ABOUT WORDIGINS

You use thousands of them every day, but how often do you ponder their origins? Words, the cells in the lifeblood of the English language. Wordigins (short for word origins) allows you to test your lexical knowledge with more than 1,500 words spanning eight categories including arts, food, money, and sports.

Modern English itself is less than 700 years old. It emerged in its standardized form with the arrival of the printing press in the 1400s from the dialect spoken in the East Midlands region of England, home of Oxford and Cambridge universities. English mutated further with its spread to the Americas and beyond; its story is one of conquest and defeat, colonization and commerce. Wordigins uses American English.