Q. What, if anything, is the difference between vim and vigor?

A. Vim means having or showing enthusiastic energy in doing or making something. It is an old-fashioned word and it is not used very much on its own although it does show up in print from time to time. The following quote is from a 1985 issue of Time magazine: "At 65, Leah Adler still has enough vim to run a kosher restaurant in West Los Angeles with her second husband Bernie while moonlighting as an extra in the Amazing Stories episode directed by Clint Eastwood."

Vim is usually used in the phrase "vim and vigor," as in the following sentence: "He's remarkably full of vim and vigor for someone in his mid-eighties."

Vigor is commonly used today in many different contexts. It implies active good health and robustness or, as the definition in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary describes it, an "intensity of action or force." Our Unabridged Dictionary includes the following examples: "the physical and intellectual vigor and toughness which the trial lawyer needs" (Robert Hale); "the vigor and inventiveness that American business has shown in many other fields" (Defense Against Recession); "burst into leaf with exceptional vigor" (American Guide Series: Maryland).

Q. My neighbor and I share my herb garden and we also share a curiosity about why we call the plant cilantro, but call the seed coriander.

A. The word coriander has been part of the English language since the 14th century, putting it in the company of such linguistic mainstays as across, action, and aunt. It comes from the Middle English word coriander, which was borrowed from Anglo-French and traces back to the Latin coriandrum, and eventually to the Greek koriandron or koriannon.

Cilantro, on the other hand, entered English via the Spanish word for coriander in the early 20th century. The Spanish word traces back to an alteration of the Latin coriandrum, and therefore has effectively the same ancient pedigree as coriander.

So why did English speakers choose to use the Spanish cilantro for the leaves of an herb whose seeds they'd been calling by another name for hundreds of years? The answer to that question probably has more to do with culinary trends than with etymology.

The earliest evidence we have of the word cilantro in English is from 1903. However, according to the Lexis-Nexis database of U.S. Newspapers and Wires, which dates back more than 35 years, the word was not commonly used in American English until the late 1980s, when Hispanic dishes started to make more regular appearances in U.S. homes. Recipes for these dishes referred to cilantro, among such other unfamiliar words as fajita and tomatillo; since the readers of these recipes were not likely to know what the word cilantro referred to, the term was almost always glossed when these recipes were first printed in U.S. publications, either as Chinese parsley, fresh coriander, or even as coriander. In fact, both the New York Times and the Washington Post referred to "fresh coriander leaves," "fresh coriander," and "sprigs of coriander" years before the word cilantro appeared on their pages. But when cilantro kept turning up in recipe after recipe, it became clear that the readership knew what the word was referring to, and thus cilantro stood. That the functions and flavors of coriander and cilantro are so different has I'm sure helped the two words maintain their distinct positions in the lexicon.

Q. I am trying to find the word that refers to the fancy line that one places underneath a handwritten signature. I had stumbled across it some years ago, but I have forgotten what the word is. It is the type of line you will see under John Hancock's name. And, by the way, how does one go about finding such a word from the definition?

A. The word in question is paraph. Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines paraph in this sense as "a flourish at the end of a signature sometimes used as a sort of rude safeguard against forgery."

Paraph came into the English language in the 14th century from the Middle French paraffe and was originally synonymous with paragraph. The Oxford English Dictionary provides a citation from 1584 as the earliest known written use of paraph in the sense of a flourish beneath a signature. The word is now largely used only in a historical context.

In the case of paraph, we were able to find the word with a search on Merriam-Webster Unabridged using "signature" as a definition keyword. In some instances, particularly if the word in question is obsolete and/or extremely rare, a bit more effort (and some lucky guesswork) may be required, but most of the time a keyword search of the Unabridged Dictionary will turn up the word.