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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, go do that first. This post will keep.
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Somewhere below, the deadliest weapon of the First World War is named after plumbing, a word that means "blow up" used to mean "boo," and midday used to be three in the afternoon.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is one of the most photographed shapes on Earth, and its name is about the grass at the bottom, not the point at the top.
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BonusMATTERHORN
The "Matterhorn" is German for "meadow peak": "Matte" is the word for an alpine pasture, and "Horn" is a peak, in this case one carved into a near-perfect pyramid by Ice Age glaciers. The meadow in question is the one at its base, the valley floor that gives Zermatt ("to the meadow") its name too. The Romans called the mountain Mons Silvius, and the Italian name on the other side of the border, Cervino, is a worn-down descendant of that.
1MONSOON
Arab sailors called the season when the Indian Ocean's winds reversed by the plain word for "season," "mawsim." Portuguese navigators who arrived in the 1500s heard it as "monção," and English took it from them as "monsoon" in the 1580s. The word has since drifted from the wind to the rains the wind brings.
2ARMADA
"Armada" is simply the Spanish for "armed," the feminine past participle of "armar," and in Spanish it still means any navy. English borrowed it in the 1530s as a general word for a fleet, and then 1588 happened. The 130 ships Philip II sent against England were officially the "Grande y Felicísima Armada," the great and most fortunate fleet, a name that did not age well; the "Invincible" was an English joke applied afterward.
3TANK
When Britain began building armored fighting vehicles in 1915, the Landship Committee needed a cover name, since "landship" said too much. Workers at the Foster's factory in Lincoln were told the riveted steel hulls were mobile water containers for the Mesopotamian front. "Water carrier" was floated and rejected, because the committee would have become the W.C. Committee, and "tank" was adopted as the official designation in December 1915. The word stuck in every language, so the most fearsome land weapon of the century is named after a cistern.
4TORNADO
Spanish "tronada" means a thunderstorm, from "tronar," to thunder. English sailors picked it up in the 1550s for the violent squalls of the tropical Atlantic, and over the next decades the spelling wandered through "ternado" and "turnado" before settling as "tornado," the letters swapped under the pull of Spanish "tornar," to turn. The word meant a whirlwind by the 1620s and the funnel cloud of the American plains only from 1849.
5EXPLODE
Latin "explodere" meant to drive an actor off the stage by clapping and hissing, from "ex," out, and "plaudere," to clap, the same root as "applaud." When "explode" entered English in the 1530s it kept that sense: to reject with scorn. The meaning shifted to "drive out with sudden noise" in the 1650s and only reached "blow up" in the 1790s, which means for most of its history you could explode an argument but not a building.
6ROCKET
Italian "rocchetta" is a little bobbin, the spindle a thread winds around, and the early gunpowder devices of the 1500s had exactly that shape: a cylinder tapering to a point. English borrowed "rocket" in the 1610s for fireworks and signal flares. The salad green of the same name is unrelated, coming from Latin "eruca."
7HIMALAYA
"Himalaya" is Sanskrit for "abode of snow," from "hima," snow, and "alaya," dwelling. "Hima" descends from the same ancient root as Latin "hiems," winter, which is why "hibernate" is a distant cousin of the mountains, and why the Greek "chimaira," a she-goat one winter old, gave us "chimera."
8OHIO
The Seneca called the river "ohi:yo'," meaning "good river," and applied the name to the Allegheny as well, which they regarded as the same stream rather than a tributary. French explorers translated it as "la Belle Rivière." When the territory north of the river became a state in 1803, it took the river's name, and "Ohio" has been a compliment to the water ever since.
9RENEGADE
Spanish "renegado" meant one who has denied again, from "renegar," and it was used specifically for a Christian who had converted to Islam, a common enough figure in the Mediterranean of the 1500s that the word was needed. English took it as "renegade" in the 1580s, and within a century it had loosened to mean any deserter or turncoat, then eventually anyone who breaks with convention.
10NOON
Latin "nona hora" was the ninth hour of daylight, which by Roman reckoning fell around 3 p.m., and Old English "non" meant the same. Then, in the 1100s, the word slid three hours earlier. Nobody is certain why; the leading theory is that monastic communities, whose daily fast ended at the office of nones, found reasons to celebrate it earlier and earlier, until "noon" meant midday and the ninth hour had been quietly forgotten.
That's today's set, and the first of a new 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 stage insult that became an explosion, a cistern that became a weapon, and a time of day that moved three hours because the monks were hungry.