Grammar Girl here. I'm Inion Fogarty, and today we're going to talk about moguls and the word a while.

Last week, when I was working on the segment about words you'll hear during the Winter Olympics,

I realized that there was enough to say about the word mogul that I could do a whole piece on it.

First, there's the winter sports meaning. But then there's the completely unrelated, powerful

person meaning, as in MediaMogel or Movie movie mogul. Same spelling, totally different origins.

So today, we'll look at both of them, plus a couple of bonus meanings I found along the way.

If you've ever been on a steep ski slope and found yourself bouncing over rounded mounds of packed snow,

ranging in size from a throw pillow

to a giant beanbag chair, but harder. You've experienced moguls. Skiers actually cause the

moguls themselves as they carve their turns, pushing the snow into mounds along the way. And once

a mogul starts to form, it tends to get bigger as more

skiers wind their way around it, deepening the troughs and packing more snow onto the bump.

Sources don't completely agree on the origin of the name for this kind of mogul. Edam Online says

it's probably from a Scandinavian source, comparing it to a Norwegian

dialect word meaning a heap or a mound. But most other sources point to a southern German

dialect word meaning mound or hillock. Regardless of the origin, though, the idea is the same. It comes from a

word meaning a small hill or mound.

And that's essentially what a ski mogul is. As for when the word entered English, the earliest

citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1953, where a writer for the Albuquerque

journal described watching skiers turning and jumping over the moguls.

The writer then explains that moguls are bumps, which suggests the word was still pretty new.

Mogul skiing eventually became a competitive sport, and the first major mogul competition took place in 1971.

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