Why is September the ninth month? Who is Tuesday named after? What does the “hallow” in Halloween mean? Word Drift answers small questions about words, names and time in long, slow episodes made for falling asleep. Each page below gives the short answer first, then the full episode, chapters and transcript.
Episodes
Who named time? The strange names of days, months, weeks and hours4:00:05
Why is Halloween called Halloween?1:35:22
How did people sleep before modern beds?1:35:10
Why does a week have seven days?1:02:52
How did people wake up before alarm clocks?1:30:11
What do AM and PM mean, and why does twelve come twice?1:01:36
Why is autumn also called fall?1:17:24
Why do place names outlive the languages that made them?1:22:34
What happened to the letters English lost?1:20:30
Where do everyday English phrases come from?1:17:25
Why is the K in knife silent?1:16:25
Why do colors have such strange names?1:04:02
Why do punctuation marks look the way they do?1:01:02
Why is the alphabet in this order?50:12
Why is September called the seventh month when it is the ninth?49:57
Why do the days of the week have such strange names?1:06:18
Why does English spelling make almost no sense?1:13:12