Tadly-OodlyĪn old Cornish word meaning “slightly drunk.” 4. ![]() TachythanatousĪn old medical term describing anything that kills quickly, such as venom or poison, Come across anything tachythanatous, and you’ll likely need a tachyiater-a medication or medical practitioner that heals quickly. ![]() In the 17th century, there was also an expression tace is Latin for candle-which isn’t true, but the phrase was used to mean “keep what we’re talking about secret.” How the phrase came about is unclear, but one theory is that because the candle represents light, keeping something tace means keeping it “in the dark” another theory claims that throwing a candle onto a theatrical stage was once used as a signal to stop the show and close the curtain immediately. Tace (pronounced “ tay-see”) means “ be silent” in Latin, but is used in English both as a verb and as an exclamation used to silence someone. Thanks to its appearance in a number of high-frequency words like the, this, that, then, and to, you can expect as much as 16 percent of all the words on any page of English text to be T-words, while around one in every 20 of the words in a standard dictionary will be listed under T-including the 40 terrific T-words below. T is now one of the English language’s most frequently used letters, and on average it will account for just under 10 percent of all the language you’ll use. And it’s from tau, via Latin, that T has ended up in English. Over time, this X steadily straightened, becoming more of a + shape, before the Ancient Greeks knocked the top off to create their T-shaped letter tau. Its earliest ancestor was probably an X-shaped Egyptian hieroglyph, which in turn became the X-shaped Phoenician letter taw. ![]() As odd as it might sound, the letter T was originally X-shaped.
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