About this site
We think words deserve a second look
Most of us use tens of thousands of words a week without ever asking where they came from. icanspeak.it is a small, ad-light project built for the moments you do ask — and for the rabbit holes that follow.
What we actually do here
We write short, sourced deep dives into individual words and language patterns: where a word was coined, how it drifted between languages, why two unrelated tongues sometimes converge on the same idea, and why "false friends" trip up even fluent speakers. Alongside the blog, theword cards are a lighter format — a wall of bite-sized origin stories you can flip through in a few minutes.
Why etymology, specifically
Etymology is one of the few fields where history, migration, trade, colonization, and plain human gossip all leave physical fingerprints you can still read today, just by looking closely at a word. A single word like "ketchup" carries a trade route across three continents. A word like "nostalgia" carries a 17th-century medical diagnosis. Once you start noticing this, it's hard to stop.
What this site isn't
We're not a dictionary, a grammar course, or a language-learning app — there are better tools for that already. We're closer to a magazine: opinionated, occasionally speculative where the historical record is thin (we say so when it is), and written for curiosity rather than fluency.
A note on the domain
icanspeak.it started life as a language-training consultancy for professionals in Germany. That project's site is still online — we didn't want that work to disappear when the domain changed direction — and you can find it preserved aticanspeak.it/former-site.