Back in December, I started a series of words, but never finished them. Do you remember the series? I'll give you a hint ... I was dis...

I'd like to add some sort of logo or graphic to Balashon, that I could use to represent the site, and use to dress up the site a bit. I ...

(This post is explaining why this site is not written in Hebrew). לפעמים שואלים אותי, "אם אתה כותב על לשון העברית, למה האתר לא בעבר...

Degel דגל is an interesting word. Ask any Israeli - or any Hebrew speaker for that matter - and they will tell you that it means "flag...

Israel celebrates its Independence Day this week - Yom HaAtzamaut. And in recent years, one of the most widespread symbols of the day, perha...

This week Israel observes Yom HaShoah - יום השואה, whose full name is Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laGvura יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה. This is ...

One of the columnists who inspired this site is Philologos of The Forward . He writes about Jewish words and phrases, and specifically has ...

Since I started this site, I've found that Shir HaShirim שיר השירים (which we'll be reading tomorrow, the seventh day of Pesach) ha...

One of the first words people often learn in Hebrew is ken כן - "yes". However, that meaning only began in the Middle Ages. In th...

I had thought of writing a post on mesubin over two years ago - when I started this site. We are all familiar with the fourth question at t...

The last of the Hebrew spices I'll be discussing (for now) is karkom כרכום. It too appears in Shir HaShirim (only once 4:14), and enter...

Just moments ago, Balashon got its 100,000th visitor. Someone (running Firefox on Linux) from Washington University in St. Louis searched fo...

We've discussed some of the other spices in the incense - today we'll discuss נרד - nerd (no, not the cousin of geek ). As with k...

In the post on aloe , we quoted the theory that the Hebrew ahal אהל derives from the Sanskrit aguruh. This theory seems to be fairly widely...

The Akkadian word for aloe was sibaru , and the related Syriac word was צברא. From these more ancient language the word entered Arabic as s...

[This post is dedicated to the memory of Isaac Meyers, a regular commenter on this site. יהי זכרו ברוך.] In the previous post, we discusse...