You may have noticed that you’re back in school right now. Hopefully you will have moved up a grade, and that means that a new designation can be applied to you, be it freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior. You’ve used these terms many times in conversation, spent years identifying with some them, but have you ever wondered where those words came from? The hidden meanings of such ubiquitous utterances?

Well, etymology (the study of word origins) is here to the rescue! Check out these fascinating back-stories of important high school phrases below; you’ll be surprised!

Freshman- Obviously this is a combination of “fresh” and “man”, since ninth graders are “fresh” or “inexperienced” at the high; it gets interesting if you trace both words really far back. Ultimately, “fresh” is from the Proto-Indo-European root preyskos, which meant “unsalted” and “man” possibly can be traced to another Proto-Indo-European word, men, which meant “mind”. So, theoretically and etymologically, a freshman is an “unsalted mind”, which is surprisingly appropriate.

Sophomore- By far the most interesting origin of the bunch. Coined in the late seventeenth century, sophomore is a borrowing from Greek, where it’s composed of two parts: sophos, meaning “wise”, and moros, meaning “idiotic”. That’s right; sophomore is an oxymoron! It’s meant to describe the quality of teenagers to be growing in intelligence but still make incredibly stupid decisions sometimes.

Junior- The word itself means “youngest”, so I don’t understand why this means 11^th grade and not 9^th grade. Indeed, it traces to Latin juvenior, or “younger”, from Proto-Indo-European heu, which mainly meant “vital force” (as in youth) but had a second definition of “eternity”, so if your junior year seems like it’s taking too long, you know why. Usage of the word junior has been dropping steadily since the 1930s, compared to a sharp incline with…

Senior- Formed as a counterpart to junior, the term derives from Latin senex, “old”, from Proto-Indo-European sen (also “old”), making this the only term on this list with zero semantic change. However, through that root sen, we can connect senior to many other words, including senate, senility, señorita, sir, surly, and the name Shannon.

That covers the grades, but here are some bonus terms for those of you still reading this article:

School- Through Latin and then Old English, this word comes to us from Greek skhole, which literally meant “leisure time”. This total about-face occurred because in leisure time, Greek people would have “lively discussions”, so the meaning became that, then “educational discussions”, and then simply “educational place”. But, hey, now there’s etymological proof that school is play, not work.

Class- Far from a “group of students”, when this took the form of Latin classis, it meant an “army division”, proving that our JROTC is the only real class in our school! Interest levels are furthered when you consider that classis is from calare, a “call to arms”, which goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root kele, “to shout”. So don’t shout in class, because it’s etymologically redundant.

Period- You’re only going around between periods, but one theory traces the etymology of this word to Greek periodos, “a going around”, a combination of peri- (meaning “around”) and hodos, which originally meant “journey”. Curiously, that prefix peri- once meant “forward”, showing another etymological shift in the complete opposite direction.