Mitchell First is a scholar of Jewish history who, like me, has a fascination with the origin of Hebrew words and phrases. He has published...

When I was a young kid, I visited Spain. It was my first overseas trip, and I really enjoyed it. We drove all over the southern part of the ...

 A while back , I discussed Hebrew words that begin with the letters קצ. In that list I wrote: קצה - cut, from it we have קצין, captain, jud...

The last post was discussing the word dfus  דפוס - "printing," and how it derives from the Greek  typos, meaning "type."...

As I've written before, I'm a major podcast listener, and am always looking for podcasts that discuss language, particularly the Heb...

The English word tripe has two definitions: 1 ...

In Pharaoh's famous dream, he was standing by the river,  "when out of the Nile there came up seven cows, handsome and sturdy, and ...

I recently came across an early draft of the speech my son prepared for his bar mitzva , ten years ago this month. It was rather nostalgic t...

The Hebrew word for jam or jelly , ribah ריבה, was coined by the father of modern Hebrew, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. On that, everyone agrees. How...

I was recently asked if there is a connection between the English word "cameo" and the Hebrew word קמיע kamea  - "amulet....

As I mentioned in an earlier post, FeedBurner, the service that provided email subscriptions to Balashon, will be ending that service in a f...

I'm still working on getting the new email subscription service working, so I need to do some additional test posts. To make this a litt...

Just a little maintenance here. Feedburner, the service that provided email subscriptions to Balashon, will be ending that service in a few ...

The 929 Project , which covers a chapter of the Tanakh every day over a 3.5 year cycle, will be starting the book of Mishlei (Proverbs) soon...

I grew up in San Francisco, and anyone from there will recognize the name Sutro.  Sutro Tower is giant radio and TV antenna that can be see...

The word "minaret", meaning the tower of a mosque, is cognate with the Hebrew menorah  מנורה. From the Online Etymology Dictionary...

There are many theories as to the etymology of the word "mafia." One of the leading ones says it comes from the Arabic marfud  -...

A Spanish word that has entered English slang is loco  - "crazy." The Online Etymology Dictionary provides the following origin: ...

The word for gerbil , the small rodent, has Semitic origins : 1849, gerbile , from French gerbille , from Modern Latin Gerbillus , the genus...

According to Klein , the Hebrew preposition etzel  אצל means "by the side of, beside, near." Milon Morfix (a more recent resource...