How It Started … How It’s Going
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Monday, September 7, 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, close this tab, go solve today's puzzle, and come back afterward. We'll wait.
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Somewhere below, a storage trunk from a soldier's barracks ends up as the name of a shoe store you've probably shopped at.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's quiet through-line is words that got picked up, borrowed, or just plain misremembered on their way to the meaning we use today: a military trunk becoming a retail chain, a nationality becoming a necktie, a myth about a confused explorer that turned out to be wrong.
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One more beat. Deep breath. Here we go.
The bonus word: FOOT LOCKER
Long before it was a shoe store, a "foot locker)" was a small, lockable wooden trunk kept at the base of a soldier's bunk, standard issue in military barracks by World War Two for storing uniforms and personal effects. The retail chain borrowed the name more than three decades later: Foot Locker, Inc. was founded on September 12, 1974, when the Kinney Shoe Corporation, itself a division of F.W. Woolworth, opened its first two stores at a mall in Industry, California. The trunk came first by more than half a century.
1. FRISBEE
Yale students in the late 1800s used to toss around empty pie tins from the nearby Frisbie Baking Company, yelling "Frisbie!" as a warning to anyone in the way. Fred Morrison spent decades independently developing a plastic flying disc of his own, and when he sold the rights to Wham-O in 1957, the company renamed it "Frisbee," reportedly inspired by the pie tins the Yale students had been throwing around for generations.
2. OKAY
"OK" started as a joke. On March 23, 1839, the Boston Morning Post ran a satirical piece using "o.k." as a deliberately misspelled abbreviation for "oll korrect," part of a fad among young Bostonians for mangling phrases and then abbreviating the mangled version. It might have stayed a one-off gag if Martin Van Buren's 1840 reelection campaign hadn't adopted "O.K." (for his nickname "Old Kinderhook") as a slogan a year later, cementing it into permanent use. Linguist Allen Walker Read spent decades tracking down this origin, finally publishing it in 1963 after disproving every competing legend.
3. OTTOMAN
The low, cushioned seat known as an "ottoman)" takes its name from the empire whose furnishing traditions inspired it: a padded platform piled with cushions was the centerpiece of a traditional Ottoman-Turkish sitting room. European furniture makers adopted the style and the name by the early 1800s, and by 1849 the word had narrowed further to describe the small footstool version most people picture today.
4. TURQUOISE
The blue-green gem now called "turquoise" was actually mined near Nishapur in Persia, but Europeans first encountered it through Turkish traders moving the stone along Silk Road routes in the 13th century. The name that stuck, from an Old French phrase for "Turkish stone," credits the middlemen rather than the source.
5. LOTHARIO
A "Lothario" is a seducer who uses and discards women, a reputation the word owes to a single stage villain: the libertine title character of Nicholas Rowe's 1703 tragedy The Fair Penitent, whose betrayal of the play's heroine was scandalous enough to turn his name into a permanent English insult.
6. OMBUDSMAN
The Swedish parliament created the position of Justice "Ombudsman" in 1809, an independent official empowered to investigate citizens' complaints against government overreach. The word itself is older, from Old Norse roots meaning something close to "representative," but it took that 1809 reform to turn it into the specific job title the world eventually borrowed.
7. CRAVAT
In 1660, a regiment of Croatian mercenaries serving the French crown arrived wearing distinctive knotted scarves, and French courtiers were charmed enough to start imitating them. The garment got nicknamed after the soldiers' nationality, "Croat," which slowly corrupted into "cravat)" and eventually settled into the modern necktie.
8. KANGAROO
For nearly two centuries, the story went that Captain Cook asked a local Guugu Yimithirr man what the strange hopping animal was called, got the answer "I don't know," and mistook the shrug for a name. It's a great story and almost entirely wrong: linguist John Haviland confirmed in 1972 that the word was real all along, just a specific one, referring only to one particular large, dark-colored marsupial.
9. EASEL
The wooden stand that holds a painter's canvas gets its English name from the Dutch word for a donkey, "ezel." The logic is the same beast-of-burden metaphor behind "sawhorse" and "clotheshorse": an "easel" carries a load the way a donkey does, just a canvas instead of cargo.
10. RITZY
Swiss hotelier César Ritz built such opulent hotels in Paris and London around the turn of the 20th century that his own surname turned into an adjective. "Ritzy" has meant extravagant luxury since around 1910, helped along a few decades later by Irving Berlin's 1929 song "Puttin' on the Ritz."
That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for ten more, and today's quiet through-line is words that got borrowed, renamed, or just plain misremembered on the way to their modern meaning: a barracks trunk becoming a shoe store, a nationality becoming a necktie, a genuine word getting buried under two centuries of a much better story about a confused explorer. The version that sticks around isn't always the one that's true.