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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 house has a wind's eye, a tablecloth loses a letter, and a peninsula is named after a misunderstanding.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus name was a boomerang first.
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One more beat.
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BonusWILLY WONKA
In Roald Dahl's first draft the chocolatier was Mr Ritchie. He renamed him after the Skilly Wonka, a boomerang his brother Louis had invented when they were boys, a toy with a name too good to waste on a toy. The factory itself came from Repton, where Dahl was at school in the 1920s and where Cadbury sent boxes of twelve foil-wrapped bars, eleven new flavours and one control, for the boys to grade; Dahl said he dreamed of inventing a bar that would astonish Mr Cadbury himself. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory appeared in 1964, with Oompa-Loompas who were African pygmies shipped in packing cases, a detail Dahl rewrote in the 1970s after protests; the orange skin and green hair came from the 1971 film. "Willy Wonka" is the only character in children's literature named after a boomerang, and the name has a boomerang's habit of coming back.
1WINDOW
Old Norse "vindauga" is "vindr" plus "auga," wind-eye: the hole in a wall or roof through which the weather looked in, before there was glass to keep it out. Scandinavian settlers brought the word to England and it drove out the Old English "eagthyrel," eye-hole, whose second element, "thyrl," a hole, survives in exactly one modern word, "nostril," the nose-hole. The French "fenestre" competed with "window" in English for three centuries and lost, surviving only in "defenestration," which is what happens when you go out of one.
2IOWA
The people the state is named for call themselves Baxoje, usually translated "grey snow"; the popular renderings "dusty noses" and "dusted faces" are wrong. "Ioway" is what their Dakota neighbours called them, "ayuxbe," passed through French traders as "Aiouez" and anglicised, and the often-repeated gloss "sleepy ones" belongs to a different word, "ayuhwa," that is not Ioway at all. The river took the tribe's name, the territory took the river's in 1838, and "Iowa" became a state in 1846; the Ioway themselves had been removed to Kansas and Nebraska a decade earlier.
3LOOPHOLE
Middle English "loupe," from about 1300, was a narrow vertical slit in a castle wall, through which an archer could shoot while presenting almost nothing to shoot back at, and probably comes from a Dutch verb meaning to watch or peer; the medieval Latin was "loupa." "Loophole," from the mid-1400s, doubled the word with "hole" for clarity, and the figurative "loophole," a small gap in a rule through which something can slip out, dates from the 1660s. The direction has reversed: the archer's loophole let things out and nothing in, and the lawyer's lets things out and nobody can close it.
4LUKEWARM
Middle English "leuk" or "luke," from about 1200, meant tepid on its own, and is probably a variant of Old English "hleowe," warm, or a cousin of a Dutch word; the etymologists are not sure. It survives in modern English only inside "lukewarm," from the late 1300s, where it is doing nothing, since the compound means "tepid-warm" and would mean the same without it. The figurative sense, lacking zeal, is from the 1520s, and comes with the Book of Revelation's warning to the church at Laodicea, neither cold nor hot, that it would be spat out.
5YUCATAN
The story every guide tells is that when Spanish sailors landed in 1517 and asked the Maya what the place was called, they were told "I do not understand you," wrote it down, and so named a peninsula after a misunderstanding. The friar Motolinia seems to have been the first to tell it, within a generation of the event, and the Maya phrase he had in mind was probably "ma'anaatik ka t'ann." Rivals exist: "uh yu ka t'ann," "hear how they talk," and Bernal Diaz's claim that "Yucata" meant land of yucas, the cassava root the Maya grew. Before the Spanish came, the Maya called the land Mayab, "flat," which is also where the word Maya comes from. "Yucatan" joins a long list of place names, Canada and Nome among them, that are supposed to record someone not understanding the question.
6WALRUS
English took "walrus" from Dutch in the 1700s, and Dutch had it from Scandinavia, where Old Norse "rosmhvalr" and Danish "hvalros" are the same two elements, horse and whale, in either order; the likeliest account is that Dutch sailors rearranged a northern "horse-whale" into something that sounded like their own words for whale and horse. Before that, English called the animal a morse, from Russian or Lappish, or a sea-horse, and Elizabethan sailors brought the tusks home as unicorn horn. Lewis Carroll paired one with a carpenter in 1871 and the word has been faintly comic ever since.
7ORNERY
An "ornery" person is an ordinary one, pronounced in a hurry. The word is first recorded in American English in 1816, as a dialect contraction of "ordinary" in the sense of commonplace, then of poor quality, coarse or ugly, and by about 1860 it had taken on the meaning it has now, mean and cantankerous, which is what an ordinary person becomes if you call him that often enough. It is one of the few English words to have been demoted from a description of everyone to an insult.
8NAMIBIA
The Namib, which runs for more than a thousand miles along the Atlantic coast, is the oldest desert on earth, and its name is Khoi for "vast place." The country was German South West Africa from 1884, then South West Africa under South African rule, and the name "Namibia" was coined by the nationalist Mburumba Kerina, who had first proposed "Republic of Namib"; the United Nations General Assembly adopted it by resolution on 12 June 1968, over South Africa's objections, and the country took it officially at independence on 21 March 1990. It is one of the few countries named after a desert, and the desert is one of the few things in it that was not renamed.
9KIBOSH
The phrase "put the kibosh on" surfaced in working-class London in the early 1830s: a broadside ballad of about 1830, two newspapers in November 1834 (one quoting a chimney sweep on the Whigs and the Duke of Wellington), a court report of 1835 in which it meant a beating, and Dickens's "Seven Dials" sketch of 1835, spelled "kye-bosk." Where it came from nobody knows. The Irish "caipin bais," cap of death, has no evidence behind it; a Hebrew or Yiddish origin has been proposed and dismissed; the heraldic "caboshed" and a clogmaker's tool have had their advocates; and the current favourite among those who want an answer is Turkish "kurbash," a hide whip, which was in English by 1814 and would lose its "r" in a London mouth. The dictionaries still say "origin unknown," which is to say that someone has put the "kibosh" on the inquiry.
10APRON
Middle French "naperon" was a little "nappe," a tablecloth, and English borrowed it in the 1300s as "napron." Then English speakers, hearing "a napron," reanalysed it as "an apron," and the "n" migrated across the gap and never came back; the same thing turned "a nadder" into "an adder," "a noumpere" into "an umpire," and, in the other direction, "an ewt" into "a newt" and "an ekename," an also-name, into "a nickname." "Apron" kept its cousins: napkin, napery and the French "nappe" all still have the "n" the apron lost.
A boomerang, a wind-eye, an arrow slit, a tablecloth, a misheard answer: today's words were all shaped by someone hearing a thing slightly wrong and passing it on, which, this close to Halloween, is also how ghost stories work.