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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, a luxury apartment is named after a garden shed, the world's largest ocean is named for a mood it was in one afternoon, and the man a unit of power honors never heard of it.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is a document type that got its name from what it was bound in, and the first famous one was about a border.
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BonusWHITE PAPER
In the British government of the early 20th century, a full parliamentary report came bound in blue covers and was called a "blue book"; a shorter statement of policy came in plain white covers, and the name followed the binding. The "white paper" that fixed the term in the public mind was Churchill's of June 1922, setting out British policy in Palestine, though the format was already in use. Business and technology borrowed the word in the second half of the century for anything that wanted to sound authoritative, and it now mostly means a sales document with footnotes.
1WATT
In August 1882, William Siemens used his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science to propose naming the unit of power after James Watt, who had died in 1819. The "watt" became the international standard in 1908. Watt himself had sold his steam engines by a different measure of his own devising: in 1782 he timed a brewery horse at a mill wheel, rounded the result up to 33,000 foot-pounds a minute, and called it a horsepower, so customers could see how many animals they were replacing.
2HOWITZER
The Hussite armies of 15th-century Bohemia used a short-barreled siege gun they called a "houfnice," from a word for a crowd or heap, since it fired stones into massed troops. German took it as "Haubitze," and English as "howitzer" in the 1690s, by which time it meant any cannon that lobbed a shell in a high arc over walls rather than firing flat at them.
3INDEX
Latin "index" is a pointer: the forefinger, a signpost, and the little tag Roman librarians hung from a rolled scroll so a reader could tell what it held without unrolling it. Printers in the 1570s borrowed the word for the alphabetical list at the back of a book that points to where things are, and "index" has been pointing ever since, at pages, at prices, and at the finger you use to run down the list.
4THUG
Hindi "thag" meant a cheat or swindler, from a Sanskrit root meaning to conceal. In the 1810s British officials in India began reporting on the Thuggee, bands of robbers who joined travelers on the road, won their trust, and strangled them, and the word came into English with the reports. William Sleeman's campaign against them in the 1830s made it famous, and by the 1860s "thug" had dropped its Indian context and meant any violent criminal.
The full story: Where does the word "thug" come from? →5ESCROW
Old French "escroue" was a scrap of parchment, or a scroll, and in English law it came to mean a specific scrap: a deed signed and handed to a third party, who held it until some condition was met and only then delivered it. "Escrow" is recorded in that sense from the 1590s, and the same French word, through a different path, gave English "scroll."
6PENTHOUSE
Anglo-French "apentis," from a Latin verb meaning to hang on, was anything attached to the side of a bigger building: a lean-to, a porch, a shed, a covered walkway. English speakers who heard "pentis" assumed it must be "pent," sloped, plus "house," and by the 1500s were spelling it that way. For four centuries a "penthouse" was the humblest structure on a property. The luxury apartment on top of a Manhattan tower took the word in the 1920s, presumably because it, too, was a small building attached to a big one.
7AFFIDAVIT
When a witness swore to a written statement, the medieval court clerk noted it in Latin with a single word, "affidavit," he has sworn, the perfect tense of a verb meaning to pledge one's faith. The note was what made the document binding, and in time the document took the note's name. An "affidavit" is a piece of paper named after the verb written on it.
The full story: Where does the word "affidavit" come from? →8PACIFIC
Ferdinand Magellan spent five weeks in late 1520 fighting through the strait that now bears his name, and emerged on November 28 into open water so flat and quiet, after the storms of the passage, that he named it "Mar Pacifico," the peaceful sea. The "Pacific" then took 99 days to cross, with the crew eating leather and sawdust, and has produced most of the world's largest storms since, but the name was already on the map.
9ENTREPRENEUR
French "entrepreneur" is literally one who undertakes, and in the 1600s and 1700s it meant a government contractor, a man who agreed to build a road or supply an army for a fixed price and was widely assumed to be cheating. The Irish-French banker Richard Cantillon rescued the word in an essay written in the 1730s, redefining the "entrepreneur" as anyone who buys at a certain price to sell at an uncertain one and bears the risk between. English borrowed it with his meaning in the 1800s.
The full story: Where does the word "entrepreneur" come from? →10RHINOCEROS
Greek "rhinokeros" is nose-horn, and that is the whole etymology: a Greek naturalist of the 300s BC, working from travelers' reports, named the animal for the one feature everyone mentioned. Latin kept the word, and English had "rhinoceros" by the 1300s, long before Dürer's famous 1515 woodcut gave Europeans a picture of one, drawn from a description, with an extra horn on its shoulder.
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 names given from the outside: a unit named by a man who never met its namesake, an ocean named on a calm day, an animal named by someone who had only heard about it, and a shed that became the best address in town.