1168. This week, we look at the word "leprechaun" and its surprisingly wild origin story involving shoemaking, ancient Rome, and wolf-men. Then we look at the word "equinox": its Chaucer connection, the newer word "equilux," and why the first point of Aries is actually in Pisces now (and headed for Aquarius).
1168. This week, we look at the word "leprechaun" and its surprisingly wild origin story involving shoemaking, ancient Rome, and wolf-men. Then we look at the word "equinox": its Chaucer connection, the newer word "equilux," and why the first point of Aries is actually in Pisces now (and headed for Aquarius).
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| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and today, we're going to talk about the leprechauns and the equinox.
by Mignon Fogarty
It's the time of year for shamrocks, green beer, and tiny bearded men guarding pots of gold. So today we're going to look at the word "leprechaun" — and I have to tell you, the origin story is wilder than you might expect. It involves shoemaking, ancient Rome, wolf-men, and more than one competing theory.
Today, a leprechaun is a mischievous Irish elf that will take you to his hidden treasure if you can catch him — a little guy in green with buckled shoes and a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
But that's actually a relatively modern image, and the word itself has a long and tangled history. In older Irish tradition, leprechauns were associated with water, not just rainbows, and nobody was dressing them in green. In fact, in the late 1800s, William Butler Yeats, the poet and folklorist, classified leprechauns as "solitary fairies" and specifically said they wore red jackets — green, he said, was for the other "trooping fairies."Â
So, the first theory of how they got the name "leprechaun" has been backfilled from that modern story because their fortune may come from being the cobbler to the stars — mending the shoes of other fairies who dance so much they're constantly in need of repairs. Or it could be that the leprechauns run around so much themselves they're constantly wearing out their own shoes. But either way, the best time to catch leprechauns is when they are working on a shoe because that's when they're in one place, and you can find them by the tap-tap-tap of their hammer. And — this is the important part — for whatever reason, leprechauns are almost always shown working on just one shoe, not a pair of shoes.Â
"BrĂłg" means "shoe" in Irish, and according to the website Irish Myths, Douglas Hyde — the first president of Ireland who was also a (how cool is this?!) linguist and folklorist — promoted the idea that the name "leprechaun" comes from "leith brog," meaning "half-brogue" or "half-shoe" because it sounds similar and fits the image of a shoemaker working on one shoe.Â
But … Etymonline says this is probably a folk etymology — meaning people reshaped the word's form to match the folklore rather than the other way around.Â
So the "one-shoemaker" story is fun, but most scholars now treat it as a back-formation rather than a genuine origin.Â
So let's go now to the explanation you would have found in modern dictionaries for many, many years: This story is that "leprechaun" goes back to the Old Irish word "luchorpán," which meant "small body." The "lú" part means "little" or "small," and "chorp" part means "body," (from the same place we get the word "corpus," which you often hear me use to mean a body of writing). The "-án" at the end ("luchorpán") is a diminutive suffix — so you have a word that's essentially "small body" with an extra "little" tacked on for good measure. We really mean it; they're tiny!
It's a tidy explanation, and you'll still often find it in dictionaries, but now there's also a newish competing theory that takes the story in a very different direction.
In 2012, Jacopo Bisagni, a researcher at the University of Galway, argued that "leprechaun" doesn't come from "small body" at all — that instead, it comes from the Latin word "Luperci."
The "Luperci" were groups of young Roman priests who participated in a festival called Lupercalia, held every February 15th that was likely connected to the god Lupercus and wolves. ("Lupus" is Latin for "wolf.") So this was one of Rome's oldest and most famous rituals, and these young Roman men would run through the streets … naked … bestowing blessings of fertility on women by hitting them with pieces of animal skins. So how on earth do you get from this weird Roman festival to tiny Irish cobblers?
Well, you have to think back to what I said about leprechauns originally being associated with water.Â
First, in the 5th century, St. Augustine wrote that the rampaging Roman men were inspired by earlier Greek stories of men who transformed themselves into wolves by swimming through a lake in Arcadia.Â
Then, centuries later, Irish scholars reading St. Augustine's account got a little confused. They took that idea of “men swimming to become wolves” and turned it into a legend about an ancient magical race that survived the Biblical flood by swimming to Ireland. In medieval Irish legends, the leprechauns — or "little Luperci" — still lived under water, but eventually the connection to wolves fell away, and then even later, the major connection to water fell away too.
So the idea is that the Romans who ran through the streets and the Greek swimming werewolves accidentally merged in the minds of medieval scholars to create a magical water-loving race, which eventually morphed into our modern leprechauns.
