The word 'mortgage' comes from a French law term that means 'death pledge'.
14
Borat, when supposedly speaking in Kazakh with his partner throughout the film, was actually speaking fluent Hebrew.
5
The word 'mile' is derived from the Latin word for 1,000 - the number of paces it took the average Roman!
6
In Turkish, the bird we call a Turkey is called "Hindi" ("from India"). In India, it's called "Peru." In Arabic, the bird is called "Greek chicken"; in Greek it's called "French chicken"; and in French it's called "Indian chicken." The bird is indigenous to none of these places.
44
The word "clitoris" comes from the Greek word meaning "side of a hill".
51
'⸮' is a punctuation mark that was first proposed in the 1580s to denote sarcasm or irony.
17
Switching letters is called spoonerism. For example, saying "jag of Flapan", instead of "flag of Japan".
2
"Goodbye" came from "God bye" which came from "God be with you."
297