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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 sandwich chain changed its name three times before landing on the version everyone knows, a wireless standard is secretly named for a king with a bad tooth, and a rock band dropped a letter so Americans would pronounce it correctly.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word started out under a much less elegant working title in its creator's own early drafts.
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One more beat.
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BonusLIGHTSABER
George Lucas's earliest Star Wars scripts, drafted in the early 1970s, called the Jedi's signature weapon a "lazersword," a fairly blunt piece of pulp sci-fi terminology that survived through several revisions. By the time the film reached production in 1976, the crew had settled on the more evocative "lightsaber," and prop makers built the first working hilts from old Graflex camera flash handles, a detail fans have spent decades hunting down surplus units to replicate.
1LED ZEPPELIN
According to drummer Keith Moon, when musicians from The Who and The Yardbirds floated the idea of forming a supergroup together in 1966, Moon joked that it would go over "like a lead balloon." The phrase stuck in Jimmy Page's memory, and when he formed his own band two years later he adapted it into "Lead Zeppelin," pairing a spectacular flop with the biggest, most flammable airship anyone could think of. Manager Peter Grant dropped the "a" from "Lead" before the first single shipped, worried American fans would mispronounce it "leed," and "Led Zeppelin" has been spelled that way ever since.
2INDONESIA
The name is younger than the islands it describes by centuries: 19th-century European scholars studying the archipelago, including the English ethnologist George Windsor Earl, proposed compound names built from Greek roots, one meaning India and the other island, to describe the region between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Nationalist writers in the archipelago adopted "Indonesia" for themselves in the early 20th century, and it became the official name of the independent republic in 1945, a scholarly coinage repurposed as a rallying cry.
3GUCCI
As a teenager in the 1890s, Guccio Gucci left Florence for London, where he worked as a porter at the Savoy Hotel, hauling the trunks and cases of wealthy guests and absorbing an education in what elegant luggage was supposed to look like. He returned home and opened a small leather goods shop on Florence's Via della Vigna Nuova in 1921, selling imported luggage before his own workshop began producing it. A century later, "Gucci" is still headquartered in the city where a hotel porter first decided he could do better.
4HALLOWEEN
The Christian church calendar sets October 31 as the eve of All Hallows' Day, better known now as All Saints' Day, and "hallow," an old English word for a holy person, gave the evening its original full name, All Hallows' Even. Centuries of casual pronunciation wore the phrase down through "Hallowe'en" to today's "Halloween," a contraction so old that the holiday's costumes and candy are a far more recent addition than its actual name.
5TANGO
Nobody agrees on where the word came from before it became a dance: some trace it to a Spanish term imitating a drumbeat, others to Kikongo or other West African languages carried across the Atlantic by the diaspora communities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, where the dance itself took shape in the late 19th century among immigrants, sailors, and dockworkers in the port neighborhoods. Whatever its roots, "tango" had crossed the ocean back to Parisian ballrooms by 1913, arriving in Europe as an exotic import from a city most of its new dancers had never seen.
6SUBWAY
Seventeen-year-old Fred DeLuca opened his first sandwich shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1965 with a loan from family friend Peter Buck, calling it Pete's Super Submarines. Radio ads were the problem: announcers saying "Pete's Submarines" over the air reportedly came out sounding like "Pizza Marines," so the name was shortened first to Pete's Subs, then Pete's Subway, before settling into simply "Subway" by 1972, four name changes in seven years before the chain found the one that would eventually outgrow McDonald's in total location count.
7AVANT GARDE
French military writers had used the phrase for the troops marching ahead of the main army since medieval times, but its leap into art and politics is usually dated to 1825, when the utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon and his follower Olinde Rodrigues wrote a dialogue calling on artists to serve as society's own advance guard, using their work to drag the public toward social reform before politicians and scientists could catch up. The military metaphor outlived Saint-Simon's movement by a long way, and "avant-garde" has described the leading edge of art ever since, still carrying its original whiff of gunpowder.
8BLUETOOTH
Harald Gormsson, who ruled Denmark and Norway in the 10th century, picked up the nickname Bluetooth according to a 12th-century chronicle, apparently for a conspicuously dark or damaged tooth, and is remembered for uniting warring Danish tribes and introducing Christianity to the kingdom. When Intel engineer Jim Kardach helped develop a short-range wireless standard in 1997, he borrowed the king's nickname as a placeholder, reasoning that the technology was meant to unite communication protocols the way Harald had united Denmark, and the working title outran every proposed replacement. The "Bluetooth" logo even encodes the king's own initials, combining two Nordic runes into one symbol.
9EL NINO
Peruvian fishermen along the country's northern coast noticed, well before scientists took interest, that a warm ocean current periodically pushed in around late December, scattering the cold-water fish stocks their livelihoods depended on. They named the current "El Nino," the boy, referring to the Christ child, since it typically arrived in time for Christmas, and only in the 20th century did meteorologists realize the local nuisance was one end of a much larger climate pattern that reshapes weather across the entire Pacific.
10RED CROSS
Swiss businessman Henry Dunant, horrified by the suffering he witnessed among wounded soldiers after the 1859 Battle of Solferino, campaigned for a neutral organization to care for casualties on any side of a conflict, and the relief committee he helped found in 1863 needed an emblem any battlefield medic could recognize instantly. It chose a simple color reversal of the Swiss flag itself, a white cross on red becoming a red cross on white, a quiet tribute to Dunant's home country that made the "Red Cross" symbol politically neutral by design from its very first use.
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 names that started as somebody's placeholder or private joke and simply never got replaced: a lazersword that grew up, a Danish king's nickname borrowed for a wireless standard, and a sandwich shop that took four tries to land on the name that stuck.