English words from English
Homegrown coinages: words and phrases English built from its own parts, often from a single newspaper column, trade, joke or court case that caught on.
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- Aboveboard
Keep your hands on top of the table and nobody can accuse you of dealing from the bottom of the deck. "Above board" started as literal card-table etiquette, and the Elizabethan pamphleteer Thomas Nashe made it a metaphor in 1594, writing that Satan "plays…
From the Wed, Sep 23, 2026 roundup → - Agent Orange
Between 1961 and 1971, the US military sprayed millions of gallons of herbicide over Vietnam to strip the jungle canopy that hid enemy movement, labeling each formula by the color of the stripe painted around its 55-gallon storage drums: Purple, Pink, Green…
From the Fri, Sep 18, 2026 roundup → - Ampersand
The "&" symbol used to be taught as the actual 27th letter of the English alphabet, and schoolchildren reciting it would say "X, Y, Z, and per se and," meaning "and by itself, and." Repeated by enough students enough times, that mouthful slurred into…
From the Thu, Sep 10, 2026 roundup → - Apple
Steve Jobs reportedly landed on "Apple" shortly after returning from a stint at an apple orchard, deciding the name sounded "fun, spirited, and not intimidating." A more practical motive, per Jobs's own account, was alphabetical: it would land ahead of Atari…
From the Tue, Aug 25, 2026 roundup → - Atomic bomb
H.G. Wells's 1914 novel The World Set Free imagined a war fought with "atomic bombs" that kept exploding for days, and it is the earliest known use of the phrase. Physicist Leo Szilard read the book in 1932, and after conceiving the nuclear chain reaction in…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup → - Banana split
The banana split was invented over Christmas break in 1904 by 23-year-old David "Doc" Strickler, a pharmacy student moonlighting as a soda jerk at Tassell Pharmacy in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. A crowd of students from nearby Saint Vincent College kept pestering…
From the Wed, Aug 5, 2026 roundup → - Banoffee pie
Banoffee pie — banana + toffee — was invented in 1971 at the Hungry Monk restaurant in Jevington, England, by owner Nigel Mackenzie and chef Ian Dowding, who coined the portmanteau name themselves. It wasn't entirely original: the pair had been trying to…
From the Thu, Aug 6, 2026 roundup → - Basketball
In December 1891, Canadian-American physical education instructor James Naismith needed an indoor game to keep restless students occupied during a harsh Massachusetts winter at the YMCA International Training School in Springfield. He nailed two empty peach…
From the Tue, Aug 25, 2026 roundup → - Chopsticks
The tidy explanation for "chopsticks" is that it comes from Chinese Pidgin English chop chop, meaning "quick, quick." There's a timing problem with that story: the English word "chopstick" shows up in print by 1699, in an account of a 1688 voyage, apparently…
From the Sun, Sep 6, 2026 roundup → - Chud
C.H.U.D. — Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers — was a modestly budgeted 1984 horror film about New Yorkers mutated by illegally dumped radioactive waste into flesh-eating sewer monsters. The movie mostly faded into cult-classic obscurity, but its…
From the Wed, Aug 5, 2026 roundup → - Clapback
"Clap back," meaning a sharp, witty retort to criticism, traces to Ja Rule's 2003 diss track "Clap Back", aimed at 50 Cent and Eminem. The phrase migrated from the song into hip-hop and internet slang over the 2000s and 2010s, eventually landing in…
From the Sun, Aug 2, 2026 roundup → - Clue
Long before it meant a piece of evidence, a "clew" was simply an ordinary ball of yarn or thread. The connection to mystery-solving comes straight from Greek mythology: when Theseus volunteered to enter the Cretan labyrinth to kill the Minotaur, the princess…
From the Sun, Aug 16, 2026 roundup → - Credit card
Edward Bellamy's 1888 novel Looking Backward follows a Bostonian who falls asleep in 1887 and wakes in the year 2000 to find a socialist utopia where every citizen is issued an equal allowance on a "credit card," a pasteboard card punched at the store with…
From the Tue, Sep 22, 2026 roundup → - Crossword