Today, you'll find both modern origin stories — the "small body" story and the "Luperci" story — alongside each other at the Oxford English Dictionary, Etymonline, and The American Heritage Dictionary.Â
It's a story that isn't settled yet, but since the Irish are famous storytellers, I know they won't have any problem weaving new tales and continuing to delight children, tourists, and more with tales of the leprechauns.
Sources
Bisagni, Jacopo. "Leprechaun: a new etymology." Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 64 (December 2012): 46–84. Publication record, University of Galway. (accessed February 25, 2026). https://research.universityofgalway.ie/en/publications/leprechaun-a-new-etymology-3/.
Harper, Douglas. "leprechaun (n.)." Online Etymology Dictionary. (accessed February 25, 2026) . https://www.etymonline.com/word/leprechaun.
"Leprechaun." Collins English Dictionary. (accessed February 25, 2026) . https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/leprechaun.
"leprechaun." The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th ed. (accessed February 25, 2026). https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=leprechaun.
"Leprechaun." Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Accessed (accessed February 25, 2026). https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/leprechaun.
"Leprechaun." Wikipedia. Accessed (accessed February 25, 2026). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprechaun.
Mair, Victor. "Another Illusion Shattered: 'leprechaun' not native Irish." Language Log, September 6, 2019. (accessed February 25, 2026). https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=44289.
"The Etymology of Leprechaun." Irish Myths. March 5, 2024. (accessed February 25, 2026). https://irishmyths.com/2024/03/04/leprechaun-etymology/.
University of Cambridge. "Lost Irish words rediscovered, including the word for 'oozes pus'." University of Cambridge, August 30, 2019. (accessed February 25, 2026). https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/lost-irish-words-rediscovered-including-the-word-for-oozes-pus.
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by Mignon Fogarty
The days are getting longer in the northern hemisphere — which is definitely improving my mood — and the spring equinox is right around the corner on March 20. So today we're going to look at the word "equinox" because it literally tells you what it means, but it's slightly lying to you, and leads to some other fun seasonal words.
Our old friend Geoffrey Chaucer was the first person to write down the word "equinox" around the year 1400 — so Middle English.Â
But he didn't use it in the Canterbury Tales. He used it in a less well-known book he wrote about a device called an astrolabe, a tool for doing things like measuring the position of the stars and planets and telling time. It was one of the first technical manuals written in English instead of Latin, and he said he wrote that way because he wanted his 10-year-old son to be able to read it.
The word "equinox" does go back to Latin, though, and the two parts mean "equal" and "night."Â
And "equal night" is a nice, tidy description — except that it's not actually true. Day and night are almost equally long on the equinox, but because of some complications about the way we measure sunrise and sunset, the day is actually a little bit longer than the night.Â
Also, the equinox is technically a moment, not the whole day. NASA defines it as the instant when the sun's center crosses the plane of Earth's equator. For 2026, that instant will be on March 20 at 14:46 Greenwich Mean Time in London or 10:46 a.m. in New York. (And if you're remembering last week's show and wondering why I didn't call the time in London "UTC time," well, I thought Greenwich Mean Time just sounded nicer. Greenwich Mean Time. It's beautiful.)
And one more thing before we move on. Before English had the Latin import "equinox," Old English speakers had their own word for it: "efnniht," which meant nearly the same thing: "even-night."Â
Now, I never thought about it before, but Merriam-Webster points out that it seems kind of weird that the names for this point in the year focus on the night instead of the day. People are more likely to be excited that the days are getting longer, so you'd think the names would be more likely to celebrate the length of the day.
It has to do with ancient astronomers' fixation on the stars, but it turns out that in modern times, we do have a word that celebrates the day: "equilux," which means "equal light."
This word actually is used to describe the day when daylight and darkness are truly the same length, which typically happens a few days before or after the equinox, depending on which equinox we're talking about because there's one in September too.Â
The word "equilux" has been around in engineering circles since the early 1900s, but people only started using it to describe equal day and equal night in the 1980s, so it's much newer than "equinox."
Next, you'll often hear the March equinox called the "vernal equinox," so let's look at that word. "Vernal" came into English in the 1530s, and it goes back to a Latin word that meant "spring." It's the same root that gives us pasta "primavera," which gets its name from being filled with springtime vegetables.Â
Of course, calling it the spring equinox or even the vernal equinox only makes sense if you're in the Northern Hemisphere. In Australia or Argentina, March means autumn. That's why some sources now prefer the more hemisphere-neutral name "March equinox" — it sounds less poetic, but it's also less confusing for a global audience.
