Thursday, April 28, 2016

A-to-Z Challenge: X

Well, it’s the hardest day of the challenge. X is always a tough letter, and I used up my brilliant plan of looking at the origins of the letter last year. So what did I pick?


Xerox! Yes, it’s a proper name, but there’s actually more to it than that. Xerox was trademarked in 1952, but the name came from the word xerography. That word showed up in 1948—yes, that recently. The word for photocopying paper was a mix of the word photography and the Greek word xeros, which means dry. Apparently, because Xeroxing was a form of copying without using liquid, the inventors decided to tack on the word dry to it. But in Greek because that’s fancier.

Sources

8 comments:

  1. Greek is always fancier ;) I shall try and remember this one for those lulls in conversation where I can blind my companions with some random knowledge :)
    Tasha
    Tasha's Thinkings | Wittegen Press | FB3X (AC)

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  2. I don't know what we all did before the Xerox machine. How did we manage to function? Great post!

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  3. It makes total sense, but I honestly had no idea that Xerox came from anything other than a company name. It was just something I never really thought about. Cool fun fact!

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  4. Well, we need more X words so I'm glad they went with this. ;)

    ~Ninja Minion Patricia Lynne aka Patricia Josephine~
    Story Dam
    Patricia Lynne, Indie Author

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  5. Ah, so that does have a root. I thought it was just a company name.

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  6. I did not know that. I guess modern words are more interesting. At least, we know from whence they came.

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  7. That's a cool one. And of course, we made the proper name into a verb.

    Susan Says

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  8. That I did not know. I thought it was just a trademark...

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