Accozzaglia is one of those wonderful words that, to my ears, sounds exactly like the meaning it is meant to convey. Denoting “a strange, messy and often unpleasant assortment of things or people”, there are numerous translations we can fall back on including jumble, mix, mishmash or hodgepodge (when talking about things) or rabble and …
In a world filled with diverse cultures and individuals, it’s all too common for biases and prejudices to arise before we even have a chance to truly understand each other. A person with these negative characteristics can be described as prevenuto in Italian. The adjective prevenuto is in its masculine form, indicated by its ending …
Today, we’re going to delve into the intriguing world of a little Italian word that plays a significant rule in our everyday lives: pomello (knob / pommel). After all, we wouldn’t be able to open many doors without it! Pomello is the diminutive form of pomo which, along with the far more commonly used mela, …
Today’s Italian word is soqquadro (masculine, plural: soqquadri), which can translate in a number of ways in English including upside-down, disarray, mess, shambles, cluttered and topsy-turvy, just to name a few! It comes from the expression sotto quadro (lit. under square), which was used by builders to refer to off-kilter or crooked structural elements that …
The Italian word squillo is a masculine noun that generally translates as ring (or “ringing sound”) but also buzz or jingle depending on the device producing the sound. It derives from the verb squillare which means, you guessed it, “to ring”. It is normally used in reference to the sound made by a telephone (telefono), …
Even if you know little to no Italian, it doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to figure out that equinozio means equinox. Both words refer to the biannual date at which the sun crosses the celestial equator, resulting in a day and night of approximately equal length all over the planet. It derives …