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Topic: I Love to Write Day

Today we celebrate I Love to Write Day, a day established, according to its founder, in the hope of getting everyone, everywhere, to sit down and write something today.

Easier said than done, perhaps, but there's plenty to write home about when it comes to the history and meaning of the verb write.

The etymology of write—which is one of the oldest verbs in our lexicon—has linguistic kin in words meaning "to scratch; draw; engrave; write; tear; wound;" and "to write on parchment."

Not surprisingly, the earliest meaning of write in English was "to draw or form by or as if by scoring or incising a surface." In addition to the familiar sense that started us off today—the sense of write meaning "to set down in writing"—plenty of other meanings of write also developed over the centuries. Write can mean "ordain" or "fate" (as in, it is so written); and it can mean "to make evident or obvious" (as when guilt was written all over his face). Write can mean "to introduce (information) into the storage device or medium of a computer" (as when something is written to disk) and it can mean sell (as when a stock option is written).

We'll close with a nod to the well-established phrase that's all she wrote. Although that wording dates back at least as long as the second world war, etymologists are stumped as to how that phrase came to mean "that's all there is."

Questions or comments? Write us at wftw@aol.com Production and research support for Word for the Wise comes from Merriam-Webster, publisher of language reference books and Web sites including Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.