If you’re feeling woozy, you might want to check to see if you’ve caught a virus, at least that’s what the etymology suggests. The word woozy, an American English colloquialism first recorded in 1897, seems to be an alternation of oozy “muddy”. There are in fact two separate words ooze, one meaning “mud, slime” and the other “to flow, leak out slowly”, the second from the Proto-Indo-European root *wes- meaning “wet”, and the first, from which woozy seems to come, from the root *weis- meaning “to flow”, and from this root probably comes the Latin word virus meaning “poison”, which was the original sense of the English word virus in the 14th century before it developed it’s modern sense related to infectious diseases over the 18th and 19th centuries.
The #ConnectedAtBirth #etymology of the week is VIRUS/WOOZY #wotd #virus #woozy
