How It Started … How It’s Going
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Monday, August 3, 2026 · The Origins Desk
🚨 MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING 🚨
Today's Origins Quiz answers — all ten of them, plus the bonus word — are below. If you haven't played yet, go do that first. This post isn't going anywhere.
Still with us? Okay. Scroll at your own risk — we've left some buffer so nothing spoils by accident.
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Somewhere below is a frugal 18th-century finance minister who accidentally got a whole art form named after him out of spite.
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Fun fact to fill the space: IKEA's flat-pack furniture names aren't random either — sofas get Swedish place names, rugs get Danish place names, and children's products get animal names or adjectives. Somewhere there's a person whose entire job is naming bookshelves.
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One more beat.
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The bonus word: SILHOUETTE
Étienne de Silhouette was France's finance minister for all of eight months in 1759, appointed during the Seven Years' War to fix a brutal budget crisis. His fix was brutal too — steep new taxes and slashed pensions, aimed even at the nobility — and the public hated him for it. Anything seen as cut-rate or austere got mockingly labeled "à la Silhouette," and that included the cheap paper-cutout shadow portraits people were turning to as a budget alternative to painted portraiture. The minister was gone within the year; the cut-price portraits kept his name forever. (One counter-theory holds he actually loved making these cutouts himself — but the "cheapskate" story is the one that stuck, fittingly.)
1. SYNCHRONICITY
The Police named their 1983 album, and Sting named the whole record's thematic arc, after Carl Jung's 1952 concept of synchronicity) — "meaningful coincidence" between events with no causal link between them, laid out in Jung's book *Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle*. It's the band's best-selling album, which is either a coincidence or exactly the kind of thing Jung was talking about.
2. IKEA
IKEA is an acronym: Ingvar Kamprad (the founder), Elmtaryd (the family farm he grew up on), and Agunnaryd (the nearest village in Sweden). Kamprad started the company in 1943 at age 17, originally selling pens and wallets by mail order — furniture, and the now-famous naming scheme, came later.
3. LANA DEL REY
Born Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, Lana Del Rey tried out a few stage names first — Lizzy Grant, May Jailer, even Sparkle Jump Rope Queen — before landing on Lana Del Rey in 2010. The name blends actress Lana Turner (Old Hollywood glamour) with the Ford Del Rey (a distinctly un-glamorous 1960s–80s sedan), though Del Rey has also said it was inspired by the feel of speaking Spanish with friends in Miami. Reportedly her management had a hand in finalizing it too — a rare stage name with a whole committee behind it.
4. HADOOP
Hadoop, the open-source framework that became the backbone of big data processing, is named after a stuffed yellow toy elephant belonging to co-creator Doug Cutting's son. The kid actually coined the word "Hadoop" himself as a toddler — it doesn't mean anything, which Cutting liked, since it made a short, easy-to-pronounce, not-already-trademarked name. Low bar, cleared by a two-year-old.
5. ODOMETER
Odometer comes straight from Greek: *hodos* ("path" or "way") + *metron* ("measure"). Same root as "method" and "episode," if you're keeping track of your Greek roots the way an odometer keeps track of your miles.
6. ULAANBAATAR
Mongolia's capital has changed names several times, but its current one, Ulaanbaatar — "Red Hero" — dates to 1924, honoring Damdin Sükhbaatar, who led the 1921 revolution that, with Soviet backing, ended Chinese occupation and set up Mongolia's Communist government. The "red" isn't subtle about which side he fought for.
7. EL SALVADOR
The only country in the world named directly after Jesus Christ. In 1525, conquistador Pedro de Alvarado's forces founded a settlement they called San Salvador — "Holy Savior" — later formalized as *Provincia De Nuestro Señor Jesucristo, El Salvador Del Mundo* ("Province of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior of the World"). Over time it got shortened to just El Salvador. Efficient editing, by 16th-century colonial-naming standards.
8. TRANSYLVANIA
Transylvania's name is straightforward Latin geography: *trans* ("across" or "beyond") + *silva* ("forest") — "the land beyond the forest," describing its position relative to the wooded Carpathian mountains as seen from Hungary and Western Europe. No vampires in the etymology. That part came later, courtesy of a 19th-century Irish novelist who never actually visited.
9. TRINIDAD
Christopher Columbus reportedly vowed, before setting out on his third voyage in 1498, that he'd name the first land he sighted after the Holy Trinity. When his ships approached the island, the first thing his crew spotted was a cluster of three hills — still called the Trinity Hills today — which locked in the name Trinidad, Spanish for "trinity." A vow kept by pure geographic coincidence, or maybe just very convenient timing.
10. EPSON
Before it was Epson, the company was Shinshu Seiki, a Seiko subsidiary that built the EP-101 in 1968 — the world's first electronic mini-printer, developed out of timing equipment Seiko made for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. In 1975, the company branded its next generation of printers "Epson" — literally "son of EP," the successor to the EP-101. The company later took the name for itself entirely.
That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for ten more — and if you knew the El Salvador one off the top of your head, we have questions for you.