On December 21, 1913, journalist Arthur Wynne filled space in the New York World's Christmas "Fun" section with a diamond-shaped word grid he called "Word-Cross." A few weeks later, a typesetter swapped the words to "Cross Word," and a second slip dropped the…
From the Tue, Sep 1, 2026 roundup → - Cyberspace
William Gibson first wrote "cyberspace" in his 1982 short story Burning Chrome and built the 1984 novel Neuromancer around it. Asked years later how he'd come up with the word, he said all he knew when he coined it was that "it seemed like an effective…
From the Tue, Sep 22, 2026 roundup → - Dead ringer
In 19th-century American horse racing, a "ringer" was a good horse entered fraudulently under a slower horse's name so insiders could clean up at the betting window, the word borrowed from an older bell-ringing phrase for substituting one thing for another…
From the Tue, Sep 22, 2026 roundup → - Deadline
Long before it meant "the report is due Friday," a "deadline" was an actual line, marked with fencing or planks around the perimeter of Civil War prison camps like Andersonville. Any prisoner who crossed it, even by accident, could be shot on sight without…
From the Mon, Sep 14, 2026 roundup → - Earmuffs
Fifteen-year-old Chester Greenwood built himself a wire-and-fur contraption in 1873 after getting fed up with cold ears while ice skating on a Maine pond, refined the design over the next few years, and received a patent for "earmuffs" in 1877 at age 18. His…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 2026 roundup → - Easter
Our only real source for the Easter/Eostre connection is the 8th-century English monk Bede, who wrote that the holiday's name came from Eostre, a pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon goddess honored during Ēosturmōnaþ (roughly April). Because the Anglo-Saxons left no…
From the Fri, Aug 7, 2026 roundup → - Eavesdrop
Old English had a word for the strip of ground around a house where rainwater dripped off the roof's edge, and by extension for someone who stood in that strip to listen at the windows. The earliest surviving "eavesdropper" is a real person: a Nottingham…
From the Wed, Sep 16, 2026 roundup → - Eggnog
This creamy holiday drink of eggs, milk, and spirits descends from posset, a medieval English concoction of hot, curdled, spiced milk. Nobody agrees on where the second half of its own name came from: one theory traces "nog" to "noggin," the small wooden mug…
From the Thu, Sep 3, 2026 roundup → - Eggplant
The varieties Europeans first grew in the 1700s bore small, whitish fruits about the size and shape of a goose egg, and "eggplant" was a literal description when it was recorded in the mid-1700s. The large purple kind took over the market later, leaving…
From the Wed, Sep 23, 2026 roundup → - Eight ball
In the pool game named for it, sinking the black ball before you've cleared your own loses you the game, so a position where the ball you need sits behind it is hopeless. "Behind the eight ball" first appears in print on February 8, 1923, in the Buffalo…
From the Sun, Sep 27, 2026 roundup → - Emmy
Television's top award started life as "Immy," an affectionate nickname for the image orthicon camera tube that made modern broadcast television possible. When the fledgling Television Academy needed a name for its new statuette in the late 1940s, engineers…
From the Wed, Sep 2, 2026 roundup → - Epcot
Before it was a theme park, EPCOT was Walt Disney's most ambitious, least realized idea: an "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow," a real functioning city of 20,000 residents meant to constantly test and showcase new urban technology, never finished…
From the Wed, Aug 12, 2026 roundup → - Everest
The world's tallest mountain above sea level was named in 1865 by British surveyor Andrew Waugh after his predecessor, Sir George Everest, who had already retired from the job, never personally surveyed or even saw the peak, and was reportedly uncomfortable…
From the Tue, Aug 25, 2026 roundup → - Eyeball
Shakespeare gets informal credit for a surprising amount of everyday English, and "eyeball" is one of the more mundane entries on that list, first turning up in his plays centuries before anyone thought a playwright's vocabulary would end up in an anatomy…
