Books • Editing • Podcasting• Journalism • Social Video • Audience Strategy • Content Direction • Events

Jess Zafarris is the author of several bestselling books on word origins, including Once Upon a Word: A Word-Origin Dictionary for Kids (Rockridge Press, 2020), Words from Hell: Unearthing the Darkest Secrets of English Etymology (Chambers, 2023), and Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds (Chambers, 2025).

She has two forthcoming titles in 2026: A Miscellany of Weird & Wonderful Facts (Macmillan, 2026), coauthored with Shannon Miller, and Into the Words: An Etymologist’s Field Guide to Plants, Animals, and Nature (Chambers, 2026).

She is a video content creator who has built a devoted social media following of more than 130K followers on TikTok and Instagram, and she co-hosts the video and audio podcast Words Unravelled, which has more than 135,000 YouTube subscribers along with more than 25,000 daily listeners and viewers across platforms. Her blog, UselessEtymology.com, has been educating curious word lovers for more than a decade.

She serves as an adjunct professor in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing department at Emerson College and is an Editor-at-Large for Ragan Communications and PR Daily. She has presented sessions at SXSW EDU and the Writer’s Digest’s Annual Conference, as well as dozens of bookstores and libraries, she teaches writing- and author-centric courses for a range of universities and online platforms, and she has developed word-origin content for Dictionary.com. She and her work have been quoted, featured, and mentioned in The New York Times, NPR, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, Reader’s Digest, and Harper’s Magazine, and she has appeared on BBC World Service Radio, NPR, and Boston Public Radio.

Jess has more than 13 years of experience in digital media, having served as a content, editorial, and audience director at organizations including Writer’s Digest, Adweek, and Ragan Communications. She has ghostwritten thought leadership pieces for advertising industry executives that have appeared in Fast Company and The New York Times.

Tickled by the validation of sharing her knowledge to the mostly interested public, she also helps other people do so, and as a result she has programmed and hosted tracks and moderated keynote firesides at events including Brandweek, Social Media Week, Ragan’s Future of Communications Conference, and PR Daily’s Social Media Conference.

She even dabbles in fiction, having written a sweary scary horror story on then-Twitter that blew up and turned into an eBook published by Hachette.

If you would like Jess to do, write, or say a thing, she’s always looking for more things to do, write, and say. She is still learning how to pronounce the words “no, thank you, I don’t have time for that,” so if you ask, she will probably say “yes.”

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