And thinking more globally, one of the world's oldest continuously celebrated holidays is tied to the March equinox: "Nowruz," which is the Persian New Year. Its roots go back thousands of years ago to Zoroastrianism, and the word itself breaks down into two parts: "now" means "new" and "ruz" means "day." So Nowruz simply means "New Day."
Finally, here's a fun misnomer to pair with "equinox." If you're trying to navigate the old fashioned way — by looking at the sky — the March equinox is tied to something called the "first point of Aries," a reference point that essentially marks the starting line for mapping the sky. NASA uses this term in its reference systems documentation, for example.
The problem is that this point isn't actually in the constellation Aries anymore. When the system was first created around 2,000 years ago, the March equinox did fall at the beginning of Aries. But because of precession — the very slow wobble of Earth's axis — the point has drifted westward, and it's now in Pisces. But the name has stuck as a traditional landmark, even if the stars have moved on!
And it's still drifting. Eventually, the first point of Aries will slide out of Pisces and into Aquarius. If you're now humming "The Age of Aquarius" by the 5th Dimension, you're not wrong — that 1960s song is literally about this astronomical phenomenon and the idea that the precession of the equinoxes is slowly carrying us into the age of Aquarius. Although astronomers do say it's a few centuries away.
So to sum up, we have "equinox" (equal night — but the day is actually a few minutes longer), and we have the "first point of Aries" (which is actually in Pisces). It's almost enough to make you wonder if daylight saving time was invented to distract us from the truth.Â
Harper, Douglas. "Equinox." Online Etymology Dictionary. (accessed March 8, 2026). https://www.etymonline.com/word/equinox.Â
Harper, Douglas. "Solstice." Online Etymology Dictionary. (accessed March 8, 2026). https://www.etymonline.com/word/solstice.Â
Harper, Douglas. "Vernal." Online Etymology Dictionary. (accessed March 8, 2026). https://www.etymonline.com/word/vernal.Â
"Equinox." Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. (accessed March 8, 2026).https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/equinox.Â
"What Does Equinox Mean?" Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/what-is-the-equinox. (accessed March 8, 2026)
"Solstice." Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. (accessed March 8, 2026).https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/solstice.Â
"Equinox." Dictionary.com. (accessed March 8, 2026). https://www.dictionary.com/browse/equinox.Â
"Length of Day and Night at the Equinoxes." U.S. Naval Observatory. (accessed March 8, 2026). https://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/equinoxes.Â
"Embracing the Equinox." NASA Science. (accessed March 8, 2026). https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/skywatching/night-sky-network/embracing-the-equinox/.Â
"March Equinox 2026." Time and Date. (accessed March 8, 2026). https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/march-equinox.html.
"Earth from Orbit: Vernal Equinox." NOAA NESDIS. (accessed March 8, 2026). https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news/earth-orbit-vernal-equinox.Â
"Equinox." Wikipedia. (accessed March 8, 2026). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equinox.Â
"Solstice." Wikipedia. (accessed March 8, 2026). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solstice.Â
"March Equinox." Wikipedia. (accessed March 8, 2026). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_equinox.Â
"Nowruz." Encyclopædia Britannica. (accessed March 8, 2026). https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nowruz.Â
"International Nowruz Day." United Nations. (accessed March 8, 2026). https://www.un.org/en/observances/international-nowruz-day.Â
"Chapter 2: Reference Systems." NASA Science. (accessed March 8, 2026). https://science.nasa.gov/learn/basics-of-space-flight/chapter2-2/.Â
"Vernal." Oxford English Dictionary. (accessed March 8, 2026). https://www.oed.com/dictionary/vernal_adj.Â
Finally, instead of a familect this week, I have the winner of the National Grammar Day haiku contest:
I'm Morgan Kohler, and this is my haiku about my favorite punctuation mark:
semi-colon, please;
let’s continue this moment;
it lives between us
Thank you, Morgan. That is wonderful, and congratulations!
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to all our Grammarpaloozian supporters on Patreon and beyond. You can sign up to support the show and get ad-free episodes every week at patreon.com/grammargirl.
And thanks to Maram Elnagheeb; Morgan Christianson; Holly Hutchings; Nat Hoopes; Dan Feierabend; and Rebekah Sebastian, who always misspells "restaurant" the first time.Â
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.Â
That's all. Thanks for listening!