From the Thu, Sep 10, 2026 roundup → - Foot Locker
Long before it was a shoe store, a "foot locker" was a small, lockable wooden trunk kept at the base of a soldier's bunk, standard issue in military barracks by World War Two for storing uniforms and personal effects. The retail chain borrowed the name more…
From the Mon, Sep 7, 2026 roundup → - Freelance
The earliest known "free lance" is in Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, published in 1819, where a baron boasts of the paid company of "Free Lances" he can put in the field: mercenary knights whose weapons were pledged to no lord. Scott may have revived rather than…
From the Wed, Sep 30, 2026 roundup → - Gerrymander
In 1812, Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed off on a state senate district so oddly shaped that a newspaper cartoonist added wings, claws, and a tail, then dubbed the resulting creature a "Gerry-mander," a jab combining Gerry's name with…
From the Wed, Sep 9, 2026 roundup → - Google
Larry Page and Sergey Brin were brainstorming names in a Stanford office in September 1997 when fellow grad student Sean Anderson suggested "googolplex," after the enormous number. Page liked the shorter "googol," a 1 followed by 100 zeros, and Anderson went…
From the Tue, Sep 15, 2026 roundup → - Googol
Mathematician Edward Kasner was working on a book meant to make advanced math approachable for general readers when he decided he needed a catchy name for the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes, and rather than inventing one himself, he asked his nine-year-old…
From the Sun, Sep 20, 2026 roundup → - Goosebumps
It's about as literal as etymology gets: goosebumps describes exactly what your skin looks like when the tiny muscles at the base of each hair follicle contract, cold or startled, and you end up looking like a plucked, cold goose. No myth, no misheard phrase…
From the Wed, Sep 9, 2026 roundup → - Grapefruit
When 18th-century botanists first described the citrus growing on Caribbean plantations, they noticed it hung from the branch in dense, heavy bunches, more like a vineyard than a typical citrus tree, and the resemblance is the entire reason "grapefruit"…
From the Fri, Sep 18, 2026 roundup → - Green light
On early railways, a plain white lamp meant "all clear," red meant stop, and green meant caution. The trouble was that the colored glass was a separate piece in front of the flame, and when a red lens fell off, was smashed, or was stolen, the signal behind it…
From the Sat, Sep 26, 2026 roundup → - Halloween
The Christian church calendar sets October 31 as the eve of All Hallows' Day, better known now as All Saints' Day, and "hallow," an old English word for a holy person, gave the evening its original full name, All Hallows' Even. Centuries of casual…
From the Sat, Sep 19, 2026 roundup → - Handicap
"Handicap" began as a 17th-century betting game: two bettors would put forfeit money into a shared cap while a neutral umpire set the odds for an uneven trade, a full hand meaning you accepted the bet. The name shortened over time and eventually got borrowed…
From the Sun, Sep 6, 2026 roundup → - Hashtag
On August 23, 2007, open-source advocate Chris Messina posted a question on Twitter: "how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp?" He pitched the idea to the company directly and was told, in his telling, that "these things are for…
From the Thu, Sep 17, 2026 roundup → - Hello
On August 15, 1877, Thomas Edison wrote to T.B.A. David, president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company of Pittsburgh, suggesting that "hello" was the right word to shout into a telephone to get the other party's attention. Alexander Graham…
From the Thu, Sep 17, 2026 roundup → - Hollywood
The neighborhood that gave its name to the American film industry got its own name in 1887, when Daeida Wilcox — wife of Kansas real-estate developer Harvey Wilcox — chose "Hollywood" for the couple's new ranch subdivision. Accounts differ on exactly why…
From the Sun, Aug 23, 2026 roundup → - Hooligan
Hooligan first showed up in London police-court reports in the summer of 1898, almost certainly borrowed from Houlihan, a stock comic-Irish surname used for a rowdy fictional family in popular 1890s music-hall songs. There's a competing theory too — a real…
