How It Started … How It’s Going
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Tuesday, September 15, 2026 · The Origins Desk
π¨ MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING π¨
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 will still be here when you get back.
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Somewhere below, one of the most valuable brand names on Earth exists because a grad student couldn't spell, and a race distance that runners suffer through every weekend was set so a royal family could watch from a comfortable seat.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is a country whose name is a translation of a translation, and both versions say exactly the same two words.
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One more beat.
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The bonus word: MONTENEGRO
"Montenegro" is the Venetian Italian for "black mountain," and it is a loan-translation: the locals already called the place Crna Gora, which means the very same thing in their own Slavic language. Venetian sailors and traders who worked the Adriatic coast for centuries simply rendered the name into their own tongue, and that version is the one the rest of the world adopted. The "black" almost certainly refers to the dark, dense forests that once covered the coastal mountains, most famously Mount LovΔen, rather than the color of the rock itself.
1. MARATHON
The town of Marathon, site of the 490 BC battle where the Athenians beat the Persians, probably takes its name from the Greek word for fennel, which grew wild on the plain. The race named for it is a much newer invention, and its famously awkward distance is newer still. At the 1908 London Olympics, organizers laid out a course starting at Windsor Castle and finishing in front of the royal box at the stadium, which came to 26 miles and 385 yards. The International Amateur Athletic Federation made that exact figure the official "marathon" distance in 1921, and every 26.2-mile race since has been running the royal family's errand.
2. OCTOTHORPE
When Bell Labs added the # key to touch-tone telephone keypads in the 1960s, the engineers needed something to call it, and "octothorpe" is what stuck. The "octo" is easy: the symbol has eight points. The "thorpe" is where the stories diverge. One insider account says a Bell Labs engineer tacked it on as a tribute to the athlete Jim Thorpe; another says it was chosen more or less at random to be deliberately hard to say. Either way, it was a joke inside a phone company that somehow made it into the dictionary.
3. NIMBY
"NIMBY," the acronym for "not in my backyard," is usually dated to a 1980 Christian Science Monitor article by Emilie Travel Livezey about resistance to hazardous waste facilities. But researchers have since found it a year earlier, in a February 1979 Virginia newspaper report quoting an Atomic Energy Commission official who complained that the "nimby syndrome" was getting in the way of siting radioactive waste dumps. The word, in other words, was born as a nuclear industry gripe before it became an urban planning cliche.
4. TEFLON
On April 6, 1938, DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett was working on new refrigerants and went to draw some tetrafluoroethylene gas from a cylinder he'd stored on dry ice. Nothing came out. The cylinder, though, weighed just as much as when it was full, so Plunkett sawed it open and found the gas had polymerized into a waxy white powder that nothing would stick to and almost nothing would react with. DuPont trademarked it as "Teflon" in 1945, and it went into everything from the Manhattan Project's uranium-handling equipment to, eventually, frying pans.
5. EPSOMSALTS
The story goes that in the dry summer of 1618, a farmer named Henry Wicker found a spring on Epsom Common in Surrey and noticed his cattle refused to drink from it. The water turned out to be bitter with magnesium sulfate, useful for healing scratches on the skin and, taken internally, as a powerful purgative. Epsom became a fashionable spa town on the strength of it, and "Epsom salts" kept the name long after the spring stopped mattering and the salt started coming from factories.
6. NINTENDO
Fusajiro Yamauchi founded "Nintendo" in Kyoto in 1889 to make hanafuda, the hand-painted Japanese flower playing cards. The name is usually translated as "leave luck to heaven," though exactly what the founder intended by it is not documented. The company sold cards, and only cards, for most of a century, dabbled in taxis, instant rice, and love hotels along the way, and did not put out its first home video game console, the Color TV-Game 6, until 1977.
7. ESPERANTO
When L. L. Zamenhof published his constructed language in an 1887 booklet, its title just called it "Lingvo Internacia," the international language. Zamenhof signed the booklet with a pen name, "Doktoro Esperanto," which in the language itself means "one who hopes." Readers latched onto the pseudonym rather than the plain descriptive title, and within a few years "Esperanto" was what everyone called the language, including Zamenhof.
8. GOOGLE
Larry Page and Sergey Brin were brainstorming names in a Stanford office in September 1997 when fellow grad student Sean Anderson suggested "googolplex," after the enormous number. Page liked the shorter "googol," a 1 followed by 100 zeros, and Anderson went to check whether the domain was free. He typed it as "google.com." It was available, Page liked the look of the misspelling, and he registered it that same day, September 15, 1997. "Google" turns 29 years old today, typo and all.
9. REDTAPE
In the 16th century, the administration of Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, began binding the most urgent dossiers, the ones headed straight to the Council of State, with red ribbon, to separate them from ordinary files tied up with plain string. The practice spread across European bureaucracies, and by the 19th century Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens were using "red tape" as shorthand for everything slow and strangling about government paperwork. Dickens's David Copperfield describes Britannia "bound hand and foot with red tape."
10. ORCHESTRA
In an ancient Greek theater, the "orchestra" was a place, not a group of people: the semicircular space in front of the stage where the chorus sang and danced, from a Greek verb meaning "to dance." Roman theaters kept the word for the same area, by then reserved for senators' seats, and it was only in the 17th and 18th centuries that the term shifted from the space in front of the stage to the musicians who were increasingly filling it.
That's today's set, and the first of a new three-day run. Come back tomorrow for ten more, and if there's a thread running under this batch, it's names that were never meant to be the name: a pen name that swallowed a language, a typo that became a verb, a phone company in-joke, and a country that answers to the same two words in two languages.