Origins

Word origins

Where everyday words, phrases, places and brand names come from: the borrowings, mistakes, myths and accidents behind them. Every word here has been an answer in the daily Origins Quiz, 649 so far.

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AvatarAvatar comes from Sanskrit avatara, "descent," the word for a Hindu god coming down to earth in bodily form. English… BikiniThe bikini is named after Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where the United States began postwar atomic bomb tests… BoycottBoycott is named after Captain Charles Boycott, an English land agent in County Mayo, Ireland, whom the Irish Land… CantaloupeThe cantaloupe is named after Cantalupo, a former papal estate outside Rome where the melon was grown after arriving in… GobbledygookGobbledygook was popularized in 1944 by Texas politician Maury Maverick, who used it in a memo against bureaucratic… HadoopHadoop is a made-up word. Doug Cutting's two-year-old son used it as the name of his stuffed yellow elephant, and… IKEAIKEA is an acronym. It stands for Ingvar Kamprad, the founder, plus Elmtaryd, the family farm, and Agunnaryd, the… KetchupKetchup most likely comes from Hokkien Chinese kê-tsiap, a fermented fish sauce. English borrowed the word around 1682… Murphy's lawMurphy's law is named after Edward A. Murphy Jr., an engineer on U.S. Air Force rocket-sled tests around 1949. The idea… NerdNerd first appears in print in Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo (1950), as the name of an imaginary animal. By 1951 it was… OKOK began in 1839 Boston as "o.k.," a joke abbreviation of "oll korrect," a deliberate misspelling of "all correct." The… QuarantineQuarantine comes from the Venetian quarantena, "a space of forty days," the time ships from plague-hit ports had to…

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