How It Started … How It’s Going
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Tuesday, August 4, 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 solve today's puzzle first. This post will still be here when you get back.
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Somewhere below, two brothers who once ran the same shoe factory arrange to be buried as far apart as possible.
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Fun fact to fill the space: Audi isn't the only brand born from a translation trick — swapping languages to dodge a trademark, flatter a founder, or just sound better. Most invented brand names (Kodak, Verizon, Rolex) are made-up words chosen for how they sound. Audi went the opposite way: a real word, just borrowed from a language its founder didn't get to keep his name in.
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One more beat.
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The bonus word: AHURA MAZDA
Ahura Mazda is the supreme deity of Zoroastrianism, the god of wisdom and light. The Strait of Hormuz — the narrow, heavily watched waterway between Iran and Oman — is widely believed to carry his name through nearly three thousand years of sound changes: Ahura Mazda became Ohrmazd/Hormoz in Middle Persian, then Hormuz. Six Sasanian kings were even named Hormizd after him. It's not the only theory on the table — some linguists trace it instead to a local word for "place of dates," and one legend credits Ifra Hormizd, mother of a 4th-century Persian king — but the Ahura Mazda connection is the one most historians favor.
1. ADIDAS
Adidas is a contraction of its founder's name: Adolf "Adi" Dassler. His older brother Rudolf was his business partner for over two decades at their shared shoe factory in Herzogenaurach, Germany — until a bitter falling-out in the late 1940s split the company down the middle. Rudolf started his own shoe brand, eventually named Puma); Adi kept the original factory and renamed it Adidas. The brothers built their new factories on opposite banks of the same small river running through town, and legend has it the town divided into "Adidas" and "Puma" halves for generations. Both brothers reportedly asked to be buried as far apart as possible in the local cemetery — a rivalry that outlived them both.
2. HALSEY
Singer Halsey), born Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, built her stage name from two sources at once: it's an anagram of "Ashley," and it's also the name of a Halsey Street subway station in Brooklyn — a neighborhood tied to an early relationship and to where she first started writing music seriously. One stage name, two coincidences stacked on top of each other.
3. UTRECHT
The Dutch city of Utrecht started life as a Roman fort called Traiectum, Latin for "a crossing" — this one over the Rhine. Traiectum shortened in Dutch to "Trecht," and the "U" (from Old Dutch "uut," meaning downriver) got tacked on to distinguish this crossing from another Trecht further upstream — the one that grew into Maastricht. Same river, same root word, opposite ends of it.
4. RHODODENDRON
Rhododendron comes straight from Greek: rhodon ("rose") + dendron ("tree") — literally "rose tree." There's a twist, though: the original Greek word didn't refer to the shrub we call rhododendron today at all — it described oleander. The name got reassigned to a different, unrelated plant with similarly showy flowers centuries later, and the "wrong" name stuck.
5. AUDI
Audi exists because its founder, August Horch, got sued over his own name. After a falling-out with his first company (which, confusingly, was also called Horch), a court ruled he could no longer use "Horch" for a new car brand — even though it was literally his surname. So he translated it instead: "horch" means "listen!" in German, and a business partner's son reportedly suggested the Latin equivalent, "audi." The four-rings badge on your neighbor's SUV is, etymologically, a lawsuit workaround.
6. MILK DUDS
Milk Duds were invented in Chicago in 1928 by Edwin Holloway of F. Hoffman & Co., who set out to make a perfectly round chocolate-covered caramel. He couldn't do it — the shape kept coming out lopsided — so instead of hiding the flaw, he named the candy after it: "milk" for the chocolate coating, "dud" for 1920s slang meaning a failure. Nearly a century later, they're still deliberately, permanently not round.
7. AURORA BOREALIS
The aurora borealis borrows its name from two mythologies at once: Aurora, the Roman goddess of dawn, and Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind. Galileo is generally credited with coining the phrase around 1619-1620 after observing a reddish night-sky glow he (incorrectly) attributed to sunlight reflecting off high atmosphere — though the first clearly documented use of the exact phrase comes from astronomer Pierre Gassendi a couple of years later. Either way, it's a Roman-Greek hybrid name for a phenomenon neither civilization could see from home.
8. ZAMBIA
Until 1964, Zambia was called Northern Rhodesia, named for British colonizer Cecil Rhodes. When the country gained independence that year, its new government deliberately dropped the colonial name in favor of one rooted in the land itself: Zambia, a shortened form of the Zambezi River that runs along its southern border. A river outlasted an empire.
9. DEAR ABBY
Dear Abby, the long-running advice column, launched in 1956 under a pen name its author, Pauline Phillips, built from two very different sources: "Abigail," after the wise, quick-thinking prophetess in the Book of Samuel, and "Van Buren," borrowed from President Martin Van Buren purely for its old-money, presidential ring. Equal parts Bible and ballot box.
10. ATOM
The word atom comes from the Greek "atomos," meaning "uncuttable" or "indivisible" — coined around 440 BC by the philosopher Democritus, who proposed that all matter was built from tiny, unsplittable particles. Twentieth-century physicists then spent several decades proving him wrong on a technicality: atoms split just fine, into protons, neutrons, and electrons. The name never got the memo.
That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for ten more — and if the Adidas/Puma cemetery detail got you, you're not alone.