Encarta prides itself on being a good one stop source of knowledge for families. And as one of the Microsoft products it has been used quite a bit, but never really caught on. As such, I never really used it and when doing searches I can’t think of a time that the answer was on it.
But that said, I got sent an interesting tidbit that came from there I thought I’d share a little of.
The 26 letters of the English alphabet can yield billions of combination, yet we still bump into words that appear to be reincarnations. Sometimes we recycle an old word for new purposes, sometimes we coin a word not knowing that a word with the same spelling existed earlier. I often hear from people who believe they have just coined a catchy word: e-dress for e-mail address, until I ask them to Google it. And sometimes words that may look alike actually have different origins.
With the start of the Harry Potter mania in 1997, a new word entered the popular culture: muggle. In the Potterworld, a muggle is an ordinary person, one with no magical powers. By extension, we use the word to indicate someone lacking a particular skill; one, who doesn’t have a special ability, a novice, one outside a field, one uninitiated in a field. Before J.K. Rowling made “muggle” a household word, it has had nearly as many lives as a black cat. The Oxford English Dictionary shows the first citation for this word is from the 13th century, and defines it as “a tail resembling that of a fish.” Since then it has been used to describe a young woman, a sweetheart and later marijuana. Over the years many writers (including Lewis Carroll) have used the word Muggle as a name for their characters, it’s just that with the popularity of the “Harry Potter” books it became better known.
When did the words google, yahoo and pixilated first appear in English? The last few decades? Here are the years of the first known citations for these words: google (1907), yahoo (1726) and pixilated (1848). Welcome back to the future.
Even I didn’t realize the age of some of those words. And now you do too. 
Tags: History, Interesting, Knowledge, words
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