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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, one of the world's most-used words was a typo in a technical memo, a band is named after loose change, and the biggest reference books in the world owe their name to a Latin scribe who couldn't read Greek.

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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word means "go" because of what kept falling off Victorian railway lamps.

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One more beat.

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BonusGREEN LIGHT

On early railways, a plain white lamp meant "all clear," red meant stop, and green meant caution. The trouble was that the colored glass was a separate piece in front of the flame, and when a red lens fell off, was smashed, or was stolen, the signal behind it turned white: a stop signal that read as "go." After a string of such accidents, the Great Northern Railway in 1876 became the first to use green for "clear," and in 1892 Britain's Board of Trade required it on every new line. Green stuck, yellow later took over caution, and "green light" had become an everyday phrase for permission by the 1930s.

1GAZETTE

In the mid-1500s, during Venice's wars with the Ottoman Empire, the city's government circulated handwritten news sheets that could be read for the price of a small copper coin, the gazeta. The coin's name attached itself to the sheet, and "gazette" reached English in 1665, when the royal court, hiding from the plague in Oxford, began publishing the Oxford Gazette, soon renamed the London Gazette and still published today. A rival theory traces the word to the Italian for "magpie," a bird known for chatter, which is at least a fair description of some newspapers.

2RUBICON

The Rubicon is a modest river in northern Italy that once marked the boundary between the province of Cisalpine Gaul and Italy proper. Roman law forbade a general from bringing his army across it, so when Julius Caesar marched his legions over the "Rubicon" in January 49 BC, reportedly remarking that the die was cast, he was committing to civil war with no way back. Historians spent centuries arguing over which of several small streams was the real one; Italy settled the matter by decree in 1933.

3ENCYCLOPEDIA

The Greeks spoke of "enkyklios paideia," the "circle of learning," the rounded general education that a free citizen was expected to have. Latin writers copying the phrase ran the two words together as though they were one, and the ghost word stuck. "Encyclopedia" entered English in the 1530s meaning a well-rounded education, and only in the 1640s came to mean a book that tried to contain one.

4ENZYME

Brewers had known for centuries that yeast turned sugar into alcohol, but by the 1870s it was clear that something inside the yeast, not the living cell itself, was doing the work. In 1877, German physiologist Wilhelm KΓΌhne coined "enzyme" from Greek words meaning "in yeast" to name these agents, distinguishing them from the "organized ferments" that were alive. The word now covers thousands of proteins that have nothing to do with beer.

5NICKELBACK

Before the band formed in Hanna, Alberta, in 1995, bassist Mike Kroeger worked the counter at a Starbucks, where a coffee cost $1.95 and he spent his shifts handing customers a nickel in change and saying "here's your nickel back." When the band needed a name, that phrase was the one everyone had heard most. "Nickelback" went on to sell more than 50 million records, which is a lot of nickels.

6LEOPARD

Ancient naturalists were sure the spotted big cat was a hybrid: the offspring of a lion and a "pard," their word for a panther. So they named it exactly that, "leopardos," lion-panther, and the belief survived in bestiaries for a thousand years. The "leopard" is not a hybrid of anything, but it still carries both parents in its name.

7INTERNET

In December 1974, Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine published a specification for a protocol to link separate computer networks together, and somewhere in the document the mouthful "internetworking" got clipped to "internet," as in "internet packet." The word stayed lowercase jargon among engineers for a decade before it became the proper name of the thing itself. "Internet," in other words, started life as an abbreviation nobody bothered to spell out.

8GYMNASIUM

The Greek word "gymnos" means naked, and a "gymnasium" was, literally, a place for exercising naked, which is how Greek athletes trained and competed. The buildings doubled as places for lectures and philosophy, which is why in German-speaking countries a Gymnasium is a secondary school and nobody takes their clothes off.

9HONCHO

American soldiers stationed in occupied Japan after 1945, and again in Korea a few years later, picked up the Japanese "hanchō," meaning the leader of a squad or work group, and brought it home as slang for whoever was in charge. "Honcho" was in print in American English by the early 1950s, usually in the phrase "head honcho," which is redundant, since the Japanese already includes the "head."

10TREADMILL

The first "treadmill" was not for fitness. English engineer William Cubitt introduced it in 1818 as a punishment for prisoners he considered idle, a huge wheel with steps that inmates climbed for hours, sometimes grinding grain or pumping water and sometimes nothing at all. Prisons at Bury St Edmunds and Brixton installed the first ones, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to one in 1895, and Britain didn't abolish the penal treadwheel until 1902. The gym version arrived in the 1960s with a much better marketing story.

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 were never meant to be the final word: a copyist's slip, an engineer's abbreviation, a coin's name, and a punishment that became a fitness plan.