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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 count is named from a footnote, a punishment becomes a pedant's grievance, and a frozen ocean is a bear.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus name was explained by its creator 28 years after he made it up, and the explanation is doing a lot of work.
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BonusDARTH VADER
In 2005 George Lucas told Rolling Stone that the name was a modified form of "Dark Father," and since "vader" is the Dutch word for father, the internet has treated the matter as settled ever since. The record is less tidy. The name appears in Lucas's earliest drafts, where a General Darth Vader of the Royal Space Fleet is a tall, grim human officer and Luke's father is alive and somebody else; the revelation that Vader is the father was written for The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, three years after the first film, which is why nothing in the 1977 picture hints at it. Lucas has given other accounts on other days: that the name "sort of appeared" in his head, that it grew out of the phrase "dark water," and that he blended it with ordinary surnames. He also went to high school with a boy called Gary Vader. "Darth Vader" is, most likely, a name that sounded good and later turned out to mean something, which is the best kind.
The full story: Where does the name Darth Vader come from? →1DRACULA
Bram Stoker's working notes call his vampire Count Wampyr in one discarded plot. The name he used came from William Wilkinson's 1820 Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, which he read either in Whitby's public library in the summer of 1890 or in London, and from which he copied a footnote: "Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil," a surname given, Wilkinson said, to men of unusual courage, cruelty or cunning. The historical bearer was Vlad III, whose father Vlad II had been made a knight of the Order of the Dragon and was called Dracul, the dragon; Romanian "drac" means both dragon and devil, and the son was Dracula, the dragon's son. How much of Vlad's history Stoker knew is debated, and scholars now call the link tenuous. He wanted a name that meant devil, and "Dracula" has never let anyone forget it.
The full story: Where does the name Dracula come from? →2ARCTIC
Greek "arktikos" is "of the bear," from "arktos," and the bear is the Great Bear, Ursa Major, the constellation that circles the north celestial pole and never sets in northern skies. The word came into English in the late 1300s as "artik," for the north pole of the heavens, and the "c" was put back in the 1550s to match the Greek. "Arctic" for the cold northern earth followed, and "frigid" by the 1660s. Antarctic is simply "opposite the bear," and the Antarctic, having no bears, is named for a constellation it cannot see.
3ROCOCO
French "rocaille" is shell-work and pebble-work, the encrusted decoration of grottoes and fountains, and in the 1800s "rococo" was a mocking alteration of it, perhaps crossed with "baroque," used by neoclassical critics for the curly, gilded style of Louis XV's France that they despised. English took "rococo" in 1836 to mean old-fashioned, used it for the furniture and architecture by 1841, and by 1844 had the general sense of tastelessly florid. Art historians rehabilitated the style in the 20th century; the word kept its sneer.
4TRIVIAL
Latin "trivium" is a place where three roads meet, from "tri" and "via," and "trivialis" meant what belonged to the crossroads, which is to say what was public, common, vulgar, the talk of the street corner. English took "trivial" in the 1580s for "ordinary, found anywhere" and had the sense "trifling" by the 1590s. A different trivium, the medieval first stage of the liberal arts, grammar, rhetoric and logic, had given English an earlier "trivialle" in the 1400s, and the two have been confused ever since, though the schoolroom one was not about small things.
The full story: Where does the word "trivial" come from? →5HOBBIT
Tolkien said the word came to him, with its first sentence, while he was marking School Certificate papers in about 1930, and he later supplied an etymology from inside his invented world, Old English "hol-bytla," hole-builder, worn down over centuries to "hobbit." In 1970 the Oxford English Dictionary asked him about the word's origin and he admitted his memory of inventing it was unsupported. Seven years later the dictionary found an earlier one: the Denham Tracts, a folklore collection published in 1895, list "hobbits" among the sprites and bogies of the north of England, between hobgoblins and brownies, in a list going back to 1584. Tom Shippey points out that those were ghosts, not small people with hairy feet, and Tolkien almost certainly never saw the list. "Hobbit," like its bearers, was apparently there before anyone noticed.
The full story: Where does the word "hobbit" come from? →6VENEZUELA
Alonso de Ojeda's expedition reached the Gulf of Venezuela in 1499 with Amerigo Vespucci aboard, and the stilt houses of the people living over the water at Lake Maracaibo reminded someone of Venice; the coast became "Veneziola," little Venice, and in Spanish "Venezuela." Martín Fernández de Enciso, who was on the voyage, wrote in his 1519 geography that the local people were called by a similar name and that the country took it from them, an account some historians still prefer. Either way the name was fixed within a generation, and the houses on stilts are still there, at Sinamaica.
The full story: How did Venezuela get its name? →7ASBESTOS
Greek "asbestos" is "unquenchable," from "a," not, and a verb meaning to quench, and Dioscorides used it for quicklime, which grows hot and seems to burn when water is poured on it. Pliny the Elder, in the first century, attached the word to a fireproof fibre he took for a plant, and the mistake stuck. The Greeks had called the mineral "amiantos," undefiled, because a cloth woven from it came out of the fire clean, and most Romance languages still call it that; English had "amiant" in the early 1400s, and an "abestus" around 1100 as a legendary stone that, once lit, could not be put out. The modern "asbestos" is 1650s. Medieval writers thought the cloth was salamander wool, the 1700s called it fossil linen, and the lung disease was named in 1927, by which time the unquenchable stuff was in every building.
8DECIMATE
Latin "decimare" is to take a tenth, and the Roman army's "decimatio" was the punishment of a mutinous or cowardly unit: the men drew lots and one in ten was clubbed to death by the other nine. English took "decimate" around 1600 in exactly that sense, and by the 1660s was already using it loosely for destroying a large but indefinite share of anything, which is the only sense most people now know. Purists have objected for three centuries that it should mean one in ten, and have been ignored for three centuries, since there is no other word for what it has come to mean.
The full story: Where does the word "decimate" come from? →9ETHIOPIA
Greek "Aithiops" was explained by the Greeks as "burnt-face," from "aithein," to burn, and "ops," face, and the Aithiopes of Homer live at the ends of the earth where the sun rises and sets. Modern scholars treat the burnt-face derivation as a folk etymology, and the word may be a reshaping of a name the Greeks heard rather than coined. For most of antiquity "Aithiopia" meant everything south of Egypt, and Europeans used it loosely for sub-Saharan Africa into the 1800s; the country we now call "Ethiopia" was known abroad as Abyssinia, from the Arabic name of one of its peoples, until it asked the world to use its own name in the 20th century.
The full story: How did Ethiopia get its name? →10REHEARSE
Old French "rehercier" is literally to harrow again, "herce" being a harrow, the spiked frame dragged over a ploughed field, and so to rake over the same ground a second time. English borrowed "rehearse" in the 1300s for going over something again, repeating or reciting it, and theatre people had it for practising a play by the 1500s. The harrow left another word behind: a "hearse" was first the harrow-shaped frame that held candles over a coffin, and the name slid from the frame to the vehicle in the 1600s.
The full story: Where does the word "rehearse" come from? →A count from a footnote, a bear in the sky, a joke about shell-work, a crossroads, a harrow: today's words were all lying around in other people's languages until somebody picked them up and put them to a new job, which is also roughly how a certain name sounded good first and meant something later.