Anu Garg, the creator of the A Word a Day e-mail newsletter and the founder of Word smith.org, shares his new anthology of “entertaining etymology,” a collection of entertaining and enlightening origins of more than 300 words, names and phrases.

Question: Tell me a bit about Wordsmith and A-Word-a-Day and what inspired you. How does a computer software person/programmer get into etymology?

Answer: Wordsmith.org is an online community of word lovers. It has more than 600,000 people in some 200 countries. A.Word.A.Day is a daily newsletter where I explore words and their origins.

I came to the United States to study computer science in graduate school. While I was in school, the Web came along. I figured it would be a good way to share my love of words with others and I founded Wordsmith.org. It started out as a hobby, and I kept going, even after I graduated and began working as a software engineer.

I ran Wordsmith.org in my spare time, but eventually it grew so much that I felt I was working two jobs, except that I loved both. So I had to make a decision and words won over the software.

I had been always interested in words as far as I can recall, and then I became curious to know where words come from, who makes them up, and what makes a word. When I saw that words in languages as different as Hindi and English had similar words, and discovered that they all came from the same root, I realize that words are a symbol of our common humanity.

As an example, consider two words, the Sanskrit “guru” and the English “gravity.” Two words, from two different languages, spoken by people on two continents, having different skin colors, different religions —but it turns out both the words derived from the same root. They both refer to heaviness: a “guru” is someone who’s heavy, laden with knowledge and wisdom, and “gravity” is what makes things feel heavy.

Q: What’s the focus of your latest book, “The Dord, the Diglot, and An Avocado Or Two?”

A: It’s a collection of stories about unusual words, and of everyday words with unusual origins. There are words such as petrichor which describes the pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell (petrichor: from Greek petros: stone, + ichor: the fluid that is supposed to flow in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology).

And it also features etymologies such as for the word window. A window is, literally, the wind’s eye. Look at how a window opens to let the wind in and it’ll be clear why it was so named in Old Norse, from which it moved into English.

Q: How did you conduct your research for this book?

A: I used many resources in my research, but foremost among them was the Oxford English Dictionary, what I call a lexicon. The good thing about this dictionary is that it never throws any word away, no matter how unused a word becomes.

Q: You’ve spoken at a variety of venues for a myriad of reasons — from Bumbershoot to writers’ conferences to a Mensa group to a spelling bee. Why are you asked to speak at these events, and what do you talk about?

A: Over the course of running Wordsmith.org for the last 14 years I have seen that all people have an interest in words and languages. They have their opinions, they have questions, and they’re eager to learn more. My talks revolve around words and languages. When I speak to a group of writers, I talk about the best use of words in making writing come alive.

When I speak to a group of children, I help them see words not as some lifeless collection of letters on a page, but as living, breathing things.

Words are born, they grow, they change and even die.

Sometimes I try to make my speeches inspirational. I talk about my life and that anything is possible: that someone born in rural India could go on to become a software engineer in a major research lab (AT&T Labs) in the U.S.; someone for whom English is a second language can go on to write books about that language.

Q: Where did you grow up?

A: I was born and grew up in India. My father’s job for the state government required him to move often, so we led a peripatetic life. I grew up in villages where there was no TV, phone, refrigerator, etc, not even electricity. But it was an idyllic life and I wouldn’t change it for anything. ... Well, perhaps I’d add a library. And yes, there were no swimming pools either while I was growing up.

I learned swimming after coming to the U.S., and took to it, well, like a fish to water.

I took up unicycling as a challenge when I heard someone say that it was very hard to learn. I found that it’s no harder to learn than a bicycle.

I can juggle and I can unicycle, but I still have to go a long way before I can juggle while unicycling.