Most people consider the guts of an animal to be its least palatable component, but you would never guess this from the apparent delight that English speakers have taken in inventing or borrowing names for these edible parts of an animal’s digestive system. These names include tharm, guts, bowels, and entrails; inmeat, innards, intestines, and viscera; trillibub, trollibags, tripe, and mundungus; slumgullion, numbles, garbage, and giblets. Each of these words originated in one of three ways. Tharm and guts, for example, arose as descriptions of what happens to food after it enters the alimentary canal: specifically tharm derives from an Indo-European source meaning to go through, while guts derives from an Old English word meaning to pour. Some of the other words originated from the resemblance of the intestines to something else: bowels, for example, derives from the Latin botellus, meaning small sausage, while viscera, a Latin word, appears to have developed from an Indo-European source meaning winding. Still other words originated from the location of the organs they referred to: entrails and intestines both derive from Latin words meaning within, while innards derives from the native English inwards; similarly, in meat arose as a name for the meat in the abdominal cavity. Many of the other words in the long list given above have such mysterious origins that little can be said about them. Trollibags, for instance, sounds like a British Barbie accessory, but in fact is simply a variation of trillibub, whose origin is unknown. Likewise, tripe, despite being a familiar culinary term, derives from no known source; mundungus derives from mondongo, the Spanish word for tripe, but beyond that nothing is known about the word. All these words, incidentally, are still in use with the exception of mundungus and tharm.