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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 state is a printing error, a country is a herd of calves, and a conjuror's patter becomes a hoax.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus phrase has three words and one very common misspelling.
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One more beat.
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BonusTOE THE LINE
The earliest known use is a command. The Army Regulator, a British drill book of 1738, has an officer ordering his men to "toe the line," and a militia manual of 1775 repeats it: soldiers on parade placed their toes against a line to dress the ranks. "Toe the mark" is recorded in 1813 and "toe the plank" in 1828, all with the figurative sense of conforming. The picture most etymologists favour is naval: barefoot sailors mustered for inspection along the seams between the deck planks, and Captain Basil Hall described them doing exactly that in 1831. Boxers toed a scratch line, which gave "up to scratch" but probably not this. The story that the two red lines on the carpet of the House of Commons are two sword-lengths apart, and that members must not cross them when speaking, is told to every visitor and is a myth; there is no record of swords ever being allowed in the chamber. "Toe the line" is also, by a wide margin, the most mis-spelled idiom in English, and "tow the line" fits none of the stories.
1TENNIS
John Gower wrote of "tenetz" in about 1400, and a Florentine chronicle has Italians playing "tenes" before 1370, so the word was already travelling with the game. The explanation offered since the 1600s is French "tenez!", "take it!" or "here it comes!", the server's call to his opponent, and Latin versions of the call, "accipe" and "excipe," are recorded in schoolbook dialogues of the 1500s. The difficulty is that no Frenchman ever wrote the call down, and the French called the game "la paume," the palm, since it was played with the hand. "Tennis" is therefore probably a French word that only foreigners used, borrowed by people naming a game after the thing they heard most often while losing it.
2OREGON
Nobody knows. The name first appears as "Ouragon" in a 1765 petition by Major Robert Rogers, who wanted to go looking for the great river of the west, and Jonathan Carver's Travels of 1778 spread "Oregon" as the river's name before Lewis and Clark had seen it. The explanation George R. Stewart offered in 1944 is still called the most plausible: on an early 18th-century French map the Wisconsin River, "Ouisiconsink," was engraved across two lines and came out as "Ouaricon-sint," which later readers took for a western river called Ouaricon. Rivals include French "ouragan," hurricane; Spanish "orejón," big-ear, supposedly for the local people's large, ornamented ears; and, from Love and Goddard in 2004, an Algonquian "wauregan," "beautiful river," which Rogers might have picked up from the Ohio country. "Oregon" is the only American state whose name may be a typo.
3EBAY
Pierre Omidyar's site went live over Labor Day weekend in 1995 as AuctionWeb, one page on the website of his consulting business, Echo Bay Technology Group. When he tried to register echobay.com he found it belonged to Echo Bay Mines, a Canadian gold producer, so he shortened the name to the first letter and the second word. AuctionWeb became "eBay" in September 1997, by which time the broken laser pointer that sold for $14.83 to a self-described collector of broken laser pointers had already entered company legend. The abbreviation has long outlived the consulting firm it abbreviated.
4TRAGEDY
Greek "tragoidia" is "goat song," from "tragos," goat, and "aeidein," to sing, and no one has ever been sure why. The drama grew out of choral performances at the Athenian festivals of Dionysus, and the ancient guesses were that a goat was the prize for the best chorus, or that a goat was sacrificed to the god before the performance, or that the chorus dressed as goat-legged satyrs. English took "tragedy" in the 1300s, when Chaucer defined it as a story of a great man fallen from prosperity into misery, and only later narrowed it to the stage and widened it to any disaster. The goat remains unexplained, and a little undignified.
5HOCUS POCUS
A conjuror who performed for James I's court around 1620 used "Hocus Pocus" as his stage name, and Thomas Ady, writing against witch-hunters in 1655, remembered him reciting "hocus pocus, tontus talontus, vade celeriter jubeo" over each trick to keep the audience's eyes off his hands. Ben Jonson had the phrase in a masque of 1622. The archbishop John Tillotson suggested in a 1694 sermon that it was a parody of "hoc est corpus," the words of consecration at Mass, "a ridiculous imitation of the priests of the Church of Rome"; the theory has been repeated ever since and is doubted, since it came from an anti-Catholic sermon and has no earlier support. "Hocus pocus" went from meaning the conjuror to meaning the trick, and its first half, clipped, is the likeliest source of "hoax" in the 1790s.
6ELECTRICITY
Greek "elektron" is amber, and the Greeks knew that amber rubbed with cloth would pick up chaff and hair. William Gilbert, Elizabeth I's physician, studied the effect systematically and in his De Magnete of 1600 coined the Latin "electricus," amber-like, for any substance that behaved that way. Thomas Browne brought "electric" and "electricity" into English in the 1640s, the sense "charged" followed in the 1670s, and by the time Franklin was flying kites the word had left the amber behind. The Greek word's own origin is unknown, and "electron," the particle, was named in 1891 by going back to the same amber.
7LAS VEGAS
In 1829 a caravan led by Antonio Armijo was working out a route from Santa Fe to Los Angeles when a young scout, Rafael Rivera, went looking for water and found a valley of springs, with grass and mesquite growing in the desert. Spanish "las vegas" is "the meadows," and the name belonged to the green lowlands around the springs long before it belonged to a town. The springs shortened the Spanish Trail by weeks, Frémont camped at them in 1844, the Mormons tried a fort in 1855, and the city of "Las Vegas" was founded in 1905 when the railroad auctioned off lots. The meadows were pumped dry by the 1960s.
8ITALY
The Oscan-speaking peoples of the far south called their land "Víteliú," land of young cattle, from the same root as Latin "vitulus," calf; the Greeks, who had no v, made it "Italia," and the bull was the emblem of the Italic tribes, who during the Social War of 90 BC struck coins showing it goring the Roman wolf, with the legend ITALIA or VITELIU. The name then meant only the toe of the boot, in what is now Calabria. Rome extended it north as it conquered, to the Rubicon by 264 BC and to the Alps by the time of Augustus, and Diocletian added the islands in 292. "Italy" is therefore a cattle ranch that grew.
9NOVEMBER
Latin "novem" is nine, and November was the ninth month of the old Roman year, which had ten months and began in March. When the calendar was reorganised into twelve months it slid to eleventh place and kept its name, as September, October and December kept theirs, so that four of our months are now mis-numbered by two. It had 29 days until Julius Caesar's reform of 46 BC gave it a thirtieth. The Anglo-Saxons called it "Blotmonath," blood month, for the cattle slaughtered before winter, and "November" replaced that around the Conquest.
10ECSTASY
Greek "ekstasis" is a standing outside, from "ek," out, and "histanai," to place: a displacement, the mind or body removed from its proper station, and so a trance, a stupor, astonishment, even madness. English had "ecstasy" by the late 1300s, the mystics of the 1600s used it for the rapture in which the soul left the body behind, and by the 1610s it meant any overwhelming happiness. The drug MDMA took the name in 1985, which was at least etymologically defensible.
Soldiers' toes, a misprinted river, a gold mine, a goat, a bull: today's words were all named by people who were looking at something else, which is the only way anything ever gets named.