Mystery Words

One of the stranger little hidden corners of English is that small group of words whose origins are unknown. Scholars have been very clever about tracking down the etymology of 99.999% of English words. But the words whose origins remain a mystery constitute an odd group. The current Merriam-Webster Collegiate dictionary has around 600 such mystery words. Many of them are archaic, no longer in use. Many are slang. But several are common, long-standing words which we all know and use.

Out of that 600, we selected 50 for you to find in this word search:

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