In the beginning of Shemot, the Israelites were forced to build arei miskenot ערי מסכנות - "storage cities" (Shemot 1:11). The ...

I hadn't really noticed before, but the Hebrew word for Greece, יוון yavan , is related to the name of one of the ancient Greek tribes, ...

This week, in Bereshit 37:3, we read about Yosef and his ketonet passim כתונת פסים. We've already discussed how ketonet means "c...

Last week, when leaving work in Jerusalem, a friend and I spotted an animal that looked like this (I wish we had a chance to take a picture ...

A word that in some ways is equivalent to olam עולם - "world" is teva טבע - "nature". The word is very common in Hebr...

In the prayers of Rosh HaShana, we say hayom harat olam היום הרת עולם. Artscroll translates this phrase as "today is the birth(day) o...

In the previous post , we mentioned se'ora שעורה - "barley", so this is a good opportunity to finish the discussion of the fi...

In the previous post , I mentioned how achuz אחוז means "percent", while shiur שיעור means "percentage". However, you ...

While discussing machoz , we mentioned Klein's theory that it is a derivative of the root אחז. This is a common root in Biblical Hebrew,...

In our last post , we showed how the Hebrew word for port, namel נמל, comes from Greek (and perhaps earlier from Egyptian.) But how could i...

We've discussed boats and planes - now lets see where they dock. The Hebrew word for "port" or "harbor" is namel ...

Previously we discussed two words for ships - sefina and oniya . However, unlike that pair, where both words have biblical origin, and in m...

Sailing vessels have been in the news quite a bit recently. There are at least three different words used in Hebrew for ships and boats - on...

The word tichon תיכון is of biblical origin, but the precise biblical usage isn't found much today. It means "middle", from t...

For anyone who is looking for a linguistic connection to Parashat Hashavua, I've indexed and labeled all the posts by parasha. Look for ...

The volcano is in the news again , and its cloud may even be getting close to Israel. But are we close to an etymological connection between...

The relationship between the United States and Israel is in the news often lately, so I thought I'd take a look at the Hebrew term for ...

Tomatoes are so ubiquitous in Israeli cuisine that you might think that the Hebrew word for them, agvania עגבניה, is as old as the language...