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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 dense forest started out meaning desert, a Roman mineral is misspelled because of a scribe, and the British treasury is named after a tablecloth.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is the name of a flag, and the two men first recorded using it flew flags with no skull on them at all.
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One more beat.
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BonusJOLLY ROGER
The name first appears in print in 1724, in Captain Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates, which reports that Bartholomew Roberts and Francis Spriggs each called their flag the "Jolly Roger." Neither flag was a skull and crossbones; Roberts's showed him standing on two skulls, Spriggs's a skeleton with an hourglass. That suggests the name was generic for any pirate colors. Where it came from is still argued: one theory is the French "joli rouge," pretty red, for the plain red flag that meant no quarter; another is "Old Roger," an English nickname for the devil.
1JUNGLE
Sanskrit "jangala" meant dry, arid, sparsely wooded land, and its Hindi descendant "jangal" meant uncultivated ground of any kind. When British administrators borrowed the word in 1776, they applied it to the wild land beyond the fields, which in Bengal happened to be dense and wet, and by the 1840s "jungle" meant tangled tropical forest, roughly the opposite of the desert it began as.
2OBSIDIAN
Pliny the Elder wrote that the glassy black volcanic stone was discovered in Ethiopia by a Roman named Obsius, so the Latin name was "lapis Obsianus," Obsius's stone. Somewhere in the copying of manuscripts an extra syllable crept in, giving "obsidianus," and it was that misspelled form that English adopted in the 1650s. "Obsidian" honors a man whose name it gets wrong.
3LOOT
Hindi "lลซแนญ," from a Sanskrit root meaning to rob or break, was one of dozens of words East India Company soldiers carried home. "Loot" is recorded in English from 1788, first as a noun for plunder taken in war, then as a verb, and by the 20th century it had lost its military accent entirely.
4LOBSTER
The Romans called the creature "locusta," the same word they used for the locust, apparently because a big armored crustacean looked to them like a giant insect. Old English speakers turned that into "loppestre," possibly under the influence of "loppe," their word for a spider, another jointed thing with too many legs. Modern "lobster" still carries the locust inside it.
5YACHT
Dutch "jacht" means hunt, and a "jachtschip" was a fast, light vessel the Dutch navy used to chase pirates and smugglers in shallow water. In 1660, the City of Amsterdam presented one, the Mary, to Charles II to celebrate his restoration to the throne. The king was delighted, took to racing it against his brother's, and owned more than two dozen "yachts" by the end of his reign, which is how a pirate-hunter became a plaything.
6RHUBARB
The Greeks called the plant "rha," after the Rha, their name for the Volga, along whose banks the root was traded, and later added "barbaron," foreign, to distinguish the imported kind. Medieval Latin fused the two as "rheubarbarum," and "rhubarb" was in English by the late 1300s, centuries before anyone thought to put it in a pie.
7OVATION
A Roman "ovatio" was a lesser triumph: a general who had won a victory without a proper pitched battle, or against an unworthy enemy, was allowed to enter the city on foot or on horseback rather than in a chariot. Plutarch explained the name by the sheep, "ovis," sacrificed at the ceremony in place of a triumph's bull, though most modern scholars derive it from "ovare," to shout for joy. "Ovation" entered English in the 1530s as a historical term and became applause in the 1800s.
8GRENADE
Spanish "granada" is a pomegranate, from Latin "granatum," full of seeds. The early explosive of the 1500s was a hollow iron ball about the size of the fruit, packed with powder and fragments, and the resemblance was obvious enough that the "grenade" took the fruit's name. The soldiers trained to throw them became grenadiers, and the Grenadier Guards still wear the burning-grenade badge.
9EXCHEQUER
Under the Norman kings, England's revenue was reckoned on a table covered with a cloth ruled into squares, like a chessboard, with counters moved between the squares to add up what each sheriff owed. The Anglo-French word for such a board was "escheker," a cousin of "chess," and both go back through Arabic to the Persian "shah," king. The "exchequer" is a tablecloth, and the Chancellor of it is, etymologically, in charge of the tablecloth.
10RECIPE
"Recipe" is the Latin imperative "take," and it was the first word of a physician's prescription: "take" so many grains of this, so many drops of that. The abbreviation Rx, with the stroke through the leg of the R, still marks prescriptions today. The word crossed into the kitchen only in the 1740s, when cookbook writers borrowed the doctors' formula for their own lists of ingredients, and "recipe" has meant dinner ever since.
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 arrived by ship: a pirate-hunter, a pirate flag, a Caribbean crustacean's Roman name, and a plant named for the river it came down.