18 Truly Surprising Word Origins

Warning: You will never look at lemurs the same way again. This one’s for linguaphiles and lemurphobes alike.

1 Fizzle
1
Back in the 17th century when people didn’t have cell phones and essentially had nothing to do except talk about farting, “Fizzle” meant to break wind without making a noise. The word comes from the Old English fisting, which means farting, and it’s totally related to our word “Feisty,” which, weird.