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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, a coward has a tail, a Beatle is named after his jewelry, and a spy is named after a preacher who forgot who he was.

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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word was nearly a strawberry.

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BonusBLACKBERRY

In 1999 Research In Motion of Waterloo, Ontario, had a two-way pager that could send email and no name for it, and hired Lexicon Branding of Sausalito, the firm behind Swiffer and PowerBook. Lexicon's team noticed that the little keys looked like the drupelets of a berry and wrote "strawberry" on the whiteboard, healthy and colorful, with "berry" being fun; then someone objected that "straw" was too slow a word for a device whose whole point was speed. "Black" was industrial and quick, and "BlackBerry" it became. In January 2013, with the product more famous than the company, RIM renamed itself after it.

The full story: How did BlackBerry get its name? →

1BERSERK

Old Norse "berserkr" was a warrior who fought in a trance of fury, and the word almost certainly means "bear-shirt," one who wore a bearskin into battle. Walter Scott brought the berserkers into English in The Pirate in 1822, believing the word meant "bare-shirt," a man who fought without armor, which is wrong but made a good story. The noun was English by 1835 and "berserk" as an adjective, for anyone who loses control, by 1844.

The full story: Where does the word "berserk" come from? →

2LIMBO

Latin "limbus" is an edge or border, and medieval theologians placed "limbus patrum" and "limbus infantum" on the border of Hell, for the righteous who died before Christ and for unbaptized infants. The phrase "in limbo," with the Latin ablative, was so common that English speakers took "limbo" for a noun by 1300, and by the 1640s "limbo" meant any state of neglected waiting. The Trinidadian dance under a bar, from 1956, is probably an alteration of "limber" and has nothing to do with theology.

3AUCTION

Latin "auctio" is "an increasing," from "augere," to increase, because the price goes up with each bid; the same root gives "augment," "author" and "august." English took "auction" in the 1590s, the verb followed by 1723, and the Romans, who held their sales under a spear planted in the ground, would have recognized the procedure if not the paddles. In northern England and Scotland the old word "roup" survives for the same thing.

4COWARD

Old French "coart" is built on "coe," tail, from Latin "cauda," with a derogatory suffix, so a "coward" is literally "one with a tail," the animal that turns tail and runs or tucks it between its legs. Coart was also the name of the hare in the French Reynard the Fox stories, the animal that runs from everything. English had the word by the mid-1200s and reshaped its spelling under the influence of "cow," which has nothing to do with it.

5KIOSK

Persian "kushk" was a palace or a portico, and Turkish "kâşk" an open summer pavilion in a garden, the kind European visitors to Constantinople admired and copied. French had "kiosque" and English "kiosk" by the 1620s for such a garden pavilion. The small booth that sells newspapers took the name in 1865, probably in French first, for its resemblance to the pavilion, and the British telephone kiosk followed in 1928. The Ottoman sultan's summerhouse has shrunk to a ticket window.

6BOURNE

In January 1887 Ansel Bourne, an evangelical preacher from Rhode Island, withdrew money in Providence to buy land and disappeared. Two months later a man called A. J. Brown, who had been running a small stationery shop in Norristown, Pennsylvania, woke up terrified, with no idea where he was, and gave his name as Ansel Bourne. He remembered nothing since Providence. William James studied the case, which became one of the first documented examples of dissociative fugue, and Robert Ludlum almost certainly took the name for Jason Bourne, the spy who wakes up without his past.

7ERMINE

The stoat turns white in winter except for the black tip of its tail, and its fur, with the black tips set into the white, has lined the robes of kings, peers and judges since the Middle Ages. The name "ermine" has two candidate sources that happened to sound alike: a Latin "mus Armenius," the Armenian mouse, since the animals were plentiful in Asia Minor, and an old Germanic word for a weasel, "harmo." The Oxford English Dictionary declines to choose, and English has had the word since the late 1100s.

8RINGO STARR

Richard Starkey wore several rings on his fingers, and in his days drumming for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes around 1960 the band called him Rings, then Ringo, which also sounded like a cowboy. He shortened Starkey to Starr so that his solo spot in the show could be billed as "Starr Time," and the whole name was in place before he replaced Pete Best in the Beatles in August 1962. Ringo Starr is the only Beatle whose name is a stage name, and it was built out of jewelry and a pun.

9RAPTOR

Latin "raptor" is a robber or plunderer, from "rapere," to seize, the same verb behind "rapid" and "rapture." English had "raptour" for a plundering bird of prey in the late 1300s, and ornithologists revived "raptor" in 1873 from the old Latin order name Raptores for the hawks, eagles and owls. The dinosaur borrowed it in 1924, when "Velociraptor," the swift robber, was named from fossils found in Mongolia the year before, and a 1993 film did the rest.

10YUGOSLAVIA

The state founded in 1918 was the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, a name that listed its peoples rather than uniting them. In October 1929 King Alexander, having suspended the constitution, renamed it "Yugoslavia," from "jug," south, and "Slaveni," Slavs: the land of the South Slavs, one people by decree. The name survived a monarchy, a socialist federation and a rump republic, and was finally dropped in 2003, when the last two members became Serbia and Montenegro.

The full story: How did Yugoslavia get its name? →

That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for another ten, and if there's a thread running under this batch, it's names that describe the body: a warrior in a bearskin, a creature with a tail, and a drummer with rings on his fingers.