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Thursday, September 17, 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, close this tab, go solve today's puzzle, and come back afterward. We'll wait.
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Somewhere below, the most common word in the English-speaking world's phone calls was chosen in a letter, a drug's inventor tested it on his own hangover, and a piece of internet punctuation was dismissed as being for nerds.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is the name of a building that got its color sixteen years before the event everyone credits for it.
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One more beat.
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The bonus word: WHITE HOUSE
The popular story is that the President's House was painted white to hide the scorch marks after British troops burned it in August 1814. It's a good story, and it's wrong. The building's porous Aquia sandstone got a lime-based whitewash in 1798, as soon as the walls were finished, to keep water from seeping in and freezing. Congressmen were already calling it the "White House" in 1812, before the war started, and it got proper white lead paint in 1818. The nickname stayed unofficial for another eighty years, until Theodore Roosevelt had it printed on the stationery in October 1901.
1. WIKIPEDIA
Ward Cunningham launched the first wiki website in March 1995 and named it after the Wiki Wiki Shuttle, the bus that a counter agent at Honolulu International Airport had once told him to take between terminals; "wiki" is Hawaiian for "quick." When Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger used his software to build a free encyclopedia, launched on January 15, 2001, they stitched the two words together, and "Wikipedia" was born.
2. HASHTAG
On August 23, 2007, open-source advocate Chris Messina posted a question on Twitter: "how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp?" He pitched the idea to the company directly and was told, in his telling, that "these things are for nerds." Users disagreed. That fall, people tracking the San Diego wildfires started tagging updates with #sandiegofire, and by 2009 Twitter had given in and made every "hashtag" a clickable link.
3. IBUPROFEN
Stewart Adams and John Nicholson, researchers at the Boots pharmacy chain in Nottingham, first synthesized the compound in 1961 while hunting for a safer alternative to aspirin. The name is a compression of its chemical name, isobutylphenyl propionic acid. Adams tested it on himself more than once, most memorably in 1971, when he woke with a vodka hangover before a speech at a conference in Moscow, took 600 milligrams of "ibuprofen," and reported that it worked fine.
4. TABASCO
Edmund McIlhenny started selling his pepper sauce in 1868 from Avery Island, a salt dome in the Louisiana bayou, and with glass scarce after the Civil War he bottled the first batches in discarded cologne bottles with sprinkler tops, which is why "Tabasco" still comes in a tiny bottle with a narrow neck. The name is borrowed from the Mexican state where the pepper seeds are said to have originated, though how they reached Louisiana is a story the family has never quite pinned down.
5. EMPATHY
German philosophers of the late 19th century, Robert Vischer and Theodor Lipps among them, used the word "Einfühlung," literally "feeling into," to describe the way a viewer projects themselves into a painting or a landscape. In 1909, the British-born psychologist Edward Titchener, working at Cornell, needed an English equivalent and built "empathy" from Greek roots meaning roughly the same thing. It started as a term about art appreciation and only later became a word about other people.
6. HELLO
On August 15, 1877, Thomas Edison wrote to T.B.A. David, president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company of Pittsburgh, suggesting that "hello" was the right word to shout into a telephone to get the other party's attention. Alexander Graham Bell, the phone's inventor, preferred "ahoy," and reportedly kept using it for the rest of his life. Edison's word won, and "hello girl" became the nickname for the women who ran the switchboards.
7. OKTOBERFEST
On October 12, 1810, Bavaria's Crown Prince Ludwig married Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen, and the citizens of Munich were invited to a public celebration on a meadow outside the city gates. The centerpiece, on October 17, was a horse race, and the meadow was christened the Theresienwiese, Therese's Meadow, in the bride's honor. The race was repeated the next year, then the year after, and "Oktoberfest" has been held on the same meadow, with beer gradually elbowing out the horses, ever since.
8. UMAMI
In 1908, Tokyo chemist Kikunae Ikeda set out to identify what gave kombu seaweed broth its distinctive savory depth, and isolated monosodium glutamate as the answer. He coined "umami" for the taste, from the Japanese "umai," delicious, and "mi," taste, and had a businessman commercialize the crystals as Ajinomoto, "the essence of taste." It took until the early 2000s for Western science to accept umami as a true fifth basic taste with its own receptors.
9. SHRAPNEL
In 1784, Henry Shrapnel, a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, designed a hollow cannonball filled with musket balls and a small bursting charge, timed by a fuse to explode in the air above enemy troops. The British Army adopted it in 1803 as "spherical case shot," and it made its mark at Waterloo. Shrapnel spent decades lobbying for credit and a pension, and got the name at least: "shrapnel" now means any flying fragment from any explosion, most of which have nothing to do with his design.
10. ENDORPHIN
In 1975, researchers in Aberdeen identified naturally occurring molecules in the brain that bound to the same receptors as opium-derived painkillers. The name "endorphin" was coined that same year by fusing "endogenous," from a Greek root meaning "within," with "morphine," the drug they resembled: literally, the morphine you make yourself. The "runner's high" association came a few years later and is still argued about.
That's today's set, and the last of a three-day run. Come back tomorrow for another ten, and if there's a thread running under this batch, it's names that had to beat a rival: a whitewash that outlasted a war story, a greeting that beat "ahoy," a symbol that beat "for nerds," and a fifth taste that took a century to beat four.