From the Sat, Aug 8, 2026 roundup → - Hot dog
The popular story behind "hot dog" doesn't hold up: it credits a cartoonist who supposedly couldn't spell "dachshund" at a 1901 baseball game and drew a dog in a bun instead. No copy of that cartoon has ever surfaced, and the cartoonist didn't even move to…
From the Sat, Sep 5, 2026 roundup → - Infomercial
The "infomercial" format existed in bits and pieces earlier, but it only really took off after the FCC lifted its long-standing limits on commercial length in 1984, opening the door to half-hour-long product pitches that blur the line between information and…
From the Fri, Sep 4, 2026 roundup → - Instagram
Founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger built "Instagram" by blending "instant camera" with "telegram," aiming to capture both the instant-photo nostalgia of Polaroids and the idea of quickly sending that photo somewhere else — like a visual telegraph message…
From the Mon, Aug 24, 2026 roundup → - Internet
In December 1974, Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine published a specification for a protocol to link separate computer networks together, and somewhere in the document the mouthful "internetworking" got clipped to "internet," as in "internet packet."…
From the Sat, Sep 26, 2026 roundup → - Interrobang
Frustrated that English had no single mark for an excited question, like "You did what?!", advertising executive Martin K. Speckter proposed a combined symbol in 1962 and named it the "interrobang," blending "interrogation point" with "bang," printer's slang…
From the Thu, Sep 10, 2026 roundup → - Iron curtain
Churchill's March 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri, declaring that "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent," made the phrase famous, but he didn't invent it. The Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov wrote of "an iron curtain" descending on Russian…
From the Tue, Sep 22, 2026 roundup → - Iron Maiden
The "iron maiden," a spiked cabinet said to impale anyone shut inside it, feels like a fixture of medieval torture chambers. It almost certainly isn't. Historians have found no mention of the device before 1802, and the surviving "medieval" examples on…
From the Sun, Sep 13, 2026 roundup → - Island
Island should, by its own history, be spelled "iland" — that's roughly how it looked in Old English, built from native Germanic roots for water and land, with no "s" anywhere in sight. The silent "s" got bolted on later, in the 1500s and 1600s, after English…
From the Sat, Aug 15, 2026 roundup → - Jolly Roger
The name first appears in print in 1724, in Captain Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates, which reports that Bartholomew Roberts and Francis Spriggs each called their flag the "Jolly Roger." Neither flag was a skull and crossbones; Roberts's…
From the Tue, Sep 29, 2026 roundup → - Kit Kat
Rowntree's launched the bar in 1935 as "Chocolate Crisp," renaming it "Kit Kat Chocolate Crisp" in 1937 before shortening it to just Kit Kat after World War II. The name itself is older than the candy by over two centuries: the Kit-Cat Club was an early-1700s…
From the Sun, Aug 9, 2026 roundup → - Kryptonite
Superman had been in comics for five years when "kryptonite" first appeared, and it didn't appear in a comic. It debuted on June 3, 1943, in The Adventures of Superman radio serial, in an episode about a meteor from his home planet. The story everyone tells…
From the Sun, Sep 27, 2026 roundup → - Labor Day
On September 5, 1882, roughly 10,000 workers, bricklayers, jewelers, cigar makers, shoemakers, printers, and piano makers among them, gave up a day's pay to march up Broadway to Union Square and on toward Reservoir Park, organized by New York's Central body…
From the Fri, Sep 18, 2026 roundup → - Lakers
The Los Angeles Lakers franchise didn't start in Los Angeles, or even under its current nickname: it began in 1946 as the Detroit Gems, a team that lasted exactly one forgettable season before relocating to Minneapolis and picking up a new name tied to the…
From the Tue, Aug 25, 2026 roundup → - Laser
