I never thought I’d become passionate about a new sport later on in life, but that’s exactly what’s happened to me since I joined our local badminton club. What began as a single weekly game has transformed into 3-4 sessions each week, each lasting 2-3 hours. While I am far from the most skilled player …
Yesterday, my son was over the moon when a real-life firefighter came to our house to check the fire alarms. And today, he’s off to the fire station with his class to see the fire engines up close! Could life get any more exciting for a young boy? In Italian, the word for firefighter is …
It doesn’t matter whether you’re learning a brand new language or looking to enhance your grasp of your native one, having a dictionary at hand is always useful for looking up new words and expanding your vocabolario (vocabulary). In Italian, this invaluable resource is called a dizionario, a word that sounds quite similar to its …
The piece of bedroom furniture where we store household linen, bed linen and clothes is known as a comò in Italian. It is an adaptation of the French word commode, the piece of furniture containing a concealed chamber pot. comò chest of drawers Comò is a masculine noun, and it is also invariable, meaning that …
We’ve already covered mountains—montagne—in a previous article, but what about their smaller, humbler cousins? In Italian, the word for hill is collina. collina hill According to Devoto-Oli, the feminine noun collina comes from Late Latin collina, which is the feminine form of the adjective derived from collis (meaning “hill” in Latin). A possible synonym for …
The word for a person (usually a king or ruler) who holds absolute power, and exercises it in a cruel or oppressive way, is despota in Italian. It comes from the Greek despótēs which was the word for the “master of the house”. In ancient Italian, the word ended in an -o rather than an …