I love learning about the English language and how weird & screwed up it is. I get a Daily Word from the Alpha Dictionary, and today's word was granularity. Down, towards the bottom, where they discuss where the word came from (it's roots), come to find out that grain, granule, corn, kernel, acorn and acre are all related! Here's what they had to say:
Word History: The Latin noun granum "grain" became grain as it made its way down French. English, in one of its schizophrenic moods, borrowed the noun from French and the adjective paired with it from the Latin, using the diminutive granulum "little grain". We adapted this same word to use by itself as granule "very small grain". The original root, grên- underwent metathesis in English (the R switched places with the vowel), giving us corn and, with a suffix, kernel. Old English speakers thought that the word acorn was a combination of ac, ak, ake "oak" + corn and spelled this word ake-corn in the past. That makes sense but acorn is a derivation of acre when it meant "field" and is unrelated to today's word.
