🚨 MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING 🚨
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.
Still with us? Alright, scroll slowly. We've left some buffer so nothing spoils by accident.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄ keep scrolling ⌄ ⌄ ⌄
Somewhere below, a state is named for a way of speaking, a country is named for one temple, and a vampire's name turns out not to exist.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄
Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word has a famous slipper, and the argument about what it was made of started with Balzac.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄
One more beat.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄ last chance ⌄ ⌄ ⌄
BonusCINDERELLA
Charles Perrault called her Cendrillon in 1697, from "cendre," ash, because her stepsisters make her sleep in the ashes by the hearth; the Grimms' Aschenputtel and the English "Cinderella" say the same thing. Perrault wrote her slipper as "verre," glass, three separate times. In the 1800s Balzac and the lexicographer Littré decided that no one would dance in glass and that he must have meant "vair," squirrel fur, garbled by a copyist, and the theory has been repeated ever since. There is no evidence for it: glass and crystal slippers appear in Catalan, Irish and Scottish versions of the tale, fur slippers were long out of fashion in 1697, and a glass shoe, unlike a fur one, fits only one foot.
The full story: Where does the name Cinderella come from? →1CALICO
Calicut, now Kozhikode on the Malabar Coast of India, was the port where Portuguese and then English traders first bought the plain white cotton they called "kalyko cloth" in the 1530s. In America "calico" came to mean cheap printed cotton, the fabric of frontier dresses, and the patchy look of those prints was transferred to horses in 1807 and to cats in 1882. The city has gone back to its own name; the cats kept the old one.
2ILLINOIS
The people the French met along the river in the 1670s called themselves by a word meaning roughly "he speaks in the ordinary way," that is, one of us. The Ojibwe rendered it "ilinwe," and the French, whose 17th-century spelling wrote the "we" sound as "ois," produced "Illinois," which English then pronounced its own way. Louis Hennepin's 1698 book claimed it meant "accomplished men," a man in the full vigor of his strength, and that flattering guess is still in schoolbooks, though no linguist accepts it.
3NOSFERATU
Emily Gerard, a Scottish novelist living in Transylvania with her Austrian officer husband, published an article on the region's superstitions in 1885 and reported that the Romanian word for vampire was "nosferatu." Bram Stoker read her and used the word in Dracula, apparently believing it meant "not dead." It is not a Romanian word, and never was; a German writer had used it in 1865, and Gerard may have garbled "nesuferit," insufferable, or "necurat," unclean, the word country people did use for things they would rather not name. Murnau's 1922 film made the mistake immortal.
4DECOY
The likeliest story is that Dutch "kooi," a cage, named the netted ponds into which tame ducks lured wild ones to be caught, and that English visitors heard "de kooi," the cage, as one word. "Decoy" meant a swindler by the 1610s and a lure for game by the 1660s, and the wooden duck on the pond came last. The etymologists hedge, because there was also a card game called Decoy in the 1500s, but the Dutch article hiding in the English word is the explanation most of them give.
5EGYPT
The Greeks called the country Aigyptos, and the best explanation is that they took the name of one temple, Hwt-ka-Ptah, "the house of the spirit of Ptah," the great sanctuary at Memphis near the head of the delta, and used it for the whole land, the way a sailor might name a country after the first port. The Egyptians themselves called it Kemet, the Black Land, for the dark Nile silt. "Egypt" came through Latin, and the same Greek word, worn down through Arabic, gave English "Copt."
The full story: How did Egypt get its name? →6RUMMAGE
French "arrumage" was the arranging of cargo in a ship's hold, and to "rummage" in 16th-century English was to stow it properly. Searching the hold came next, in the 1610s, and the meaning reversed from tidying to ransacking. A "rummage sale," in 1803, was a sale of unclaimed goods at the docks; the church basement version came a century later. The word has never left the harbor entirely: a customs officer who rummages a ship is still using the oldest sense.
7EARWORM
German calls a tune that will not leave your head an "Ohrwurm," an ear-worm, and English translated it piece for piece. The earliest English use anyone has found is in Desmond Bagley's 1978 thriller Flyaway, where a character explains that the Germans have a word for it. "Earworm" stayed obscure until marketing professor James Kellaris began studying the phenomenon around 2000, and now it names a whole subfield of music psychology.
The full story: Where does the word "earworm" come from? →8LARIAT
Spanish "la reata" is "the rope," specifically the rope used to tie horses or mules in a string, from "reatar," to tie again. Anglo cowboys in the Southwest heard the article as part of the word, and by 1832 "lariat" was American English for the rope itself. It belongs to a small club of words that swallowed their foreign article, with "alligator," "alcohol" and today's decoy.
9LETHARGY
Greek "lethargos," forgetful, joins "lethe," forgetfulness, the river of the underworld whose water made the dead forget their lives, with "argos," idle, so that the condition is "inactive through forgetfulness." Medieval doctors used "lethargy" for a diagnosis, a prolonged sluggishness of body and mind, and it reached English in the late 1300s as "litarge." The learned "th" spelling, restoring the Greek, arrived in the 1590s, and the river has been quietly running through the word ever since.
10ANTHOLOGY
Greek "anthologia" is a flower-gathering. Around 60 BC the poet Meleager of Gadara collected short poems by 46 predecessors along with his own and called the book his Garland, explaining in the preface that he had woven it like a wreath and that each poet was a different flower. Later collections took his word, and "anthology" came into English in the 1600s for any gathering of poems. Every short-story anthology is still, by name, a bouquet.
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 borrowed words that picked up a hitchhiker: a Dutch article on a duck, a Spanish article on a rope, and a slipper that acquired a theory it never needed.