Relating to the Greek root word naus (meaning “ship”) are the terms naval and nautical.  What most people don’t know is that our term for stomach distress accompanied with the urge to vomit is also related, since in ancient times this was primarily caused by seasickness. Nonetheless, today we still have 

      (a)   (6).

In French, jeu parti means literally “divided game,” usually involving two people with different opinions or viewpoints. These French words were squished together and borrowed into Middle English (1300s), usually dealing with a chess match where making one move could be very dangerous to a player. This word is (a)   (8 letters).

The Greek and Latin word for the hardest known substance, whether applied to a legendary stone or an actual substance like steel, was adamas, from which we devised our word “adamant,” which means having extremely strong feelings about something. But there is another term that comes from this word adamant, still meaning the strongest natural substance known to man. This word is (a)   (7).

In 1848, there was a wave of women’s rights movement that culminated in a massive convention in New York. One lady, a writer and editor, was very adamant about women’s clothing of the time, complaining that the long hoopskirts would drag on the ground and collect dirt and other unsanitary stuff. So she took to wearing baggy pants with elastic waistbands instead, and this started a massive trend. Today, these baggy pants have shortened and evolved into a type of underwear usually only associated with old ladies, but the legacy of Amelia Jenks (a)   (7) goes on.

In Ancient Rome, this was the name for a long round fish that would supposedly deliver a terrible electric shock to anyone who touched it. In the early 1800s, the American inventor Robert Fulton developed an underwater projectile designed to explode when it came into contact with a ship, and he named this device after the fish: (a)   (7).

The French say adieu. The Spanish say adios. Both of these are actually wishes to the departing person, putting him or her in the care of God (dios, dieu). The same thing happens in English, where the old-fashioned phrase “God be with ye” has been shortened to (a)   (7).

The Arabic makhzan denotes a storehouse. Middle French borrowed this term in the 14th century and English in turn borrowed it in the 16th, but it underwent changes in meanings, depending on the thing that was being stored. This is why today the word can mean both a thing that holds the bullets in a gun or a storehouse of written information and images: (a)   (8).

The Italian word for fly is mosca, and when the Spanish invented a new weapon that propelled a little metal ball through the air, the weapon was aptly named after the fly. With some alterations to its spelling, we have the Modern English version:  ______ (6). Its linguistic relative is a word for those pesky, buzzing, bloodsucking insects, literally meaning “small fly”: 

________ (8). (Answer either blank to get this correct).

(a)  

In the spring of 1929 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made its first presentation of annual awards for excellence in motion pictures, giving awards for the year’s best. The award, a 10-inch gold-plated man with his arms resting on the handle of a sword in front of him, was known as “the statuette.” Margaret Herrick, a librarian at the Academy, on seeing one of the statues, claimed, “It reminds me of my Uncle  (a)   (5).” A Hollywood columnist overheard her and erroneously published this as the official name of the statue. It went viral...just like footage of Will Smith and Chris Rock.

In July of 1946 atomic bomb tests were carried out on (a)   (6), one of the Marshall Islands. During the same time, a bombshell of another sort hit the beaches of the French Riviera, this one in the fashion industry. It is not known who coined the term, but this type of bathing suit is as popular today as it ever was.

In earlier ages, the preservation of food presented a greater problem than it does today, especially on long journeys. One expedient was to preserve flat cakes of bread by baking them twice in order to dry them out. In Middle French, the term bes means “twice,” and the term cuit means “cooked.” Once translated into English, the meaning evolved to be any variety of crisp, dry baked products, and a (a)   (7) is still the term the British use for cookie or cracker, though we Americans only use it to call those warm things Granny makes for breakfast.

A technique used by the Roman army to keep mutinous recruits and slaves in line was to select one-tenth of the men by lot and execute them, thereby encouraging the other nine-tenths to follow orders. The Latin prefix deci means “ten,” and this is still the prefix on our modern  

(a)   (8), which means “to ruin or destroy”.

When Europeans settled in the Americas, they made many mistakes in naming the new animals they subsequently encountered. One of the most famous is the name for a type of fowl that they thought was one of the sort exported from (a)   (6) (which in that time was synonymous with anywhere in the Ottoman Empire), but the erroneously-named bird still graces our dinner tables.

The Delaware Indian word for “wolf” is P’tuksīt. This was anthologized by the English as  (a)   (6), which became the name of a village in southeastern New York, and this place became a beautiful piece of land that only very wealthy people eventually inhabited. In this wealthy community, young men began wearing dress jackets with tails, and the new style of men’s formal dress was invented, along with the name for the type of suit.

Originally the Aztecs called this fruit ahucatl after their word for “testicle.” This is may be partly due to the fruit's resemblance to a testicle, but also because it was supposedly believed to be an aphrodisiac. The conquering Spanish, when they brought the fruit back to Spain, couldn’t pronounce “ahucatl,” so they renamed it their term for advocate, which to them sounded close enough: (a)   (7).

In Italian, (a)    (8) means “small sweets,” signifying the candy that was thrown during weddings and celebrations. When times were tough, candy was replaced by little bits of paper, and the name for this remains today. 

The Old Norse had a word for “a wild warrior or champion.” Such warriors wore hides of bears, which explains the probable origin bera, “bear,” and serkr, “shirt, coat.” These warriors became frenzied in battle, howling like animals, foaming at the mouth, and biting the edges of their iron shields, and we have borrowed this adjective term to describe any insane behavior: 

(a)   (7).

The Germanic noun blodan means “blood.” Bloedsian therefore literally means “to consecrate with blood, sprinkle with blood.” We have simplified this word to the Modern English  (a)   (5), and we use it much more frivolously, as in a letter closing or after a sneeze.

Originally, the Old French-to-English word (a)   (9) meant “hood” or “headgear,” basically something that covered and protected people from the elements. So the word didn’t stray far in becoming the word for a person who protected other people, from say, dangerous characters at a high school dance, or on a field trip.

Dent-de-lioun, the Middle English form of (a)   (9), makes it easy to see that our word is a borrowing of an Old French term meaning “tooth of the lion,” referring to the white color and sharply indented leaves of the plant.

No one really knows if a (a)   (9) is named for the color of its excrement or because it was thought to steal butter. It is hard to imagine that anyone ever noticed the color of its excrement or believed the winged insect capable of such theft. The first suggestion rests on the fact that an early Dutch name for the was boterschijte. The second is based on an old belief that the insect was really a larcenous witch in disguise.

The original meaning of the word (a)   (6), was, in the decorous phrasing of the Oxford English Dictionary, “to break wind without noise.” During the 19th century this relative of fart took on a related but more respectable sense, “to hiss, as does a piece of fireworks,” or to “die out or fail.”

A guiser was once a person who was a mummer or masquerader; you know this from the word disguise. However, guiser made a slight pronunciation shift and became associated with “a weird character; a strangely-acting person.” Usually this person’s weirdness came from his being old, hence the term (a)   (6).

Why does the word fox begin with f but its female counterpart, 

(a)   (5), begin with v? The answer lies in English dialects. In the speech of Devon, Somerset, and Cornwall, counties of southern England, words that begin with the voiceless fricative sounds (f) and (s) are pronounced instead with voicing, as (v) and (z). This word was formed by a slight change in the root vowel of fox and the addition of a suffix –e or –en.

The Latin potio, meant “the act of drinking, a drink, or a draft, as of a medicine.” Our word potion, which retains the sense “dose,” passed through Old French (pocion) on its way to Middle English (pocion). But the Latin word had also passed through Vulgar Latin into Old French in the different form (a)   (6). This word meant “beverage,” “liquid dose,” and it carried with it a dangerous connotation.