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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, an element was named before anyone had touched it, a flower is named after a hat, and the word for a gig worker was written by the author of Ivanhoe.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is a measuring system whose most famous number, the one on your thermometer, was an accident of a later correction.
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BonusFAHRENHEIT
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a German instrument maker working in Amsterdam, published his scale in 1724 with two fixed points: zero was the coldest thing he could reliably produce, a slush of ice, water, and ammonium chloride, and 96 was the temperature of a healthy human body, chosen because it divides neatly by twelve. Water froze at 32 and boiled somewhere near 212, but those were observations, not definitions. In the 1770s a Royal Society committee reversed that, fixing water's freezing and boiling points at exactly 32 and 212 and letting everything else float, and body temperature floated up to the 98.6 that "Fahrenheit" thermometers have shown ever since.
1FREELANCE
The earliest known "free lance" is in Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, published in 1819, where a baron boasts of the paid company of "Free Lances" he can put in the field: mercenary knights whose weapons were pledged to no lord. Scott may have revived rather than invented it, but the record starts with him. By the 1860s "freelance" described politicians unattached to a party, and by the 1880s writers unattached to a paper, and the gig economy inherited a word for a hired sword.
2APRICOT
The Romans called it "praecoquum," early-ripening, because it fruited before the peach. Greek borrowed that, Arabic borrowed the Greek as "al-barquq," Spanish and Portuguese borrowed the Arabic, and English got "abrecock" in the 1550s. The modern spelling came later, when French and English writers reshaped it to look like Latin "apricus," sunny, a folk etymology that fit the fruit so well it stuck. "Apricot" has been around the Mediterranean twice.
3HELIUM
On August 18, 1868, the French astronomer Pierre Janssen pointed a spectroscope at a solar eclipse in India and saw a bright yellow line that matched nothing known. Norman Lockyer in England saw the same line without an eclipse and named the element for Helios, the Greek sun god. Chemists were skeptical of an element that existed only in the Sun until 1895, when William Ramsay released "helium" from a uranium mineral in a London laboratory and matched the line, 27 years after it was named.
4RODEO
Spanish "rodeo" is a rounding up, from "rodear," to go around, and on the ranches of Mexico and California it meant the seasonal gathering of cattle for branding and counting. The contest grew out of the work: cowboys competed at the skills the roundup demanded. Several towns claim the first organized "rodeo," and Prescott, Arizona, has the strongest paperwork, with prizes and admission charged on July 4, 1888.
5ENGINE
Latin "ingenium" meant inborn talent or cleverness, the root of "ingenious." When "engine" entered English in the 1300s it meant the product of such cleverness: a contrivance, a trick, a siege machine, even a plot. Any clever device was an engine for five centuries, which is why a cotton gin is an engine with the middle worn off. The narrowing to machines that convert energy into motion only happened in the 1800s, with steam.
6NOSTRIL
Old English "nosþyrl" is "nose" plus "thyrel," a hole, from a verb meaning to bore through. The same verb, "thyrlian," to pierce, gave English "thrill," which meant to run something through until the 1500s and then softened into being pierced by emotion. A "nostril" and a thrill are, at the root, the same hole.
7HAMMOCK
On November 3, 1492, three weeks after his first landfall, Columbus noted in his journal that people paddled out to the ships to trade cotton and "nets in which they sleep," and he wrote down the Taíno word for them: hamacas. Spanish took the word straight from the Taíno, English took it from Spanish in the 1550s, and sailors adopted the thing itself as soon as they saw it. "Hammock" is one of the first American words in a European language.
8ESCAPE
Vulgar Latin "excappare" is literally "out of the cape": to slip free of your cloak and leave your pursuer holding it. The image is of a captive wriggling out of a garment someone has grabbed. French wore it down to "eschaper," and "escape" reached English around 1300, along with the cloak that gives "cape," "chapel," and "chaperone" their common root.
9IRONY
Greek "eironeia" meant feigned ignorance, from "eiron," a dissembler, and it was the name Plato's contemporaries gave to Socrates's habit of pretending to know nothing so that his opponents would talk themselves into a corner. "Irony" entered English in the early 1500s as a term of rhetoric, saying the opposite of what you mean. The sense of a cruel twist of fate is a 19th-century addition, and the one most people now argue about.
10TULIP
Persian "dulband" is a turban, and Turkish speakers used a form of the word, "tülbent," for the flower whose opened bloom looked like one. The Flemish diplomat Ogier de Busbecq, sent to the Ottoman court in 1554, recorded the name in his letters home, and the bulbs followed the word to Vienna and then Holland. "Tulip" and "turban" are doublets, the same word arriving in English by two routes, one on a hat and one in a garden.
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 got ahead of the facts: an element named 27 years before anyone held it, a body temperature that moved because water didn't, and a flower named for a hat by someone who had never seen it bloom in Europe.