How It Started … How It’s Going
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Wednesday, September 16, 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.
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Somewhere below, a word you learned in a chess book turns out to be a centuries-old mistranslation, a famous tea has no documented link to the man it's named for, and a national park is named for a misunderstanding.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is one of the most reproduced images in human history, and the man who drew it made less from it than you'd pay for a decent dinner.
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One more beat.
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The bonus word: SMILEY FACE
In 1963, the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, had just gone through a merger and wanted something to lift employee morale. It hired a local advertising man, Harvey Ball, who spent about ten minutes drawing a yellow circle with two dots and a curve, adding the eyes so the button couldn't be turned upside down into a frown. He was paid $45. Nobody trademarked it, and by the time Ball tried in 1971, the "smiley face" had already been declared public domain, with more than 50 million buttons sold and a French entrepreneur registering his own version across Europe.
1. SPAM
Hormel introduced its canned pork product on July 5, 1937, and got the name from a contest: the winner was Ken Daigneau, a New York actor who happened to be the brother of a Hormel vice president, and he collected $100 for it. The company's official line is that it's short for "spiced ham." Its second life as the word for junk email comes from a 1970 Monty Python sketch set in a cafe where every dish contains "Spam)," and a chorus of Vikings chants the word until it drowns out all other conversation, which early internet users decided was a perfect description of unwanted bulk messages.
2. MAYBELLINE
Thomas Lyle Williams, a young Chicago entrepreneur, watched his sister Mabel darken her eyelashes with a homemade mix of petroleum jelly and coal dust, and in 1915 started selling a version by mail order under the name "Lash-Brow-Ine." When that ran into trademark trouble, he renamed the company for Mabel, and "Maybelline" went on to become the first mass-market mascara in America.
3. ISTANBUL
For centuries, Greek speakers heading into Constantinople said they were going "eis tin polin," to the city, and Turkish speakers heard that phrase as a name. The Ottomans used "Istanbul" informally alongside the official Konstantiniyye for hundreds of years; it was the Turkish Republic that made it the only official name in 1930, asking foreign post offices to stop delivering mail addressed to Constantinople.
4. LUDDITE
The story is that in 1779, an apprentice named Ned Ludd from Anstey, near Leicester, smashed two knitting frames in a fit of rage after being whipped or taunted. There is no independent evidence he existed; the tale first appeared in the Nottingham Review in December 1811, right as textile workers across the Midlands were breaking the machines that threatened their trade. Those workers signed their threatening letters "General Ludd" or "King Ludd," and "Luddite" has meant a technology resister ever since.
5. EARLGREY
Charles Grey, the 2nd Earl Grey, was British prime minister from 1830 to 1834 and pushed through the Great Reform Act and the abolition of slavery in the empire. The bergamot-scented tea that carries his name is a different matter: he never wrote a word about it, and the first known advertisement for "Earl Grey" tea, from Charlton & Co., dates to 1884, nearly four decades after his death in 1845. Every story about a Chinese mandarin or a grateful diplomat handing him the recipe was told after the fact.
6. YOSEMITE
In 1851, the Mariposa Battalion, a California state militia, entered the valley while pursuing the Ahwahneechee people who lived there. Lafayette Bunnell, the battalion's doctor, proposed naming the valley after what he understood to be the tribe's name, believing it meant "grizzly bear." Linguists now think "Yosemite" comes from a Miwok word meaning "those who kill," the name that neighboring tribes used for the valley's people, who did not call themselves that at all.
7. FERRISWHEEL
Daniel Burnham, chief planner of Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, told a gathering of engineers that the fair needed something that would "out-Eiffel Eiffel," a rival to the tower that had stunned visitors to Paris four years earlier. George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., a Pittsburgh bridge engineer, answered with a 264-foot rotating wheel carrying 36 cars of up to 60 passengers each. The "Ferris wheel)" opened on June 21, 1893, and Ferris, tangled in lawsuits over its profits, died broke three years later.
8. ALGEBRA
Around 820 AD, the Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi wrote a treatise in Baghdad whose title included the Arabic word "al-jabr," meaning "the reunion of broken parts," his term for moving a subtracted quantity to the other side of an equation to restore balance. The same word traveled to Spain in its medical sense: an "algebrista" was a bone-setter, someone who reunited broken limbs, and the trade appears under that name in Spain's first official dictionary in the 18th century. "Algebra" the subject and algebra the orthopedics were, for a while, the same word.
9. CHECKMATE
"Checkmate" comes from the Persian "shah mat," and nearly every chess book will tell you it means "the king is dead." Etymologists mostly disagree. In Persian, "mat" means helpless, defeated, or at a loss, so the phrase is closer to "the king is stuck." The "dead" reading crept in as the game passed through the Arab world, where a similar-sounding verb really does mean "died," and it fit the drama of the moment well enough that nobody bothered to correct it.
10. EAVESDROP
Old English had a word for the strip of ground around a house where rainwater dripped off the roof's edge, and by extension for someone who stood in that strip to listen at the windows. The earliest surviving "eavesdropper" is a real person: a Nottingham court record from October 1487 charges one Henry Rowley with being "a common eavesdropper and night-wanderer." The verb took another century to show up in print, in a 1606 comedy, but Henry was clearly already doing it.
That's today's set, the second of a three-day run. Come back tomorrow for ten more, and if there's a thread running under this batch, it's stories that got better in the retelling: a king who was never dead, a tea recipe nobody wrote down, a machine-breaker who may not have existed, and a valley named for a word its own people never used.