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Wednesday, August 5, 2026 · The Origins Desk
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Today's Origins Quiz answers β all ten of them, plus the bonus word β 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, a group of German miners blame the devil for a metal that wasn't copper, and a 1984 B-movie about sewer cannibals accidentally donates a word to internet slang forty years later.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is also a movie title β but the 1942 film actually borrowed its name from the real Moroccan city, not the other way around. The screenwriters reportedly picked it partly because it just sounded exotic and romantic to American ears. Sometimes etymology is just vibes.
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One more beat.
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The bonus word: CASABLANCA
Casablanca's name has been through three languages before landing in English. Portuguese traders built a new town on the site of a Berber settlement called Anfa in 1515 and named it "Casa Branca" β "white house." When the Spanish took over regional trade under the Iberian Union, they translated it again into "Casablanca," and it stuck as the name used internationally. French colonists later called it Maison Blanche (same meaning, different language), and the Arabic name, Ad-DΔr al-BayαΈΔ β "Dar al-BeΓ―da" β is a straight translation of the same phrase. Four languages, one meaning: everyone just kept calling it the White House.
1. CANDIDATE
In the Roman Republic, men running for office wore a toga scrubbed or chalked to a blinding white β the toga candida β from the Latin *candidus*, "shining white." The idea was to stand out in a crowded forum and signal purity of purpose (whether or not that purity was real). "Candidate" comes directly from *candidatus*, "one clothed in white." Same root gives us "candid," "candle," and "incandescent" β a whole family of words about things that shine, applied to politicians with, historically, mixed accuracy.
2. ANAHEIM
Anaheim was founded in 1857 by a colony of German wine-growers who bought land along the Santa Ana River. Rather than name the settlement purely in Spanish or purely in German, they split the difference: "Ana," for the river, plus the German "heim," meaning "home." A vineyard colony's practical bilingual compromise ended up naming a city that a century later would be best known for a mouse.
3. SARCOPHAGUS
A sarcophagus is literally a "flesh-eater" β from Greek *sarx* ("flesh") + *phagein* ("to eat"). The name comes from a specific limestone quarried near Assos in ancient Troas, which Pliny the Elder claimed could rapidly dissolve the flesh of any corpse placed inside it. Modern historians are skeptical the stone actually did that (Pliny also reported dog-headed people elsewhere in his writing, for context), but the reputation was enough β "flesh-eating stone" became the name for any stone coffin, whether or not it was made from the original cannibal limestone.
4. ATARI
Before it was a video game company, "atari" was β and still is β a term from the board game Go, called out when a stone or group of stones is one move from being captured, roughly the Go equivalent of "check" in chess. Nolan Bushnell, an avid Go player, picked the name for his new game company in 1972 because it captured the tension he wanted people to feel playing his machines. The word comes from the Japanese verb *ataru*, "to hit" or "to strike" β a company built on making things go "atari" on purpose.
5. BANANA SPLIT
The banana split was invented over Christmas break in 1904 by 23-year-old David "Doc" Strickler, a pharmacy student moonlighting as a soda jerk at Tassell Pharmacy in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. A crowd of students from nearby Saint Vincent College kept pestering him to "make something exciting," so he split a banana lengthwise, added three scoops of ice cream, and charged 10 cents β double the going rate for a regular sundae. He's also credited with designing the boat-shaped glass dish it's still served in today. Latrobe was formally recognized as the dessert's birthplace in 2004, exactly a century later.
6. LYME
In November 1975, a mother in Lyme, Connecticut, called the state health department to report that 12 children in her small community had been diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis β a wildly high number for a disease that's normally rare. Yale researchers investigating the cluster traced it to deer ticks carrying a spiral-shaped bacterium, later named *Borrelia burgdorferi*, in the woods surrounding Lyme and two neighboring towns. The disease got the town's name simply because that's where the outbreak was first noticed and studied β an unwanted kind of fame for a small New England town.
7. ANTARCTICA
There has never been a native bear anywhere near the South Pole, and the name Antarctica admits it right in the etymology. "Arctic" comes from Greek *arktikos*, related to *arktos*, "bear" β a reference to Ursa Major, the Great Bear constellation, which sits in the northern sky. "Antarctic" simply adds the Greek prefix for "opposite," making Antarctica, literally, "the opposite of bear country." A whole continent named for an animal that has never once set foot on it.
8. NICKEL
German miners in 16th-century Saxony kept digging up a reddish ore that looked like copper but stubbornly refused to yield any. Frustrated and more than a little superstitious, they blamed a mischievous spirit and named the ore *Kupfernickel* β roughly "copper demon," with "Nickel" being a nickname for "Old Nick," the devil. In 1751, Swedish chemist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt finally isolated the actual metal hiding in the ore and named it nickel after the miners' cursed word for it. The miners weren't entirely wrong to feel tricked, either β the arsenic released while smelting the ore was almost certainly what was making some of them sick.
9. CHUD
C.H.U.D. β Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers β was a modestly budgeted 1984 horror film about New Yorkers mutated by illegally dumped radioactive waste into flesh-eating sewer monsters. The movie mostly faded into cult-classic obscurity, but its acronym had a strange second life: decades later, "chud" resurfaced online as a slang insult for a low-effort, low-intelligence internet poster, popularized in part by Kevin Smith's *Clerks II* in 2006 and later widely used across social media. A forgettable B-movie monster outlived its own movie as a punchline.
10. ARGENTINA
Argentina's name comes from the Latin *argentum*, "silver" β but the silver was mostly a rumor. Survivors of a shipwrecked 1516 Spanish expedition led by Juan DΓaz de SolΓs returned with stories (and a few actual silver trinkets, gifted by local peoples) of a fabulously wealthy "Sierra del Plata," a mountain range rich in silver, somewhere in the interior. The tale spread fast enough that Portuguese mapmakers had already renamed the local river "RΓo de la Plata" β "River of Silver" β by 1524, and the Latin equivalent, Argentina, followed for the country itself. The silver mountain, notably, was never actually found in the quantities the legend promised.
That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for ten more β and if you didn't know Antarctica was etymologically an anti-bear zone, now you do.