How It Started … How It’s Going
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Thursday, September 10, 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, this is your cue to go do that first.
Still here? Okay, scroll slowly. We've padded some distance so nothing spoils early.
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Somewhere below, a miserly Dickens character lends his name to anyone who won't split a check, and a Greek goddess of victory ends up on the side of a running shoe.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word doesn't have a confirmed origin at all, just competing theories nobody's fully proven. Today's puzzle turned out to have a few more of those than usual.
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One more beat.
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The bonus word: SHENANIGAN
Nobody actually knows where "shenanigan" comes from. The two leading, equally unproven theories point either to the Irish word "sionnach," meaning fox, for the animal's reputation as a cunning trickster, or to the Spanish "chanada," a shortened form of a word for trick or deception, possibly picked up during the California Gold Rush. Both stories are plausible. Neither has ever been confirmed.
1. SCROOGE
Before 1843, nobody used "scrooge" to describe a stingy person, because Ebenezer Scrooge didn't exist yet. Charles Dickens introduced him in A Christmas Carol as a miser who reforms after three ghostly visits, and the character's name became shorthand for tightfisted behavior almost immediately, doing more for the word's staying power than the actual redemption arc.
2. HYPNOSIS
Scottish surgeon James Braid coined "hypnosis" in the 1840s, drawing on Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, even though Braid himself eventually argued the trance state had little to do with actual sleep. The name stuck anyway, a rare case of a scientist naming something after the exact comparison he later tried to walk back.
3. EYEBALL
Shakespeare gets informal credit for a surprising amount of everyday English, and "eyeball" is one of the more mundane entries on that list, first turning up in his plays centuries before anyone thought a playwright's vocabulary would end up in an anatomy textbook.
4. NARCISSISM
Narcissus, in Greek myth, was so captivated by his own reflection in a pool of water that he couldn't tear himself away, eventually wasting away on the spot. The nymph Echo, who loved him and was ignored for her trouble, arguably had the worse end of the story, but it's Narcissus's) name that ended up describing an entire personality type.
5. AMPERSAND
The "&" symbol used to be taught as the actual 27th letter of the English alphabet, and schoolchildren reciting it would say "X, Y, Z, and per se and," meaning "and by itself, and." Repeated by enough students enough times, that mouthful slurred into "ampersand," a word born entirely from generations of kids mumbling through alphabet drills.
6. NERD
The word "nerd" first appeared in print in Dr. Seuss's 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo, naming a small, grumpy-looking creature, and meant essentially nothing like its modern definition. It took another couple of decades, and an assist from the sitcom Happy Days, before the word settled into describing socially awkward obsessives rather than a fictional zoo animal.
7. INTERROBANG
Frustrated that English had no single mark for an excited question, like "You did what?!", advertising executive Martin K. Speckter proposed a combined symbol in 1962 and named it the "interrobang," blending "interrogation point" with "bang," printer's slang for an exclamation point. It never fully displaced typing both marks separately, but it's sitting in most modern font files if you go looking.
8. GALVANIZE
Luigi Galvani spent the 1780s running electrical current through severed frog legs and watching them twitch, and became convinced he'd discovered a life force running through animal tissue. He hadn't, not exactly, but "galvanize" survived his mistaken theory to describe anything that shocks a person or group into sudden action.
9. ARACHNID
Arachne, a mortal weaver in Greek mythology, made the mistake of claiming she was better at her craft than Athena herself. Athena did not take the comparison well, and Arachne spent the rest of eternity as a spider, an origin story spiders themselves remain unbothered by.
10. NIKE
Long before it was stitched onto sneakers, "Nike)" was simply the Greek word for victory, personified as a winged goddess who accompanied warriors and athletes alike. An employee reportedly suggested the name to the company's founders in 1971, and the swoosh logo is meant to evoke her wing.
That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for ten more, and if you're keeping track, that's two separate puzzles now where a Greek deity ended up naming either a planet or a shoe brand. The Greek pantheon remains undefeated as a naming convention.