How It Started … How It’s Going
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Sunday, August 9, 2026 · The Origins Desk
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Today's Origins Quiz answers β all ten of them, plus the bonus name 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 Pope quotes a wizard in his first official teaching document, and a hit movie's title turns out to be a "foreign word" its own author admits he just made up.
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Fun fact to fill the space: Catholic encyclicals aren't titled the way books are β they're traditionally named after their own opening words in Latin, not workshopped like a headline. Today's bonus clue references one from earlier this year; its title just happens to be the phrase the document opens with. Popes don't run title A/B tests.
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One more beat.
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The bonus name: J.R.R. TOLKIEN
In May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, *Magnifica Humanitas* ("Magnificent Humanity"), a document devoted largely to questions raised by artificial intelligence. In paragraph 213, the Pope quotes Gandalf directly: "It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till." The footnote credits J.R.R. Tolkien's *The Return of the King*, Book Five, Chapter IX β Gandalf's speech to the assembled lords before the Black Gate. A wizard's pep talk, footnoted in a papal encyclical, roughly seventy years after it was written.
1. JUMANJI
Author Chris Van Allsburg has said Jumanji) is Zulu for "many effects" β but there's a catch: no such word appears to exist in the Zulu language with that meaning, and there's no recorded use of "jumanji" before Van Allsburg's 1981 picture book. The most likely story is that he simply invented a word designed to sound exotic and foreign, and the "Zulu" explanation is part of the legend rather than verified fact. A made-up word about a made-up jungle game, appropriately enough.
2. RIO DE JANEIRO
Portuguese explorers sailing with Gaspar de Lemos entered Guanabara Bay on January 1, 1502, and β despite there being no actual river β mistook the wide bay entrance for a river mouth. They named it accordingly: Rio de Janeiro, "River of January." No one ever went back to correct it, and five centuries later, one of the world's most famous coastal cities is still named after a geographic mistake made on a single New Year's Day.
3. ROLEX
According to founder Hans Wilsdorf's own account, given in a 1958 speech, the name Rolex came to him as a word whispered in his ear by a genie while he rode a horse-drawn omnibus through Cheapside, London, sometime around 1908. It's a wonderful story and almost certainly not literally true β most historians think Wilsdorf, after testing hundreds of letter combinations, simply landed on something short, easy to pronounce in any language, and compact enough to fit on a watch dial alongside an importer's name. The genie was probably just good marketing.
4. TANTALIZE
In Greek myth, King Tantalus was condemned to stand forever in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree β every time he reached for the fruit, the branch lifted out of reach; every time he bent to drink, the water receded. His punishment (for stealing ambrosia from the gods, or revealing their secrets, depending on the version) gave English the verb "tantalize" by the 1590s: to torment someone by dangling something desirable just out of grasp. Three and a half millennia later, we still use his name for the specific cruelty of an almost.
5. OPERA
Opera is, grammatically, a mistake that stuck: it's the Latin plural of *opus* ("a work"), but Italian speakers in the 1600s adopted it as a singular noun meaning a staged musical drama, and every language that borrowed the word from Italian β including English β kept the singular usage. So every time someone says "an opera," they're technically saying "a works."
6. LABYRINTH
The word labyrinth is generally traced to *labrys*, the Minoan word for the ceremonial double-headed axe found carved and painted throughout the palace of Knossos on Crete β excavator Sir Arthur Evans believed the maze-like palace complex itself inspired the word's association with mazes, tying it to the myth of the Minotaur's labyrinth. It's worth noting scholars aren't fully settled on this: the word itself may actually be Lydian, arriving in Crete via Anatolian trade routes rather than originating there, and double-axe symbols have turned up at multiple Minoan sites, not just Knossos.
7. KIT KAT
Rowntree's launched the bar in 1935 as "Chocolate Crisp," renaming it "Kit Kat Chocolate Crisp" in 1937 before shortening it to just Kit Kat after World War II. The name itself is older than the candy by over two centuries: the Kit-Cat Club was an early-1700s London political and literary society, reportedly named after Christopher "Kit" Catling, a pie-shop owner whose mutton pies β nicknamed "kit-cats" β the club met over. A chocolate bar borrowed its name from a men's political dinner club that hadn't existed in over a hundred years by the time it launched.
8. INSULIN
Physician Paul Langerhans identified small round clusters of cells scattered through the pancreas in 1869 without knowing what they did, and they were later named the "islets of Langerhans" β from Latin *insula*, "island," describing how they looked scattered through the surrounding tissue like islands in a sea. When researchers later isolated the hormone those islet cells produce, they named it insulin directly after them β a hormone named for a geography metaphor about the cells that make it.
9. EXODUS
The Book of Exodus gets its English title, by way of Latin, from Greek *exodos* β literally "the road out," from *ex-* ("out of") plus *hodos* ("road" or "way"). *Hodos* has a busy family tree: it's also the root behind "episode," "method," and "period." The book describing the Israelites' departure from Egypt is, at the level of pure etymology, just titled "the exit."
10. NARCISSUS
The Narcissus) myth is one of Greek mythology's cleanest cautionary tales: a beautiful youth, cursed by the goddess Nemesis after spurning a rejected admirer, becomes fixated on his own reflection in a pool of water and wastes away, unable to look away from himself. The flower that grew where he died carries his name to this day β and so, less charmingly, does "narcissism." The word's deeper root may trace to Greek *narkΔ*, "numbness," possibly linking the flower's heavy, intoxicating scent to the same root that gives us "narcotic."
That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for ten more β and if you're now wondering whether Rolex was really named by a genie, congratulations: so is basically every watch historian who's looked into it.