How Certain Words In English That Don’t Seem to Be Related Actually Come From the Same Source

In their wonderfully informative whiteboard series for Mental Floss , linguist Arika Okrent and illustrator Sean O’Neill verbally and visually give examples of words that don’t seem like they would come from the same source, but actually do. This is the converse to their previous video in which they looked at words that seem to be related but actually aren’t.

Sometimes words we might not expect to have anything in common historically, even though they sound kind of alike, do in fact go back to the exact same source.

Lori Dorn
Lori Dorn

Lori is a Laughing Squid Contributing Editor based in New York City who has been writing blog posts for over a decade. She also enjoys making jewelry, playing guitar, taking photos and mixing craft cocktails.