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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 word for medicine started out as an argument against aliens, a novelist admitted his most famous coinage meant nothing, and Churchill's most famous phrase turns out to have been Goebbels's first.

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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is something you probably have in your pocket, and it was named in a utopian novel about the year 2000.

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BonusCREDIT CARD

Edward Bellamy's 1888 novel Looking Backward follows a Bostonian who falls asleep in 1887 and wakes in the year 2000 to find a socialist utopia where every citizen is issued an equal allowance on a "credit card," a pasteboard card punched at the store with each purchase. Bellamy used the phrase eleven times, and the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies and spawned "Bellamy clubs" across the country. The first real card that worked across multiple merchants, Diners Club, didn't appear until 1950, and it ran on a very different idea of who owed whom.

1CYBERSPACE

William Gibson first wrote "cyberspace" in his 1982 short story Burning Chrome and built the 1984 novel Neuromancer around it. Asked years later how he'd come up with the word, he said all he knew when he coined it was that "it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless." A pair of Danish artists had used it for an architecture studio in the late 1960s, but with no digital meaning at all, so the internet's nickname belongs to Gibson.

2RICKSHAW

The "rickshaw" is a clipped English version of the Japanese jinrikisha, literally "human-powered vehicle." The most accepted account credits three Tokyo men, Izumi Yosuke, Takayama Kosuke, and Suzuki Tokujiro, with inventing it in 1869; the city licensed them to build it in 1870, and by 1872 there were roughly 40,000 on Japan's streets.

3ECONOMY

"Economy" comes from the Greek oikonomia, household management, built from the words for "house" and "law" or "custom." For most of its life in English it meant running a home thriftily, and only in the 17th century did writers start applying "political economy" to the management of a whole state, before the adjective quietly fell away.

4DARKMATTER

In 1933, the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky measured how fast galaxies in the Coma cluster were moving and found they should have flown apart long ago unless the cluster held far more mass than its stars could account for. He called the missing material "dunkle Materie" in his German-language paper, and "dark matter" has been the working name for the universe's invisible majority ever since, though Zwicky's abrasive habit of calling colleagues "spherical bastards" kept him from getting much credit in his lifetime.

5IRONCURTAIN

Churchill's March 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri, declaring that "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent," made the phrase famous, but he didn't invent it. The Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov wrote of "an iron curtain" descending on Russian history in 1918, the British socialist Ethel Snowden used it about the Soviet border in 1920, and Joseph Goebbels used it in a February 1945 newspaper column warning what would follow a Soviet victory. Churchill himself had used "iron curtain" in a telegram to Truman in May 1945, ten months before Fulton.

6TUPPERWARE

Earl Tupper, a former DuPont chemist, took a black, foul-smelling refinery byproduct called polyethylene slag and purified it into a clean, flexible plastic, then designed a lid whose airtight seal he modeled on a paint can's. "Tupperware" launched in 1946 and sold poorly in stores, where nobody knew how to "burp" the lid, until a single mother named Brownie Wise showed the company that demonstrating it at home parties worked, and Tupper pulled the product from retail entirely in the early 1950s.

7CHARTREUSE

The Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery near Grenoble have made their herbal liqueur, from a recipe of some 130 plants that only two monks know at any time, since 1737, with the green version arriving in 1764. The color came second: "chartreuse" as a name for that yellow-green shade is first recorded in English in the 1880s, borrowed from the drink, not the other way around.

8ANTIBIOTIC

The word "antibiotic" has had three lives. Matthew Maury, a U.S. naval officer and oceanographer, coined it in 1860 to mean "against life" in an argument that other planets couldn't be inhabited. The French microbiologist Paul Vuillemin borrowed it in 1890 for one organism destroying another. And Selman Waksman, whose Rutgers lab discovered streptomycin, gave it the modern meaning in the early 1940s: a substance made by a microbe that kills or stops other microbes.

9RAYON

Manufacturers had been selling regenerated cellulose fiber as "artificial silk" since the 1880s, and the name made it sound like a knockoff. In 1924 the National Retail Dry Goods Association convened a committee to find a better one. "Glos" was proposed and laughed off, and "rayon" won, from the French word for a ray of light, a nod to the fabric's sheen.

10DEADRINGER

In 19th-century American horse racing, a "ringer" was a good horse entered fraudulently under a slower horse's name so insiders could clean up at the betting window, the word borrowed from an older bell-ringing phrase for substituting one thing for another. "Dead" is just an intensifier, as in "dead center," and the earliest known "dead ringer" appears in an 1893 Ohio newspaper. The popular story about bells tied to coffins for people buried alive is invented.

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 words that changed jobs: a word against aliens that became a medicine, a word for running a household that became a word for running a country, and a novelist's admitted nonsense that became the address of the modern world.