A "laser" produces an intensely focused beam of light, and its name is simply an acronym: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Physicist Gordon Gould coined the term in 1957 lab notes, years before the technology existed to actually build…
From the Wed, Aug 26, 2026 roundup → - Led Zeppelin
According to drummer Keith Moon, when musicians from The Who and The Yardbirds floated the idea of forming a supergroup together in 1966, Moon joked that it would go over "like a lead balloon." The phrase stuck in Jimmy Page's memory, and when he formed his…
From the Sat, Sep 19, 2026 roundup → - Lightsaber
George Lucas's earliest Star Wars scripts, drafted in the early 1970s, called the Jedi's signature weapon a "lazersword," a fairly blunt piece of pulp sci-fi terminology that survived through several revisions. By the time the film reached production in 1976…
From the Sat, Sep 19, 2026 roundup → - Limelight
Nineteenth-century theaters achieved their brightest, whitest stage lighting by burning a chunk of heated calcium oxide — quicklime — in a flame hot enough to make it glow intensely. First used to illuminate a London stage in 1837, the technique gave the most…
From the Wed, Sep 2, 2026 roundup → - Lobby
The verb "to lobby" comes from the literal lobby — the entrance hall of a legislative building — where members of the public would wait to catch lawmakers on their way in or out and press their case. A popular legend credits Ulysses S. Grant, who supposedly…
From the Thu, Aug 20, 2026 roundup → - Lollipop
Nobody's entirely sure where "lollipop" comes from, but the leading theory blends an old English dialect word for the tongue with an imitative word for a smacking or popping sound, a pretty fitting etymology for a candy that all but requires making that exact…
From the Mon, Sep 14, 2026 roundup → - Mastercard
In 1966, a group of banks that had been shut out of Bank of America's BankAmericard program formed the Interbank Card Association to fight back. The name on the plastic came together in 1969: "Master Charge" was borrowed from a card run by the First National…
From the Fri, Sep 25, 2026 roundup → - Maverick
Samuel Maverick was a Texas lawyer, land speculator, and signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence who ended up owning a herd of cattle almost by accident, as payment for a debt. Uninterested in ranching, he simply let the animals roam unbranded on…
From the Sun, Aug 16, 2026 roundup → - Milk Duds
Milk Duds were invented in Chicago in 1928 by Edwin Holloway of F. Hoffman & Co., who set out to make a perfectly round chocolate-covered caramel. He couldn't do it — the shape kept coming out lopsided — so instead of hiding the flaw, he named the candy after…
From the Tue, Aug 4, 2026 roundup → - Moscow mule
The "Moscow mule" was born of two inventory problems. In the early 1940s, John Martin of the Heublein company had bought the Smirnoff brand and couldn't get Americans to drink vodka, while Jack Morgan, owner of the Cock 'n' Bull on Sunset Strip, had a house…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup → - Mother's Day
Anna Jarvis held the first "Mother's Day" observance in May 1908 at a Methodist church in Grafton, West Virginia, in memory of her own mother, and campaigned until Woodrow Wilson made the second Sunday in May a national holiday in 1914. Then she watched the…
From the Fri, Sep 25, 2026 roundup → - Nabisco
"Nabisco" started life in 1898 as an informal shorthand for the company's much longer original name, and stuck around as a popular nickname for decades before the company finally made it official. The syllable-by-syllable abbreviation had already won in…
From the Sat, Sep 12, 2026 roundup → - Namby-pamby
In 1725, poet Ambrose Philips — tutor to the grandchildren of King George I — was riding high on his royal connections, publishing a string of gushing, baby-talk poems in praise of his aristocratic young charges. Fellow writers found the style insufferable…
From the Tue, Aug 18, 2026 roundup → - Napalm
Developed in secret at a Harvard University lab in 1942 by chemist Louis Fieser, "napalm" gets its name from a blend of two chemical terms, naphthenic acid and palmitic acid, for the compounds originally used to thicken gasoline into the sticky, flammable gel.
