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

Jess Zafarris is the author of several bestselling books on etymology (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), Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds (Chambers, 2025), and Into the Words: An Etymologist’s Field Guide to Plants, Animals and Nature (Chambers, 2026). She is also a video content creator who has built a devoted social media following of more than 150,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram, and she co-hosts the podcast Words Unravelled, which has more than 150,000 YouTube subscribers along with more than 30,000 daily listeners across podcast platforms. Her blog, UselessEtymology.com, has been educating curious word lovers for more than a decade.

In addition to her books on etymology, she coauthored the book A Miscellany of Weird and Wonderful Facts for Curious Humans Who Have Nothing Better to Do Than Read (You Know Who You Are) (Media Lab Books, 2026), as well as several tabletop RPG adventures and scenarios published in print through Media Lab Books and Parallel Dimension Gaming.

She serves as an adjunct professor in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing department at Emerson College and the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida, teaching courses on writing, multimedia editing, and media business, and she is an Editor-at-Large for Ragan Communications and PR Daily, where she produces major conferences for social media and communications professionals. She has been a featured speaker, panelist, and emcee at events including SXSW EDU, the Writer’s Digest’s Annual Conference, and Rising Phoenix, and she teaches writing- and author-centric courses for a range of universities and online platforms. 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.

In the past, she has held content and audience engagement director roles at Adweek, Writer’s Digest, and Ragan Communications & PR Daily.

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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