iPhone Vocabulary Fail: Objects of Antiquity Edition!
In this post on Damn You, Auto Correct!, someone is unintentionally referring to tiles used in mosaics:
According to Wikipedia, a tessera (plural: tesserae) is “an individual tile in a mosaic, usually formed in the shape of a cube.”
Tesserae is also the term for dice used in ancient Rome (makes sense — they’re cubes!) or for the layers of calcification on sharks’ otherwise cartilaginous jaws and backbones (um, interesting).
And now, this post:
A garderobe is a chamber for storing clothes, a wardrobe; or the clothes stored in such a chamber; or simply any private chamber.
The word is Middle English from Old French and really does come from the roots for “guarding” your “robes.” (So does the word “wardrobe,” actually.)