How It Started … How It’s Going
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Saturday, September 12, 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 world-famous company's very first product didn't actually carry the company's own name, and a legendary festival is named after a town it wasn't actually held in.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's puzzle has two separate "the name everyone knows isn't the name that was actually used at the time" stories in it. That wasn't planned going in; it just kept happening as we researched.
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One more beat.
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The bonus word: VOLKSWAGEN
Volkswagen is simply German for "people's car," and the company was founded in 1937 under the Nazi "Strength Through Joy" program to build one. But the very first cars off the line weren't badged "Volkswagen" at all. Hitler declared they'd be called the "KdF-Wagen," after the initials of the sponsoring program, and that's the name that appeared on the first several hundred cars ever assembled. The name that would go on to sell tens of millions of Beetles worldwide only became the product's own name later.
1. VASELINE
Robert Chesebrough, an English chemist working the Pennsylvania oil fields in the 1870s, noticed rig workers using a waxy residue that gummed up their pumps to heal cuts and burns. He patented a purified version in 1878 and named it by mashing together the German word for "water" and the Greek word for "oil," giving the world "Vaseline."
2. OZONE
Unlike most gases named for a color or an element, "ozone" is named for a smell: the Greek verb for "to smell," picked out because of the sharp, distinctive odor the gas gives off, whether that's after a lightning strike or coming out of certain machines.
3. LOSANGELES
Los Angeles started life in 1781 with a Spanish name several times longer than the one it goes by now, honoring "Our Lady, Queen of the Angels" along with a nearby river. Over the following century, most of that devotional mouthful got dropped, leaving only the last two words: "Los Angeles," the angels, with no queen or lady required to say it anymore.
4. KAMIKAZE
Long before it described WWII fighter pilots, "kamikaze" meant "divine wind," and referred specifically to the typhoons that scattered two Mongol invasion fleets bound for Japan in the 13th century. For centuries the word carried a note of national salvation, not sacrifice, before its meaning shifted entirely.
5. SCUBA
Ask most people what "scuba" actually stands for and you'll likely get a blank look, even from people who dive every weekend. It's been a real, everyday word for so long that its acronym origins, self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, have mostly worn off.
6. WOODSTOCK
The most famous music festival of the 20th century isn't named after the town it was held in. Organizers wanted to hold it in the artsy town of Woodstock, New York, but local opposition killed that plan, and the whole event ended up on a dairy farmer's field near Bethel, dozens of miles away. "Woodstock" stuck as the name anyway.
7. ADOBE
Adobe Systems has nothing to do with sun-dried mud bricks. Cofounder John Warnock started the company out of his home in Los Altos, California, and named it after Adobe Creek, the small stream that happened to run behind his house. "Adobe" the software giant owes its name entirely to local geography.
8. GENESIS
The band didn't pick its own name. A group of Charterhouse schoolboys recording their first demos in 1967 left the naming to Jonathan King, a former Charterhouse pupil turned record producer, who suggested "Genesis)," evoking a word that simply means a coming-into-being, fitting for a band that was just getting started.
9. EUROPIUM
Some chemical elements are named for scientists, some for mythology, and some just for where they were found. "Europium," isolated in 1901, falls into the last camp: it's simply named after the continent of Europe, no further story required.
10. NABISCO
"Nabisco" started life in 1898 as an informal shorthand for the company's much longer original name, and stuck around as a popular nickname for decades before the company finally made it official. The syllable-by-syllable abbreviation had already won in everyday use long before it won on paper.
That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for ten more, and if today's puzzle has a quiet through-line, it's that a lot of very famous names turn out to be geography, abbreviations, or someone else's decision, rather than the deliberate branding exercise you'd assume.