- Have you ever wondered why a woodchuck is called a woodchuck if it doesn't even chuck wood?

Well, if you play a game of telephone, you know that what the first person says is never the same as the end phrase, sometimes to hilarious effect.

Similarly, words get reshaped and reimagined over time as they travel from speaker to speaker and place to place.

And woodchuck is one of the many words that got to its current form by way of folk etymology.

Let's dive in to what happens when people take an unfamiliar word and transform it into something that feels a bit more familiar, even if it means bending the truth a little or a lot.

I'm Dr. Erica Brozovsky, and this is "Otherwords."

(upbeat music) - [Voiceover] "Otherwords."

Folk etymology is the process by which the form of an unfamiliar or foreign word is adapted to a more familiar form through popular usage.

It also accounts for the unsubstantiated theories about those word and phrase origins.

Basically, people will make a somewhat educated guess about where a word came from based on what it means or sounds like.

Now, the problem is that those guesses are usually wrong, but because they're so convincing and kinda make sense in a roundabout way, they stick around forever, like cockroaches or the word cockroach.

It comes from the Spanish cucaracha.

But for English speakers in the 1620s unfamiliar with Spanish, it sounded a lot like two words they did know, cock and roach.

And while cockroaches have nothing to do with fish or fowl, the name stuck.

Linguistic innovation.

Humans love searching for patterns and making meaning out of things.

We see animals in the clouds and faces everywhere, from wall outlets to bell peppers or capsicums.

So it makes sense that we do the same with words, instinctively trying to fit an unfamiliar word or foreign phrase into what's already in our mental lexicon.

And it can happen on the phonetic, semantic, and morphological level.

Let's start phonetic.

The tongue twister, "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood," is really the wrong question.

Even if they could chuck, they wouldn't.

And the word woodchuck has nothing to do with wood or chucking.

The word is thought to derive from an Algonquin language local to a region where the animal has been found, the Eastern United States.

Some theorized that the Cree word otcheck and the Ojibwa otchig, meaning fisher or marten, which is a completely different weasel-like animal, were difficult for colonists to pronounce.

So approximate syllables were substituted, leading to woodchuck.

Crayfish comes from the middle English crevis, derived from the Anglo-French creveis, emphasis on the vase, and eventually given the aquatic nature of the creature after countless repetition, vase, vase, face, face, face, face, face, fish, face, face, fish, fish, fish, fish, fish, fish, fish, fish, it turned into fish.

Our brains categorize and remember words based on semantics or the word's meaning.

So mapping words to familiar concepts makes us more likely to remember and use them.

A common semantic folk etymology is that the words female and male have similar origins.

Turns out, not even in the slightest.

Female is from the old French femelle, via Latin femella, a diminutive of femina, meaning woman.

In the 12th century, femelle was borrowed into English, and as time progressed, the spelling was altered based on the presumed connection with male.

It's easier to see that the words female and male are not related when you look at other words that share an etymological history.

After all, we say feminine, not femasculine.

Another one is the word hangnail.

It's that little piece of skin that painfully hangs off your nail.

Self-explanatory, right?

Actually, hangnail comes from the old English angnaegl, meaning corn on your foot.

The first half ang means painful, and naegl means iron nail because the corns kinda look like the head of a nail.

Turns out, it isn't so straightforward.

Morphological folk etymology happens when the word structure is changed towards a familiar pattern.

Chaise lounge is a folk etymologization of the French chaise longue, meaning long chair.

Lounge has the same letters as long, fits the English spelling and pronunciation and is what you do on the chair, so it made sense that the switch happened.

And the word for diagonal from something, kitty corner or catty corner, was originally cater corner with cater as the Anglicism of the French cat, meaning four.

When cater became obsolete, well, an English word of similar sound came in to fill the gap and has no relation to cats.

So don't put kitty in a corner.

To be clear, folk etymology doesn't just happen in English.

Cuernavaca, the capital of Mexico's Morelos state, was originally called Cuauhnahuac in Nahuatl, meaning near woods.

Spanish speakers unfamiliar with the indigenous language reshaped it to Cuernavaca, which means cow horn, and the name stuck, despite the city being near woods and not particularly related to cows nor horns.

And in old French, the verb savoir, meaning to know, at one point began to be spelled scavoir with a cedilla, because people mistakenly thought it came from the Latin word for to know scire.

In fact, spelling leads to another subset of folk etymology, backronyms, which occur when acronyms are created to fit an existing word.

Have you ever heard that the word tip means to ensure promptness?

That piece of folk etymology goes back over a century where a 1909 book alleges it comes from a mid 18th century custom.

A review of the book that came out the same year said, "We deprecate the careless repetition of popular etymologies, such as tip," so they knew it was up early on.

Another catchy backronym is that NEWS stands for North, East, West, South, since the newspapers cover things coming from all different directions, but it's simpler than that.

News covers the stuff that's new.

And FYI, Wifi is not an acronym and has never stood for wireless fidelity.

According to Phil Belanger who presided over the naming, it has no meaning.

They just really needed a snappier name than IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence.

For centuries, we've invented stories to explain the world around us, and similarly, we invent stories about words.

It's a way of making sense of the unfamiliar, even if that means inadvertently bending the truth.

Before widespread literacy, language was passed down by word of mouth.

So like the game of telephone, mishearings and misunderstandings were inevitable.

So the next time you hear a strange, too good to be true story about a word's origin, don't just take it at face value.

Dig a little deeper and you just might uncover a fascinating tale of folk etymology at work.