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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 goddess warns you about your wallet, a lawyer's word has a letter nobody says, and a tall novelist is told to find honest work.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is gibberish, and has been since the 1960s.
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BonusLOREM IPSUM
The dummy text that fills every unfinished layout is mangled Latin, and the Latin is Cicero. Richard McClintock, a classics professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, went looking for the rare word "consectetur" and found the passage in sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, Cicero's 45 BC treatise on the ends of good and evil. The famous opening is a truncation of "dolorem ipsum," "pain itself," with its first syllable sliced off, as if a typesetter had started mid-word, which is probably what happened. McClintock published the finding in a 1994 letter, and in it guessed that the text had been in use since the 1500s; he has since admitted that date was a guess with nothing behind it. The modern version comes from Letraset dry-transfer sheets first sold in 1966, and designer Dave Farey credits the librarian James Mosley with supplying the passage. Word processors picked it up from there, and "lorem ipsum" became the one Latin phrase every designer knows and nobody can translate, because it does not mean anything.
1LITMUS
The dye came first. Litmus is a blue colouring extracted from lichens, recorded in English in the early 1300s as "lit-mose," and the name is probably Norwegian "litmose," from "lita," to dye, and "mos," moss: dye-moss. Chemists used it because it turns red in acid and back to blue in alkali, and "litmus paper," the strip you dip, is recorded from 1803. The figurative "litmus test," a single question that reveals which side someone is on, is surprisingly recent, first attested in 1957.
2OLIVE OYL
She is older than Popeye. E. C. Segar's Thimble Theatre began in December 1919 with Olive, her brother Castor Oyl and her boyfriend Harold Hamgravy, and the strip ran for nearly a decade on their schemes before a one-eyed sailor was hired to crew a boat in January 1929. The family names are all oils: Castor, their father Cole (coal oil) and their mother Nana, after "banana oil," 1920s slang for nonsense. Popeye took over the strip, the title and eventually, by March 1930, the girl, and "Olive Oyl" has been his long-suffering companion since.
3REACHER
Jim Grant had just been made redundant from Granada Television in 1995 and was writing his first novel when he went shopping with his wife, Jane. Being six foot four, he was asked, as usual, by an elderly woman to fetch something from a high shelf, and Jane remarked that if the writing did not work out he could always be a reacher in a supermarket. He liked the word, gave it to his drifter, and published Killing Floor under the name Lee Child in 1997. "Reacher" has since sold well enough that the fallback career was never needed.
4ESMERALDA
Victor Hugo's dancer in Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) was born Agnès, stolen as a baby and raised among the Romani of Paris, who called her La Esmeralda after the amulet she wears, a paste emerald in a little bag around her neck. "Esmeralda" is simply the Spanish for emerald, which Hugo chose for its glitter and its foreignness. The jewel is the plot: the bag holds a tiny shoe, which eventually identifies her to her mother, too late to save either of them. Disney kept the name and the dancing and dropped nearly everything else about "Esmeralda."
5MONEY
Rome's mint stood beside the temple of Juno on the Capitoline Hill, and that Juno bore the title Moneta, which the Romans themselves connected to "monere," to warn: she was the goddess who gave warning, and the geese in her precinct were said to have warned the city of a Gaulish attack in 390 BC. Coins struck beside her temple were "moneta," the word moved into Old French as "monoie," and English had "money" by the mid-1200s. The same Latin word reached Old English earlier and separately, through the Germanic languages, as "mynet," which became "mint," so the warning goddess is in your pocket twice.
The full story: Where does the word "money" come from? →6INDICTMENT
Anglo-Norman lawyers were formally accusing people with "enditer" by the mid-1100s, and English borrowed it as "endite" around 1300, with no "c" anywhere. The Latinising scribes of the 1400s changed the opening "e" to "i" to match "indictare," and in the early 1600s spelling reformers went further and inserted a "c" from the Latin, which nobody had ever pronounced and nobody pronounces now. The spellings "indict" and "indictment" froze in legal writing, and "indite," the same word, survived with the older spelling for the harmless act of composing a letter.
7PLAYWRIGHT
A wright is a maker, from Old English "wyrhta," worker, the same word that gives wheelwright, shipwright and the surname Wright. "Playwright" is therefore a play-maker, built like a cartwright and with the same whiff of the workshop, and when Ben Jonson used it in the 1610s he meant it as a sneer, a hack who knocked plays together rather than a poet. The sneer wore off; by the 1680s the word was in ordinary use for a dramatist, and the trade name stuck in the language while "playwriter," the obvious alternative, never caught on.
8SERENDIPITY
Horace Walpole coined it in a letter to his friend Horace Mann in January 1754, explaining that he had taken it from a fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of." Serendip is the old Persian name for Sri Lanka, from Sanskrit Sinhaladvipa, the island of the lion people. The word sat almost unused for two centuries and only became common in the 1900s, when scientists adopted it for the lucky find that rewards a prepared mind; "serendipity" is now among the best-loved words in English, which Walpole, who intended it as a private joke, would have found very hard to believe.
The full story: Where does the word "serendipity" come from? →9UKRAINE
The oldest record is a chronicle entry for 1187, preserved in the Hypatian Codex, which uses "ukraina" for the Pereiaslavl principality on the steppe frontier. Most etymological dictionaries derive the name from the Slavic root "krai," edge, and gloss it as "borderland," and the Russian and Polish states did use it that way for their frontier zones. Many Ukrainian scholars reject that reading: the same root means "region" or "country," and the linguist Hryhoriy Pivtorak argues that the Cossacks of the 1500s and 1600s were already using it for their own land, with the borderland sense a later imperial overlay. English usage shifted with independence; the Associated Press dropped "the" on 3 December 1991, and "Ukraine" without an article is now the standard, the government having pointed out that the article turns a country back into a region.
The full story: How did Ukraine get its name? →10MAGNET
Greek "ho Magnes lithos" is "the Magnesian stone," named for Magnesia, a region of Thessaly where lodestone was found, and Latin "magnes" passed through Old French to English as "magnes" in the late 1300s and "magnet" by the mid-1400s. The same place name is in magnesia, the white powder, and from it magnesium and manganese, two more elements traced to one Greek district. French gave up the word for "aimant," from "adamas," and the Italians chose "calamita," possibly from the reed stalk in which early navigators floated a magnetised needle. The figurative magnet, the person or place that draws everyone in, is recorded from the 1650s.
Every answer today is named for something you can point to: a moss, an oil, a shelf, a gem, a temple, a Latin textbook, a wheelwright's shop, an island, a frontier, a Greek hillside. Even the gibberish turned out to be Cicero.