In Bereshit 11, the Torah provides an etymology for the name of the city of בבל Bavel (Babylon in English, the capital of Babylonia). It is ...

There is no question that the English word "behemoth", referring to a huge creature, comes from the Hebrew word behemot בהמות. Bu...

A podcast I enjoy, The History of English Podcast, had an episode a while back called " The Lion Kings " where the host discussed ...

I just read something interesting in Klein's entry for the Hebrew word sheled שלד: PBH [Post-Biblical Hebrew] skeleton.  Syriac של...

As you may have noticed, I haven't written any posts in Balashon in over a year. While I have not abandoned Balashon, I have put my acti...

I've planned on writing a post about charoset חרוסת since 2006. But every time I started, the etymology offered by Klein seemed so obvi...

Pesach is coming up and we will be reading from the haggada הגדה. What is the connection between haggada and aggada אגדה - the stories fo...

In the post about achsania , I mentioned the word for hotel - malon מלון. I didn't discuss the etymology there, so let's take a loo...

A reader asked about the origin of the word daysa דייסה - "porridge, gruel." He said that "the word looks and sounds not muc...

We are approaching the holiday of Purim, where the megillah is read in most cities on the 14th of Adar, but in walled cities it is read on t...

A while back we talked about herut חרות - "freedom". But what about the similar word chofshi חפשי - "free" and the rel...

A friend recently asked me a question about metathesis - the rearranging of letters in a word. Let's take a quick look at an example in ...

Arnold Schwarzenegger has been in the news recently, so I thought I'd take a look at the first word of his catchphrase, " Hasta la ...

It was frosty here this weekend, so I got to thinking - is there any connection between the homographs קרח kerach - "ice" and ker...

The biblical word ketoret קטרת means "smoke, odor of sacrifice, incense." According to Klein, all of the forms of the verb קטר (m...

In Hebrew, the word seret סרט means "ribbon". Let's take a look at the history of the word, and some possible relatives. As...

There is a connection between the Hebrew word for face - פרצוף partzuf and the Yiddish word frum , meaning "religiously observant, pio...

I found an old note of mine that said I should write about the word achsania - the Hebrew word for "hostel." Since the note was w...

Here's a connection between two words that you might not have known. I don't have too much to add, but I found it really interesting...

The Hebrew word geves גבס and the English word gypsum are closely related. Let's see how. In Hebrew today, you'll most likely hea...