Let's look at two Hebrew words for clown - לֵיצָן leitzan  and מוּקְיוֹן mukion .  Leitzan is the more common of the two, so we'll s...

A reader asked about an Israeli grape juice called Inbalim  ענבלים. I presume this is the brand: He asked why the juice had that name.  I do...

The Hebrew month of Elul אֱלוּל begins this week, so let's look at its etymology. As with the other names of the months in the current H...

Rabbi David Bashevkin (of the enjoyable 18Forty podcast) recently posted on his Substack an essay entitled " The Revival of Hebrew ....

The Hebrew word for "feeding tube" (or more technically a nasogastric or orogastric tube) is זוֹנְדָּה zonda . This is clearly not...

Devarim 8:17-18 includes a well-known passage where the people are warned against attributing their successes to their own talents, instead...

Someone recently asked me if I had written about the root אמן. I thought for sure I had already, but it turned out I only mentioned it very ...

The Hebrew root ברא has three distinct meanings. Two are very familiar, one much less so. One meaning is "to create" and is found ...

Halakha  הֲלָכָה can refer to the system of Jewish law as a whole, or the set of laws dealing with a specific subject. Most etymologies conn...

I was curious about the etymology of Nukhba , the Hamas special forces unit that carried out horrific terrorist attacks on October 7. The ro...

I was curious about the origin of the Israeli slang term fukes  פוּקְס, meaning "stroke of luck," referring to something positive ...

  I have a long list of words to write about. Today I started looking into one of them, and then only later did it turn out that I had alrea...