despite the silly claims of two computer scientists.

In Hebrew, Arabic, English, German, or any other language, taboo words are curious things.

The story of the biblical word b’liya’al.

It’s not why you think.

A modest suggestion for a new way of thinking about the original meaning of the word “Maccabee.”

If you don’t know what it means, you can probably figure it out. (Or you can read this column.)

Despite the claim of two recent scientific papers.

“I em verry heppy to mit you end yourr femily in yourr hawm.”

“A gut kvitl!” East European Jews once said to each other in the days just before and during the holiday of Sukkot, and many still do. What does it mean?

The products of the Yiddish greeting-card industry are a reminder of how wonderfully varied was the world of Yiddish-speaking Jewry.

There’s a lot in this name.

On the possible whereabouts of Ophir and Tarshish, and how to get there by ship from Palestine.

On the once-prevalent practice of rendering Hebrew publication dates by means of numerically coded verses from the Bible.

The convoluted story of jeroboams, rehoboams, methuselahs, and more.

In part, it borrowed extensively from the slangs and vernaculars of other languages. Consider the case of de la shmatte.

Some say its author was Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League. Is that right?

The shifting historical meaning of “Thou shalt not oppress a stranger.”

The process results from, in equal measure, Jewish separateness and Jewish assimilation.

A look at the phenomenon by which Yiddish words become English words under the influence of other, similar-sounding English words.

Contrary to a Times column, the reason people say “he’s Jewish” rather than “he’s a Jew” has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. It’s just a quirk of grammar, and it’s not unique to Jews.

It’s because of demons.

Where does the Yiddish word narishkayt come from?

Starting in the 16th century, this Ahasueros has personified the legendary figure of the “Wandering Jew,” symbol of the accursed Jewish people. How come?

What we learn from the story of the Russian phrase shakher-makher, or wheeler-dealer.

A linguistic investigation prompted by a meal in Rome of carciofi alla giudia.

The title of the Mishnaic tractate is commonly translated as “The Ethics of the Fathers.” But how did it get that name? And could “fathers” actually mean “principles,” and “ethics” mean “sayings”?

Different languages employ different methods of generating nicknames, but they all satisfy the same two needs: to show special affection and to demonstrate special intimacy.

There’s Greek oinos and Hebrew yayin, to say nothing of such farther-flung cognates as Swahili mvinyo and Maori waina. Is there a common root?

Created by an East European Jew disillusioned with Zionism and Hebrew, the language was meant to unite humanity in a spirit of brotherhood.

Why certain terms having to do with the basics of life are less prone to linguistic change than others.

Why are my friend’s Italian neighbors calling a house a bayta?

And what they tell us about particularism and universalism in Jewish tradition.

Who or what was Azazel?

The method, developed by the Babylonians and kept alive by medieval Jews, is known in Hebrew as the “secret of impregnation.”

What nahagos, the casual term for “driver,” tells us.

A form of folk medicine now in the news thanks to Olympic athletes like Michael Phelps, cupping has a long history in Judaism.

Why the Hebrew word for “shaming” (as in “Facebook shaming”) should not be sheyming.

Now used to describe converts to Judaism, the term misleadingly suggests that Jewishness inheres more in certain selective beliefs than in Jewish peoplehood.

How the hexagram became a Jewish symbol.

Some are named for their first word, others for their first significant word. What about the rest?

A centuries-old tale of complicated, ambivalent, and, sometimes, covertly intimate relationships between a largely anti-Semitic Christian society and its Jewish minority.

Fun with Hebrew numbers.

Popular today at weddings and bar-mitzvahs, the words, meaning “the people of Israel lives,” trace all the way back to the story of Joseph.

The answer depends on how one punctuates the Bible’s Passover story.

How a bizarre talmudic passage led to klafte, the derogatory word for an unpleasant woman.

As news reports from Britain confirm, a new anti-Jewish slur is making the rounds. Where did it come from?

Some think the Devil can be found in the Hebrew Bible. Are they right?

Like animals, words have an ecology. As one is driven out of its traditional habitat, others move into the space that has been vacated.

By the time Yiddish-speakers arrived in America and pre-state Palestine, English already had a rich vernacular, while Hebrew had none at all.

Three different words for the same Jewish head covering. Are they interchangeable?

The great controversy over Donald Trump’s “Yiddish.”

Romantic, idealistic Christianity says no. Sober, practical Judaism says yes.

The answer hasn’t always been clear.

How to translate the rabbinic term yetser ha-ra—and how not to.

The answer might help uncover the origins of Ethiopian Jewry.

My cantor told me the plural for yad, the Hebrew word for Torah pointer, is yadot. I think it’s yadayim. Who’s right?

“Fire is fire, meat is meat.” But what does it all mean?

The history of holiday greetings.

There are three Hebrew expressions for the days from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur. Two are well-known. The third? No one’s quite sure what it means.

It was widely reported this month that a professor in Texas had “decoded” the strange language spoken in Gulliver’s Travels. He did no such thing.

Philologos sets sail to discover the roots of the Yiddish word kayor.

A near-indecipherable tattoo on a woman’s leg helps unravel a mystery surrounding the 1943 anthem of the Jewish resistance.

Even in our increasingly post-religious age, “pagan” remains for most people a derogatory word. Why?

The first written reference to the magical utterance was in a Roman text. Did it have earlier roots?

Or was he mistranslated?

The 400-year-old translation is denigrated because of its archaic language. That’s one of its greatest strengths.

Hebrew scribes take great pains to copy faithfully. But, as a passage in Proverbs shows, once an error creeps into the chain of transmission, it can be there forever.

And why we say it at all.

Rabbi Yehudah says lions and bears. Rabbi Nehemiah says hornets and gnats. What does arov really mean?

It’s not just bad grammar.

Why do we Anglicize some names and not others?

A common and dismaying misconception.

Does the English idiom “kiss of death” come from the story of Judas, or from the Sicilian Mafia—or both?

Is the tech term, as in computer hacker, connected with the verb hakn, meaning to chop?

After a friend comes to him with a strange dream, Philologos wonders if the unconscious mind can do Hebrew numerology.