How It Started … How It’s Going
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Friday, August 7, 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 veterinarian gets his name permanently attached to a bacterium he didn't actually discover, and a coffee chain rejects a name because "let's grab a cup of Pequod" just doesn't land.
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Fun fact to fill the space: the World Health Organization has actively discouraged naming new diseases after people, places, animals, or foods since 2015 β specifically to avoid stigma, and honestly, to avoid exactly the kind of permanent credit confusion you're about to read about. Older names like today's bonus word are all grandfathered in. If it were discovered today, it probably wouldn't get a surname at all.
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One more beat.
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The bonus word: SALMONELLA
Salmonella is named for Daniel Elmer Salmon, a veterinary pathologist who ran the USDA's microorganism research program in the 1880s β except Salmon didn't actually find it. His research assistant, Theobald Smith, isolated the bacterium from sick hogs in 1885 while the two were investigating (and misdiagnosing) hog cholera. Smith did the bench work; Salmon, as the lab's senior scientist, got his name on the paper and, later, on the genus itself, proposed by bacteriologist Joseph LigniΓ¨res in Salmon's honor. It's a very old, very familiar kind of scientific injustice β the boss's name outlives the assistant's.
1. STARBUCKS
In 1971, the founders sat down with artist Terry Heckler to name their new Seattle coffee company, wanting something with a sense of Pacific Northwest adventure and old maritime coffee-trading roots. Heckler pushed for names starting with "st," and somewhere in the brainstorm someone pulled out an old mining map of the Cascades showing a defunct town called "Starbo" β which immediately reminded Heckler of Starbuck, the first mate on the *Pequod* in *Moby-Dick*. The ship's own name, Pequod, was seriously considered too, until someone pointed out that "let's grab a cup of Pequod" doesn't exactly sell coffee. So the ship lost, the first mate won, and Starbucks got its name β co-founder Gordon Bowker has said the Melville connection was really more coincidence than deliberate homage.
2. AUGUST
August started life as Sextilis β Latin for "sixth" β back when the Roman calendar year began in March and had only ten months. Even after the calendar reform bumped it to the eighth slot, it kept the old "sixth month" name for centuries, right alongside Quintilis ("fifth"), which had already been renamed July for Julius Caesar. In 8 BC, the Roman Senate renamed Sextilis too, this time for Caesar's adopted heir, Augustus β reportedly because several of his greatest triumphs, including the conquest of Egypt, had happened during that month. Two months in a row named for the same family, and neither name has anything to do with counting anymore.
3. LINCOLN LOGS
Lincoln Logs were invented around 1916β1917 by John Lloyd Wright, the second son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright β and the inspiration came from the family business. While helping his father oversee construction of Tokyo's Imperial Hotel, John studied the building's interlocking wood joints and adapted the idea into a notched, stackable toy log system, patented in 1920 as "Toy Cabin Construction." He named it for Abraham Lincoln's own log cabin origins, and in 1943 sold the whole company to Playskool for a reported $800 β a rounding error compared to the century of nostalgia the toy went on to generate.
4. MAGENTA
The color magenta started out with a completely different name. French chemist FranΓ§ois-Emmanuel Verguin patented the vivid pink-red aniline dye in 1859 and called it "fuchsine," after the fuchsia flower. Later that same year, French and Sardinian forces defeated the Austrians at the Battle of Magenta in northern Italy, and in the wave of patriotic naming that followed, the dye got rebranded magenta in the battle's honor β a marketing rename that stuck so completely, almost nobody remembers "fuchsine" was first.
5. OCTOPUS
Octopus comes from Greek *oktΕ* ("eight") + *pous* ("foot") β "eight-foot." Oddly, that wasn't actually the animal's everyday ancient Greek name; writers like Aristotle and Pliny mostly called it *polypous*, "many-footed." "Oktopous" existed in Greek but only became the standard scientific term much later, when 18th-century Linnaean taxonomists went hunting for precise, literal Greek roots and picked the more mathematically accurate option over the vaguer one everyone had actually been using.
6. NARWHAL
The leading theory on narwhal traces it to Old Norse *nΓ‘r* ("corpse") + *hvalr* ("whale") β Viking sailors reportedly thought the animal's mottled grey-and-white skin, and its habit of floating motionless at the surface, made it look unsettlingly like a drowned body. It's the derivation you'll find in most major dictionaries, though a few linguists have pushed back, arguing "corpse whale" is a tidy folk etymology and that the real root just meant something closer to "whale with the long projection" β a reference to the tusk, no death imagery required. Either way, the ghoulish version is the one that won the naming.
7. EASTER
Our only real source for the Easter/Eostre connection is the 8th-century English monk Bede, who wrote that the holiday's name came from Eostre, a pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon goddess honored during ΔosturmΕnaΓΎ (roughly April). Because the Anglo-Saxons left no written religious records of their own, historians can't independently confirm how widely Eostre was actually worshipped β Bede is essentially the only witness. But the name held on regardless, carried forward from a single monk's account into a holiday celebrated by billions who've mostly never heard of her.
8. LAVENDER
Lavender traces to the Latin verb *lavare*, "to wash" β the same root behind "laundry" and "lavatory" β because the herb was steeped into bathwater and used to scent freshly washed fabric for centuries. A minority of etymologists argue instead for Latin *livere*, "to be bluish," pointing at the flower's color rather than its use, but the washing story is the one nearly every dictionary and garden history leads with.
9. LORD OF THE FLIES
William Golding's title is a literal English translation of Beelzebub β from Hebrew *Ba'al Zevuv*, "lord of the flies," a name for a Philistine deity that Israelite scripture repurposed as a mocking insult, and which later Christian tradition folded into a name for Satan himself. In the novel, the "lord of the flies" is a pig's severed, fly-covered head mounted on a stake β a grim stand-in for the evil Golding believed lives inside people rather than arriving from outside them. Lord of the Flies turns a Bible-footnote demon into the book's whole thesis statement.
10. ALCATRAZ
Spanish naval officer Juan Manuel de Ayala charted San Francisco Bay in 1775 and named one island "La Isla de los Alcatraces" β "Island of the Pelicans" β after the birds he found roosting on its cliffs. Alcatraz is the shortened form that stuck, though the Spanish word itself has a murkier past: some etymologists trace *alcatraz* further back through Arabic and Portuguese, possibly to a term for a water-drawing device or a diving bird, long before it ever meant "pelican" specifically. Two centuries and one federal prison later, almost nobody thinks "pelicans" when they hear the name anymore.
That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for ten more β and if you're annoyed that the guy who actually found Salmonella didn't get his name on it, congratulations, you've just discovered the entire history of science.