Question: I'm not sure if you know or not but I'm really curios about how every thing got its name

Jenni Rodd answered on 16 Jun 2016:

Great question Cocobean!
So you’re wondering, for example, why we call a dog “dog” and not some other name like “wug”.
The short answer is that we don’t exactly know 🙂
Lots of the words that we use have come from other languages that existed a very long time before modern English. These words tend to change over time. The change in exactly how we pronounce them. So, for example “dog” probably came from the old English word “docga”.
Words also change (a lot) in meaning. So for example the words “tweet” and “tablet” have fairly recently got new meanings to do with technology that didn’t exist when I was your age. Sometimes these new words come about because a particular group of people sit down and decide on it (like the name Twitter), but more often they just develop over time as people find that they need a new word to describe something new. You and your friends might have some specific new words that you use a lot – well if these are useful words then they might catch on and in 10 years time we might all start using them!
So… in short. Words are changing all the time! They evolve in a similar way to animals. Gradually shifting in how we say them and in what they mean. But we’ll never really know how some of words in English came to be in the first place because they have been around for much longer than people have been writing things down. We don’t have very good ‘fossils’ to study for words!