Un jour de plus que je me lève avec une coqueluche de fumeur, un jour de plus que je me dis il faut que je me sèvre du tabagisme. A tel point que je me suis posé la question - pourquoi dit-on "tabagisme", et non "tabacisme", puisque le mot semble venir de "tabac" ?

Un peu de recherche m'a livré des résultats surprenants : La discussions est toujours ouverte entre les étymologistes, mais il est le plus probable que les deux mots ne soient pas étymologiquement liés.

"Tabagisme" vient de "tabagie", qui est originalement un mot de la langue canadienne algonquin et qui voulait dire "festin"". Le sens du mot s'est ensuite transformé dans le sens moderne d'"estaminet pour les fumeurs" justement par son assonance avec le mot "tabac".

Le français a acquis le mot "tabac" de l'espagnol, qui l'a emprunté à l'arawak, une langue qui se parlait à Cuba et sur l'île d'Hispaniola. (Notons, que le site anglo...

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The longest sentence in the English language containing phonetically the same word:

Buffalo buffallo bufallo Buphalo bufallow Buffalough buffalow buphalough.

(Sorry for all the spelling mistakes, but this word is just asking for it...)

Explanation:
A Buffalo buffalo is a type of buffalo
"to buffalo" is a verb meaning 'intimidate'
And if you still do not get it, insert the little word "whom" between the current third and fourth words from the back.

In Dutch, "saffie" is a colloquial way to refer to a cigaret.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, "saffie" equally meant "cigar", and was a shortening of "saffiaantje". At that time the most luxurious of cigars were rolled with Morocco leather, called "saffiaan", or saffian, even in English.

Saffie, coming from saffiaan, entered Dutch via the Russian сафьян [safyan] which goes back to the Persian sätiyān, which means goatskinleather.

Another well-travelled word thus.

The Italian word "razzia" comes from the Arabic "ghazwah", originally "dessert raid", which then, by extension, came to mean any battle or war, and finally became synonymous with "djihad", or "holy war".
It is also related to Ghazi, "war leader", an honorific military title under the Ottoman empire.

Another day feeling crapulous? I just had a leaf through Nicolas Ostler's latest book "Ad infinitum, a biography of Latin" and found out the following quirky fact: "crapulence" came to us, via Latin, from the Etruscan for "hangover".

Another word which Latin handed over to us, and which has travelled quite a bit since then, is what once was the Etruscan for "landlord", or "shopkeeper", caupō. It became English cheap (with a palatalisation), German, "to buy", kaufen (with a consonant shift according to Grimm's law), Russian купить (kupit'), same sense as the German, and Finnish (via Germanic) kaupa, "deal, trade, commerce", as well as kaupunki, "city".