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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 a fool was once a legal verdict, a battleship renamed every other battleship on Earth, and a word for a hedgehog now means a child.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word has two origin stories, both French, and the scholars have been arguing about which one for 200 years.
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One more beat.
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BonusVAUDEVILLE
The traditional story traces it to the "vau de Vire," the valley of the river Vire in Normandy, where a 15th-century cloth-fuller named Olivier Basselin was said to have written the satirical drinking songs that took the valley's name. The rival theory, which many scholars now prefer, derives it from "voix de ville," voice of the town, for the topical street songs of Paris. Either way, a "vaudeville" was a kind of comic song for two centuries before it was a kind of show. American theater managers adopted the word in the 1870s to make variety entertainment sound respectable, and it worked.
The full story: Where does the word "vaudeville" come from? →1VACCINE
Edward Jenner published his smallpox experiments in 1798 under the title "An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae," the cow-pox, from Latin "vacca," cow, since his method used matter from cowpox sores to protect against the deadlier disease. "Vaccine" meant only the cowpox preparation until 1881, when Louis Pasteur, who was developing preparations against anthrax and rabies that had nothing to do with cows, proposed extending the word to all of them as a tribute to Jenner.
The full story: Where does the word "vaccine" come from? →2AMBER
Arabic "anbar" is ambergris, the waxy substance from sperm whales' digestive tracts that washes up on beaches and was prized for perfume. Medieval Europeans used the same word for the other precious thing the sea left on beaches, fossilized tree resin, and the two were confused for centuries. Eventually the resin kept the plain word, "amber," and the whale product became "ambergris," from French "ambre gris," gray amber, to tell them apart.
3URCHIN
Norman French "herichon" was a hedgehog, from Latin "ericius," and "urchin" meant exactly that in English from the 1300s, as it still does in some rural dialects. The spiny sea creature became a sea urchin, a hedgehog of the sea, in 1591. The ragged, mischievous child came a little earlier, in the 1500s, perhaps for being small and prickly, and by 1790 William Cowper could write of sending "an urchin (I do not mean a hedge-hog, but a boy)."
4DREADNOUGHT
The Royal Navy had been calling ships "Dreadnought," fear nothing, since one sailed against the Spanish Armada in 1588, and the name had been given to a ship as early as 1573. The one launched in February 1906 was different: ten big guns of a single caliber, steam turbines, and a speed no battleship could match. Overnight every other battleship in the world was obsolete, and navies began calling the old ones "pre-dreadnoughts" and the new type, generically, "dreadnoughts." One ship's name became the name of a class, an arms race, and eventually a very large guitar.
The full story: Where does the word "dreadnought" come from? →5ELEVEN
Old English "endleofan" is "one left," from the Germanic for one and a verb meaning to leave: when you have counted to ten on your fingers, one is left over. Twelve is "twelf," two left. "Eleven" and twelve are the only two English numbers built this way; from thirteen on, the language switched to the "three-and-ten" pattern, which suggests that for a long time nobody needed to count past twelve very often.
6VANILLA
Spanish "vainilla" is a little "vaina," a pod or sheath, from Latin "vagina," which meant a scabbard before it meant anything else. Spanish soldiers encountered the long dark pods in Mexico in the 1520s, where the Aztecs used them to flavor chocolate, and brought both home. "Vanilla" was in English by the 1660s, and "plain vanilla" as a term for the boring default is a 20th-century irony, since for most of its history it was the exotic one.
7IGNORAMUS
In English law, a grand jury that found an indictment unsupported wrote "ignoramus," Latin for "we do not know," on the back of it and threw it out. In 1615, George Ruggle, a Cambridge don, wrote a Latin comedy for a royal visit with a pompous, blustering lawyer named "Ignoramus" as its butt. James I enjoyed it so much he returned to see it again, the London lawyers were furious, and the character's name became the ordinary English word for a fool.
The full story: Where does the word "ignoramus" come from? →8LIBEL
Latin "libellus" is a little book, the diminutive of "liber," and in medieval law a "libel" was any written complaint or petition filed with a court, with no suggestion of wrongdoing. Because so many of those complaints were about things written against people, the word narrowed by the 1600s to a published statement that damages a reputation, leaving "slander" for the spoken kind.
9LAVA
In Naples, "lava" was the dialect word for a stream of rainwater rushing down a street after a storm, from Latin "labes," a fall or a slide. When Vesuvius erupted in 1737, Neapolitans used the same word for the streams of molten rock running down the mountain, and travelers' accounts carried "lava" into English in the 1750s. The volcano borrowed its word from the gutter.
10ECLAIR
The pastry appears in French cookbooks in the 1860s as an "éclair," lightning, and nobody recorded why. The two usual explanations are that it is eaten in a flash, and that its glossy icing gleams like a lightning strike; a third is that the name came from the oblong shape of a flash as drawn in the period. Whichever it was, English had the word by the 1860s too and has never translated it.
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 small words that meant something humbler first: a little book, a little pod, a gutter in Naples, and a hedgehog that grew up to be a child.