Nostril is from the Old English nos for 'nose' plus thirl 'hole'; thus, pretty logically, 'nose hole'.
Werewolf reflects an Old English word for 'man'.
I realized recently that acorn reflects the Old English ac, meaning 'oak tree'--although the second half of the word has been connected on since early times and I'm not sure where it comes from.
First, people sometimes spell plurals with an apostrophe.
The only plurals that are correctly spelled with apostrophes are some plurals
of letters. Examples: mind your p's and q's, PhD's (although this one
can be spelled without the apostrophe, I think).
I believe that the reason people might be confused about this is just one word: Levi's. People take that to be a plural but it is actually a possessive.
Second: Since we have--evidently acceptable--spellings such as Grammys, Emmys, etc. People forget the old rule for spelling words ending in y which I was taught in school: Change y to i and add -es. Thus pastries, not, as we see sometimes, pastrys (etc.).
Some languages have series of words that are related (related
in meaning and perhaps differing in part of speech) and form a sort of series
in which there is, for example, a vowel change from one word to the next.
This is known in linguistic circles by the German term Ablaut or Ablautsreihe (Ablaut series), and perhaps the best examples are found in German: Koch ('cook'), Küche ('kitchen'), Kuchen ('cake').
I have been trying to collect examples of Ablautsreihe in English and believe I have found a few.
And maybe these (these are less clear):
Berserk comes from Old English (and ultimately Norse) berserkr, meaning 'bear shirt'--i.e., presumably, a shirt made of a bear skin. Or it could be 'bare shirt', meaning of course no shirt at all, bare-chested. Nobody knows which it is.
Jerusalem artichoke (nowadays commonly sold as a "sunchoke"). These are not artichokes nor do they have anything to do with Jerusalem. The word is related to Italian girasole, meaning 'sunflower'. (The Italian word comes from words meaning 'turn' and 'sun'.)
The ac- in the word acorn is the Old English word for 'oak'. 'Oak tree' was ac treo.
Pen, before it meant a writing instrument, meant 'feather'. In French (plume) and German (Feder), the word for 'pen' is still the same as 'feather'.
This is not a word origin but another case where we don't know the correct interpretation, There is in the Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) literature the phrase dæþ se bytere. We don't know if that means 'death the biter' or death the bitter (one). They didn't mark long vowels.
We are all very familiar with prefixes. Many times there seem to be a pair of two opposite prefixes such as pro- and con-; in- and ex-.
Often times the two prefixes that seem to be paired seem to be opposite in meaning. In- and ex- can suggest inside and outside, as in interior and exterior. However, this is one example where you can't push this too far and make it truly general: Intrude and extrude are by no means opposite.
One perhaps amusing if (hopefully) not almost sacrilegious pair might be pro-stitution and con-stitution. Hopefully that example shows that prefixes might sometimes be opposite in meaning but are not always!
The sound /oo/ (I dearly wish I could use a phonetic or phonemic alphabet) can be spelled, in English, in an almost incredible number of ways:
Blue, blew, shoe, lose, cool, fuse, through. Oo is common: loose, booze, choose, moose, goose, noose. Also uCe (where C stands for consonant): accuse, abuse, infuse, allude, intrude, etc.
There is actually some regularity in English spelling--despite all you hear to contrary, here and elsewhere. That was the thread, the principle, in the Spelling textbooks on which I worked in one of my first jobs.
What chaos there is can partly be blamed on Norman scribes who, after the Norman conquest, put some effort into fixing or straightening out English spelling--and only made things worse with their band-aid approach and their frequent failure to properly understand that which they were tampering with.
I wrote elsewhere about what might be called ossified words, that is, words that are used in one particular phrase or expression but cannot be found anywhere else in Modern English. Two examples I have mentioned were the groom part of bridegroom (from an Old English word for 'man'). and tide in the saying time and tide wait for no man (and in yuletide and one or two other words).
Here are some more I'd like to submit: spic and span (maybe not used very much anymore but once the name of a household cleaning product). I understand it's related to brand as in brand new; hence we might say spic and span new.
How about in the nick of time? Nick apparently means something like an 'exact moment'.
How about quick? I think the quick and the dead might be a biblical phrase. Elsewhere the word survives in quicksand, quicklime, and quicksilver, a term for mercury (the Romans called mercury argentum vivum, that is, 'living silver' or, of course, 'quicksilver'.
Cobweb. From an old word coppe meaning 'spider'.
