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Sunday, September 13, 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, go do that first. This post isn't going anywhere.
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Somewhere below, a seismologist spent the rest of his life insisting a scale should have someone else's name on it too, and a word game went through two entirely different names before the one you know.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word was invented by someone whose day job had nothing to do with games at all, which turns out to be true of a couple of today's answers as well.
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The bonus word: MASTERMIND
In 1970, Mordecai Meirowitz, an Israeli postmaster and telecommunications expert with no background in the toy industry, took a much older pencil-and-paper guessing game called Bulls and Cows and reworked it into a physical code-breaking game with colored pegs. He shopped it around to toy companies with little luck until a British plastics manufacturer, Invicta Plastics, bought the rights and released it as "Mastermind)" in 1971. It's gone on to sell more than 50 million copies.
1. MACHIAVELLIAN
Niccolò Machiavelli's 16th-century political treatise, arguing that rulers should be willing to lie, betray, and act immorally to hold onto power, so scandalized readers that his own surname became an adjective. "Machiavellian" has described cunning, end-justifies-the-means scheming ever since, whether or not the schemer has read a word he wrote.
2. ARCHAEOPTERYX
In the summer of 1861, a quarry near Solnhofen, Germany, turned up a single fossilized feather unlike anything paleontologists had seen. German scientist Hermann von Meyer named the find "Archaeopteryx," Greek for "ancient wing," before anyone knew what kind of creature it belonged to. Weeks later, a nearly complete skeleton with matching feather impressions turned up nearby, confirming the feather's owner as one of the most important transitional fossils ever found.
3. SCRABBLE
The tile game most people know as Scrabble has had two other names in its lifetime. Architect Alfred Mosher Butts first built it as a refinement of an earlier game of his own, Lexiko, then reworked it into a crossword-style version he called Criss-Crosswords. It wasn't until 1948, when a buyer named James Brunot purchased the rights, tweaked the board, and renamed it, that "Scrabble" became the name that stuck.
4. TEDDYBEAR
In 1902, on a hunting trip in Mississippi, President Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a black bear his guide had already cornered and tied to a tree, calling it unsportsmanlike. A political cartoon of the incident inspired a Brooklyn shopkeeper to start selling a stuffed bear cub named in the president's honor, and "teddy bear" has been the generic name for the toy ever since.
5. ECUADOR
Most countries are named for a person, a tribe, or a landscape feature. Ecuador is simply named for a line: it's the Spanish word for the equator, the invisible line circling the globe at zero degrees latitude that happens to run directly through the country. "Ecuador" is, quite literally, "the equator."
6. RICHTERSCALE
In 1935, Charles Richter needed a way to compare the size of the dozens of small Southern California earthquakes his lab was logging every week, and turned to colleague Beno Gutenberg, who suggested plotting them logarithmically. The two developed the scale together, and Richter insisted for the rest of his life that it should be called the Richter-Gutenberg scale. Gutenberg, who disliked publicity, never pushed the point, and the "Richter scale" kept just the one name.
7. MARGARINE
The story behind "margarine" runs through two different scientists. In 1813, French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul isolated a fatty acid he named "margaric acid," from the Greek word for pearl, for its lustrous, pearly deposits. When Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès invented a butter substitute in 1869 to win a prize from Napoleon III, he believed his creation contained margaric acid and named it "oleomargarine" accordingly. It later turned out the substance didn't actually contain any margaric acid at all, but the name, shortened, had already stuck.
8. IRONMAIDEN
The "iron maiden," a spiked cabinet said to impale anyone shut inside it, feels like a fixture of medieval torture chambers. It almost certainly isn't. Historians have found no mention of the device before 1802, and the surviving "medieval" examples on display in museums are now generally considered 19th-century constructions built to illustrate a story rather than genuine period artifacts. The English metal band "Iron Maiden," formed in 1975, borrowed the name of a myth that was itself only a couple of centuries old.
9. NIKON
Long before it made a camera, Nikon was an optical-instruments company. The name blends the Japanese words for "Japan" and "optical," reflecting the firm's original business making lenses and binoculars. "Nikon" wouldn't release its first camera for decades after the company itself was founded.
10. DIESEL
Rudolf Diesel patented his fuel-efficient compression-ignition engine in 1892, and both the fuel and the engine type still carry his name. In 1913, at the height of his fame, Diesel boarded a steamer crossing the English Channel, went to bed, and was never seen again. His disappearance remains unsolved to this day, and "diesel" is now just as likely to appear on a gas station sign as in a true-crime podcast.
That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for ten more, and if there's a thread running under this batch, it's disputed credit: a scale that could have had two names, a game that had three names before its real one, and a fatty acid that got credit for an invention it turned out not to be part of.