Wordspotter's Guide

Olivia Swarthout is a German-American author from Montana, USA who currently resides in London. A lifelong aficionado for all things strange and obscure, Olivia's work centres around unearthing the most unexpected and entertaining stories from the annals of human history. In so doing, she hopes to help her audience connect with the distant past and share in her sense of kinship with its inhabitants - who were, after all, not so different from us. Olivia is also the author of Weird Medieval Guys, a love letter to the creativity, hilarity, and timeless appeal of art from the Middle Ages.Olivia is a name that arose as a variation of the Latin Oliva, meaning "olive", popularised in the English-speaking world by the heroine of William Shakespeare's play, Twelfth Night. Swarthout is a surname of Middle Dutch origin that roughly translates to "Black Forest." It probably originated near a Frisian forest of the same name, but neither the woods nor their inhabitants are around to say for sure.

Immensely readable, full of learning and very entertaining. Olivia Swarthout shows how words are a source of stories and of knowledge across time and across human society. With energy, humour and learning she demonstrates that words have inner lives, often surprising, wayward and ambiguous. This is an enjoyable and readable book that will teach readers something about the language we use every day