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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, close this tab, go solve today's puzzle, and come back afterward. We'll wait.
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Somewhere below, a band misspelled its own name to save money on a web address, an ape got its name from a 2,500-year-old travel log, and a famous landmark was named for gold two years before anyone found any.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word was originally Greek, chosen by a man who was thinking about a harbor on the other side of the world.
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BonusGOLDEN GATE
On July 1, 1846, the explorer John C. Fremont looked at the strait connecting San Francisco Bay to the Pacific and named it Chrysopylae, Greek for "Golden Gate," on the model of Chrysoceras, the Golden Horn, the harbor of ancient Byzantium. He explained that the strait would be "a golden gate to trade with the Orient." Gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in January 1848, eighteen months later, and the name suddenly looked like prophecy. The bridge that borrowed the name didn't open until 1937.
1GEYSER
Iceland has plenty of spouting hot springs, and its own words for them, but one spring in the Haukadalur valley was simply called Geysir, "the gusher," from an Old Norse verb meaning to gush. Foreign visitors in the 18th century took that one spring's proper name and applied it to every spouting hot spring on Earth, and "geyser" entered English around 1780. Old Faithful, in other words, is named after a specific hole in the ground in Iceland.
2OVERTHETOP
In the trenches of the First World War, "over the top" was the order to climb the parapet and advance across no man's land into machine-gun fire. An American volunteer, Arthur Guy Empey, used it as the title of his 1917 memoir and defined it as "the order for the men to charge the German lines." Within a couple of years of the armistice, British newspapers were using it for anything that went further than it needed to, and the sense of excess has outlived the trenches.
3LINKINPARK
The band had already been Xero and Hybrid Theory when their label told them to change the name again in 1999. They settled on the name of a Santa Monica park honoring Abraham Lincoln, but as Mike Shinoda has explained, they wanted the .com address, the correctly spelled one was already taken, and so "Linkin Park" was spelled to match a domain they could actually buy. The park itself has since been renamed for a local civic leader, so the original name survives mainly in the misspelling.
4DECIBEL
Until the 1920s, telephone engineers measured signal loss in "miles of standard cable," which was exactly as clumsy as it sounds. In 1924, Bell Telephone Laboratories proposed a logarithmic "transmission unit" instead, and in 1928 renamed it the "decibel": one-tenth of a bel, a unit honoring Alexander Graham Bell. Almost nobody uses the full bel, which is why the fractional version became the famous one.
5ELECTRIC
The Greeks knew that rubbed amber attracts feathers and bits of straw, and their word for amber was elektron. In 1600, the English physician William Gilbert published De Magnete, the first serious study of magnetism, and coined the Latin "electricus," "amber-like," for any substance that behaved that way. Sir Thomas Browne brought "electric" into English in the 1640s, long before anyone had a wire to run it through.
6NEWBALANCE
William J. Riley, an Irish immigrant in Boston, founded the "New Balance" Arch Support Company in 1906 to make flexible inserts for people who stood all day. Company lore holds that he designed the three-point support after watching chickens in his yard balance on three toes, and that he kept a chicken foot on his desk to demonstrate the principle to customers. The company didn't make a running shoe until 1938, and didn't become a sneaker brand until decades after that.
7GORILLA
Around 500 BC, the Carthaginian navigator Hanno sailed down the West African coast and reported meeting hairy "wild women" that his interpreters called gorillai; his men killed three and brought the skins home. In 1847, the American missionary and physician Thomas Savage, describing skulls sent from Liberia, borrowed the word from a Greek translation of Hanno's account to name the largest ape. Hanno's creatures were probably chimpanzees, and whether "gorillai" was really an African word or a Greek garbling of one remains unknown. The "gorilla" got a 2,300-year-old name from an animal that wasn't one.
8ABOVEBOARD
Keep your hands on top of the table and nobody can accuse you of dealing from the bottom of the deck. "Above board" started as literal card-table etiquette, and the Elizabethan pamphleteer Thomas Nashe made it a metaphor in 1594, writing that Satan "plays above-board boldly," then used it again in 1599 for a suitor who "durst not deal above-board" with a girl's disapproving parents.
9TRENCHCOAT
Burberry and Aquascutum have argued for a century over who invented the "trench coat," and both have a case: Aquascutum was waterproofing wool in the 1850s, and Thomas Burberry patented gabardine in 1879 and a belted officer's coat in 1912. What's certain is that the First World War turned a rainproof for gentlemen into an officer's uniform, with D-rings for gear, epaulettes for rank, and a storm flap for the rain, and that the name first appeared in print in a 1916 tailoring trade journal.
10EGGPLANT
The varieties Europeans first grew in the 1700s bore small, whitish fruits about the size and shape of a goose egg, and "eggplant" was a literal description when it was recorded in the mid-1700s. The large purple kind took over the market later, leaving English speakers with a name that no longer describes anything on the plate, while British English kept the French "aubergine" and sidestepped the problem entirely.
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 outlived what they described: a fruit that's no longer white, a park that's been renamed, a strait named for gold before the gold, and an ape named for a creature that was probably something else.