Words from Hell

A Smorgasbord.. A veritable smorgasbord of linguistic delights in this well researched, often amusing and always fascinating book of words, meanings and mash ups. The real meanings of the foulest sounding words, the horrible histories of often everyday language and from the downright inappropriate to the outright sublime. It's all here in well ordered and entertaining fashion. - NetGalley

A well-researched but still easily digestible book about the etymology of some of our most commonly used words. The author thoroughly covers the salacious words expected from a book titled "Words from Hell" and very common words with extremely unexpected origins (see: vanilla, shark, dragon). I appreciate that the author doesn't present the work as just a list of words but provides such great research while also infusing her personality. Favorite quote: "Clitoris: Congratulations, you've found it!" If that doesn't want to make you read this I don't know what will. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this advanced reader copy. - NetGalley

As someone who is fascinated by etymology, this was so fun. It's broken down into a few main chapters that form general categories (for example: swear words, supernatural words, violence words, etc.) and then each chapter is an alphabetical list of many terms and a brief explanation of their origin. Some words have clear histories, and some have multiple theories, and the author did a good job making the difference clear. If you're a word nerd who loves stuffing their brain with little fun facts, you'll definitely enjoy this! (As long as you don't mind reading lots of crude language, because that's literally the topic of the book) Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC! - NetGalley

This is the perfect book to prepare yourself to "Ackchyually..." your friends. Your friends will then hate you and you will no longer have any friends. In short, this is a book to study if you want more alone time. All jokes aside. I found this to be an interesting book where I could discover where the more colorful words in our language came from. I would recommend this to anyone who has an interest in language and writing. - NetGalley