It's not our holiday. Yes, the populace here is prone to creeping Americanism, but I swear to Galt that if fireworks weren't being cancelled then Hallowe'en wouldn't be taking over from Guy Fawkes as our early-summer evening out.

Still, you may nonetheless be asking, what in hell is a Hallow anyway? Well, you've come to the right place:

You may have heard that this name is some sort of unholy shortening of the phrase All Hallows’ Eve, which is true, but it only pushes the mystery back further into the mists of the linguistic past, tempting us to ask the question: what, pray tell, is a Hallow?

 That's the end of your good news. For, sadly, a Hallow is nothing to do with ghosts, zombies, or corpses that walk. A Hallow is just a saint.

In Old English, the word was hālga, literally ‘holy one.’ It’s a definite form of the adjective hālig, which gives us Modern English holy.

You know, like 'hallowed ground,' or 'hallowed be thy name.' Less exciting than you thought, right.

It gets more mundane: the suffix '~e'en' is just short for 'evening.' Or to be more precise, "evening is a long form of even: in Old English, the word for ‘evening’ was ǣfen."

Our modern word evening (from Old English ǣfenung) is formed from an old verb to even (Old English ǣfenian), meaning ‘to become evening.’ Evening is just a regular -ing noun formed from a verb, like fighting comes from fight. So, when you think about it, evening means ‘evening-ing.

And when the 'v' is dropped ("a sound change that occurred sporadically throughout the history of English [producing] variant forms o’er and e’er for over and ever") you end up with the name of the Americanised holiday.

Less exciting than you thought, right? Still, no tricks here—I promised you answers, not treats.

Elon Musk announced this week that his A.I. tool Grok would be curating a competitor to online encyclopedia giant Wikipedia called Grokipedia.

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