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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 condiment started as fish sauce, the world's most gossipy newspapers are named after a pill, and Britain hid an atomic bomb behind the dullest name it could think of.

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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word was invented for the radio, not the page, and the reason usually given for it is probably wrong.

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BonusKRYPTONITE

Superman had been in comics for five years when "kryptonite" first appeared, and it didn't appear in a comic. It debuted on June 3, 1943, in The Adventures of Superman radio serial, in an episode about a meteor from his home planet. The story everyone tells is that the writers invented it so that voice actor Bud Collyer could take a vacation while Superman lay weakened and someone else groaned into the microphone. Radio historian Michael J. Hayde has pointed out that Superman is never actually exposed to the stuff in that first episode, and argues it was introduced to let him discover his own origin. The comics didn't catch up until Superman #61 in November 1949.

1KETCHUP

The word comes from the Hokkien Chinese "kΓͺ-tsiap," a sauce of fermented fish, which British traders encountered in Southeast Asia in the late 1600s and brought home. English cooks spent the next century making "ketchup" out of mushrooms, walnuts, oysters, and anchovies. Tomatoes didn't enter the picture until 1812, when Philadelphia horticulturist James Mease published the first known tomato recipe, made with brandy and no sugar or vinegar, and it took Heinz's 1876 version to make it the sweet, thick sauce the word means today.

The full story: Where does the word "ketchup" come from? →

2RESTAURANT

In 18th-century Paris, a "restaurant" was a thing you drank: a concentrated meat broth, from the French for "restoring," sold to the delicate as a health food. The story that a soup seller named Boulanger opened the first sit-down establishment in 1765, under a sign inviting the weary to come and be restored, was first printed in 1853, nearly ninety years later, and historians now treat it as a legend. The word shifted from the broth to the shop regardless, and English, which already had "eating house," "cook's shop," and "chop shop," borrowed the French because it sounded better.

3YUKON

On August 1, 1845, Hudson's Bay Company trader John Bell wrote to his superiors that after "much trouble and difficulties" he had finally reached the "Youcon, or white water River, so named by the natives from the pale colour of its water." The Gwich'in phrase, roughly "chΕ³Ε³ gΔ…Δ―Δ― han," describes the milky glacial runoff, and it became the name of the river, then in 1898 of the "Yukon" Territory carved out during the Klondike gold rush.

4PALACE

The Palatine Hill was the most fashionable address in Rome, and after Augustus built his house there, his successors expanded it until the emperor's residence covered the hill. "Palatium," the hill's name, became the word for the building, then for any grand residence, and passed through French into English as "palace." Every palace in the world is named, at one remove, after a hill.

5TABLOID

Burroughs, Wellcome & Company registered "Tabloid" as a trademark on March 14, 1884, for its compressed medicine tablets, and defended it fiercely. The press caught the word anyway: on January 1, 1901, Alfred Harmsworth produced a one-day experimental edition of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, half the usual size and stripped to essentials, and called it "tabloid journalism," news you could swallow in sixty seconds. The compliment curdled over the following decades, and "tabloid" now means something closer to what the drug company feared.

6OPPORTUNITY

The Latin "ob portum" means "toward the harbor," and "opportunus" described a wind blowing that way, the one condition a sailor waits for. "Opportunity" kept the sense of a favorable moment and lost the boat.

7NAUSEA

The Greek "naus" means ship, and "nausia" was, specifically, the sickness you got on one. Latin borrowed it, English took it in the 1400s, and "nausea" has since been extended to every kind of queasiness, though the word still contains the vessel that caused the first cases. "Nautical" and "astronaut" are its cousins.

8INFANTRY

In medieval Italy, an "infante" was a youth, and by extension one of the young men who marched on foot beside a mounted knight, the low end of a feudal army. Italian "infanteria," via French, reached English in the 1570s as "infantry." The word shares its root with "infant," which literally means "not speaking"; the soldiers were expected to keep quiet too.

9TUBEALLOYS

When Britain authorized its atomic bomb program in August 1941, the civil servant in charge, Sir John Anderson, and the ICI chemist running it, Wallace Akers, needed a name that would attract no attention whatsoever. They chose "Tube Alloys," which was, as the official history put it, "deliberately chosen to be meaningless, with a specious air of probability about it." Britain could not afford the project while being bombed, and the Quebec Agreement of August 1943 folded it into the Manhattan Project.

10EIGHTBALL

In the pool game named for it, sinking the black ball before you've cleared your own loses you the game, so a position where the ball you need sits behind it is hopeless. "Behind the eight ball" first appears in print on February 8, 1923, in the Buffalo Courier, in a quote from boxer Rocky Kansas predicting where an opponent would finish, and three more Buffalo papers used it that year before it spread. Not bad for a phrase that now sounds like it was always there.

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 hide what they are: a code name built to be forgettable, a fish sauce that became a tomato sauce, and a grand word for a house that is really the name of a hill.