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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 graveyard is a dormitory, a demon sits on your chest, and a silver strike is named after a death threat. Happy Halloween.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word was a crime in England for 194 years.
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BonusWITCHCRAFT
Old English "wiccecraeft" is "wicce" plus "craeft," and both halves have moved since. "Craeft" meant power, strength, might, and only later skill, art, a trade, and finally a small boat. "Wicce" was a female sorcerer, the feminine of "wicca," a male one, from the verb "wiccian," to practise sorcery; where that came from is uncertain, and the modern pagan movement that took "Wicca" as its name has given the old masculine noun a second life. The laws of King Alfred, around 890, already singled the practice out as women's work, and by 1600 the feminine had so taken over that a male witch had to be called a "he-witch." Parliament made "witchcraft" a felony in 1542; the trials peaked in the 1580s and the 1640s, the last English one ended in acquittal in 1717, and the Act was repealed in 1736, by which time, the historian Lecky said, only the ignorant and a few clergymen still believed in it.
1WRAITH
The word arrives in 1513, in Gavin Douglas's Scots translation of the Aeneid, where it is used for apparitions of both the dead and the living, and nobody has found where Douglas got it. In Scottish belief a "wraith" was a person's ghostly double, and to see your own was to be told you were about to die, the same notion the Germans call a Doppelganger. The word has since thinned out, like its subject, and now describes anything pale, shadowy and insubstantial, frightening or not.
2INCUBUS
Latin "incubare" is to lie upon, and "incubo" was the nightmare itself, the thing that lay on the sleeper's chest and would not let them breathe; Scribonius Largus, a physician of the first century, treated it with herbs. Christian writers made it a demon, the "incubus" that visited women in their sleep, and English had it in that sense by about 1200. The female counterpart, the succubus, is a later Latin coinage reshaped to match. By 1834 the word had softened into a figure of speech for any smothering burden, a debt or a bore. "Incubate" is the same verb, used of hens, which lie upon their eggs with better intentions.
3TOMBSTONE
Ed Schieffelin was prospecting out of what became Fort Huachuca in 1877, in Apache country, when the scout Al Sieber told him that the only rock he would find out there would be his own tombstone. Schieffelin found silver instead, his partner filed the first claim under that name on 3 September 1877, and the town that grew up above the Goodenough Mine in 1879 took it over. Tombstone produced somewhere between forty and eighty-five million dollars in silver, hosted the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881, and has been living off the name ever since. The word itself is Greek "tymbos," a burial mound, by way of Latin and French, plus the plainest English word for a rock; "Tombstone" is the only town in America named after a warning.
4CAULDRON
Latin "calidus" is warm, "calidarium" was the hot room of a Roman bath, and by way of Old French the word reached English around 1300 as "caudron," a very large kettle. The "l" was put back by scribes in the 1400s who wanted the word to look like its Latin ancestor, and it has never been pronounced. The same Latin word went into Spanish as "caldera" and came back into English, through geology, for the great collapsed crater of a volcano, which is a "cauldron" in the most literal sense. Shakespeare's witches gave the pot its permanent tenant.
5HOGWARTS
J. K. Rowling has said that when the name occurred to her she had no idea where it came from, and that a friend later reminded her of a visit to Kew Gardens seven years earlier, where they had seen plants labelled with it. Hogwort is a real plant, Croton capitatus, a woolly, weedy croton of the American South that nobody plants on purpose, though the friend's memory and Rowling's differ on whether the Kew plants were crotons or lilies. "Hogwarts" sounds like something out of a medieval herbal, which is presumably why it stuck in her memory, and the school's motto, about not tickling a sleeping dragon, was added later as a joke on the pompous Latin of real schools.
6CEMETERY
Greek "koiman" is to put to sleep, and a "koimeterion" was a sleeping place, a dormitory. The early Christians took the word for their burial grounds, as a gentler and more hopeful term than the pagan ones, since the dead were sleeping and would wake; Latin made it "coemeterium," Old French "cimetiere," and English had "cemetery" by the late 1300s. For most of English history a cemetery was specifically a churchyard, and the modern sense of a large landscaped burial ground away from any church dates from the 1800s, when the churchyards filled up.
7REAPER
A reaper is a harvester, one who cuts grain with a sickle or a scythe, and the word is Old English. The figure of Death as a skeleton with a scythe, cutting down lives as a farmer cuts corn, comes out of the plague art of the 1300s, when the Black Death made the harvest metaphor unavoidable and the Dance of Death put skeletons on church walls across Europe; Renaissance painters may have borrowed the scythe from Father Time and Cronus. "Grim" was attached in the 1840s, and the "Grim Reaper" has been the standard English personification of death since, hood, scythe and all.
8AMULET
Pliny the Elder used "amuletum" in the first century for an object worn to ward off witchcraft and disease, and gave no hint of where the word came from; two thousand years of guessing have not settled it. The old suggestion, that it comes from "amoliri," to avert or remove, is tidy and unproven, and the Oxford English Dictionary rejects an Arabic source. English had "amalettys" in the mid-1400s, then lost the word for a century and a half and picked it up again around 1600. An "amulet" is worn to protect; a talisman, a different word with a clearer Greek pedigree, is supposed to bring luck.
9FRANKENSTEIN
Burg Frankenstein stands on a hill above Darmstadt, built before 1250 by a lord who took its name, "stone of the Franks," as his own. In 1673 the alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel was born there, and spent his life hunting for an elixir of life and making an evil-smelling "animal oil" from bones that he offered to trade for the castle; stories that he robbed graves and tried to animate corpses are later and unproven. Mary Shelley travelled down the Rhine in 1814 and spent some hours at Gernsheim, ten miles away; whether she heard the name or the stories is unknown, since her journals say nothing about either. The novel appeared in 1818, and "Frankenstein" has since been transferred, to the irritation of pedants, from the scientist to the creature he never named. The lightning came later still, from the 1931 film.
10TRICK OR TREAT
Children in Scotland and Ireland had gone "guising" in costume at Halloween for centuries, and in Canada and the United States the night was long given over to pranks. The phrase itself is Canadian: the first known printing is in a newspaper in Blackie, Alberta, in 1927, reporting youths "demanding edible plunder by the word 'trick or treat.'" The custom crept south through the 1930s, paused for the war, and took over North America after 1945, when sugar came off the ration and the candy companies realised what they had. "Trick or treat" is thus not an ancient Celtic rite but a Prairie newspaper's phrase for a shakedown, which is roughly what it still is.
A dormitory, a kettle, a farmhand, a Latin sick-note, a scout's threat and a Kew Gardens label: the vocabulary of the scariest night of the year was assembled from the most ordinary parts imaginable, which is usually how fear works.