From the Mon, Sep 14, 2026 roundup → - Nickelback
Before the band formed in Hanna, Alberta, in 1995, bassist Mike Kroeger worked the counter at a Starbucks, where a coffee cost $1.95 and he spent his shifts handing customers a nickel in change and saying "here's your nickel back." When the band needed a…
From the Sat, Sep 26, 2026 roundup → - Nickelodeon
A "nickelodeon" — the storefront movie theaters that sprang up across American cities in the early 1900s — got its name by combining its five-cent admission price with odeion, a Greek word for a roofed theater built for musical performances. For one coin…
From the Fri, Aug 28, 2026 roundup → - Nickname
A "nickname" started life as an entirely different phrase, mangled by repetition. Middle English had "an eke name" — eke meaning "also," so literally "an also-name," an extra name alongside your real one. Said aloud enough times, the n from "an" drifted onto…
From the Fri, Aug 21, 2026 roundup → - Nightmare
The "mare" in nightmare has nothing to do with horses. In Old English and across other Germanic languages, a "mare" was a goblin-like demon believed to creep into a sleeper's room at night and sit on their chest, producing a crushing feeling of suffocation…
From the Sun, Aug 16, 2026 roundup → - NIMBY
"NIMBY," the acronym for "not in my backyard," is usually dated to a 1980 Christian Science Monitor article by Emilie Travel Livezey about resistance to hazardous waste facilities. But researchers have since found it a year earlier, in a February 1979…
From the Tue, Sep 15, 2026 roundup → - No man's land
Long before it meant the deadly strip of ground between opposing trenches, the phrase described disputed or ownerless territory in medieval England, recorded as early as 1320 in the spelling "nonesmanneslond," and used specifically for a patch of ground just…
From the Sun, Sep 20, 2026 roundup → - Nostril
Old English "nosþyrl" is "nose" plus "thyrel," a hole, from a verb meaning to bore through. The same verb, "thyrlian," to pierce, gave English "thrill," which meant to run something through until the 1500s and then softened into being pierced by emotion. A…
From the Wed, Sep 30, 2026 roundup → - Octothorpe
When Bell Labs added the # key to touch-tone telephone keypads in the 1960s, the engineers needed something to call it, and "octothorpe" is what stuck. The "octo" is easy: the symbol has eight points. The "thorpe" is where the stories diverge. One insider…
From the Tue, Sep 15, 2026 roundup → - Over the top
In the trenches of the First World War, "over the top" was the order to climb the parapet and advance across no man's land into machine-gun fire. An American volunteer, Arthur Guy Empey, used it as the title of his 1917 memoir and defined it as "the order for…
From the Wed, Sep 23, 2026 roundup → - Oxford
"Oxford" is about as literal as English place names get: it comes from Old English Oxnaforda, meaning "ford of the oxen," describing a shallow spot in the River Thames where cattle could be driven across before any bridge existed there.
From the Mon, Aug 24, 2026 roundup → - Ping-Pong
The English games firm J. Jaques & Son trademarked "Ping-Pong" in 1901, naming their boxed parlor set for the sound of a celluloid ball on a vellum bat, and later sold the American rights to Parker Brothers. Because the name belonged to a company, everyone…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup → - Podcast
British journalist Ben Hammersley coined "podcast" in a February 2004 Guardian article, blending the name of a portable music player with an old term for radio transmission. He later admitted he made the word up in about five seconds, mostly just to pad the…
From the Fri, Sep 4, 2026 roundup → - Radar
"Radar" is an acronym, coined by the US Navy in the early 1940s: RAdio Detection And Ranging. Britain had been developing similar technology under the far less catchy name RDF (Radio Direction Finding), but once the American term caught on during World War…
From the Fri, Aug 28, 2026 roundup → - Ragtime
The syncopated piano style that swept America in the 1890s and 1900s, popularized by composers like Scott Joplin, took its name from a shortening of "ragged time" — a description of how its melodies deliberately broke up an otherwise steady, conventional…
From the Wed, Sep 2, 2026 roundup → - Rain check
On June 21, 1883, the St. Louis Brown Stockings announced that fans who paid for a game called off by rain before five innings would get a ticket good for a future game. The "rain check" spread through baseball within a few seasons, and by 1887 a shoe-shiner…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup → - Red tape
In the 16th century, the administration of Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, began binding the most urgent dossiers, the ones headed straight to the Council of State, with red ribbon, to separate them from ordinary files tied up with plain…
From the Tue, Sep 15, 2026 roundup → - Revolver
Samuel Colt was still in his early twenties when he patented a repeating pistol in 1836 that could fire multiple shots from a single revolving cylinder without reloading — a radical improvement on the single-shot pistols of the day. His first manufacturing…
From the Thu, Sep 3, 2026 roundup → - Rigmarole
In 1291, and again in 1296, Edward I of England made the nobles of Scotland sign parchments swearing allegiance to him. The documents, with dozens of seals dangling from ribbons, came to be called the "Ragman Rolls," after a medieval parlor game called…
From the Fri, Sep 25, 2026 roundup → - Rubber
British chemist Joseph Priestley — better known today for co-discovering oxygen — coined the word "rubber" around 1770, after noticing that a chunk of the substance could erase pencil marks far better than the balled-up bread crumbs people had been using for…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 2026 roundup → - Scrooge
Before 1843, nobody used "scrooge" to describe a stingy person, because Ebenezer Scrooge didn't exist yet. Charles Dickens introduced him in A Christmas Carol as a miser who reforms after three ghostly visits, and the character's name became shorthand for…
From the Thu, Sep 10, 2026 roundup → - Scuba
Ask most people what "scuba" actually stands for and you'll likely get a blank look, even from people who dive every weekend. It's been a real, everyday word for so long that its acronym origins, self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, have mostly worn…
From the Sat, Sep 12, 2026 roundup → - Sideburns
Ambrose Burnside, a Civil War Union general, wore a facial hair style so distinctive that people started calling the style "burnsides" after him. Somewhere along the way the two halves of the word swapped places, and "sideburns" stuck instead, an…
From the Wed, Sep 9, 2026 roundup → - Skunk Works
In 1943, Lockheed engineer Kelly Johnson was told to design and build America's first jet fighter, the XP-80, in total secrecy and in record time. There was no spare building for his team, so they set up shop in a rented circus tent pitched next to a plastics…
From the Mon, Aug 17, 2026 roundup → - Skyscraper
Long before it meant a tall building, "skyscraper" was 19th-century slang for almost anything unusually tall and a little absurd — a lanky horse, an oversized hat, even the topmost sail on a ship's mast. It wasn't until the late 1880s that the word settled…
From the Thu, Sep 3, 2026 roundup → - Smiley face
In 1963, the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, had just gone through a merger and wanted something to lift employee morale. It hired a local advertising man, Harvey Ball, who spent about ten minutes drawing a yellow circle with…
From the Wed, Sep 16, 2026 roundup → - Spam
Hormel introduced its canned pork product on July 5, 1937, and got the name from a contest: the winner was Ken Daigneau, a New York actor who happened to be the brother of a Hormel vice president, and he collected $100 for it. The company's official line is…
From the Wed, Sep 16, 2026 roundup → - Spanish flu
Spain was neutral in the First World War, so when the 1918 influenza arrived there in May, its newspapers reported it in full, including the news that King Alfonso XIII had come down with it. France, Britain, Germany, and the United States were all censoring…
From the Fri, Sep 25, 2026 roundup → - Steeplechase
In 1752, two Irish huntsmen, Edmund Blake and Cornelius O'Callaghan, settled a wager by racing cross-country between two church steeples in County Cork, jumping hedges, walls, and ditches along the way rather than following any road. Nobody recorded who won…
From the Sun, Sep 6, 2026 roundup → - Tabloid
Burroughs, Wellcome & Company registered "Tabloid" as a trademark on March 14, 1884, for its compressed medicine tablets, and defended it fiercely. The press caught the word anyway: on January 1, 1901, Alfred Harmsworth produced a one-day experimental edition…
From the Sun, Sep 27, 2026 roundup → - Tank
When Britain began building armored fighting vehicles in 1915, the Landship Committee needed a cover name, since "landship" said too much. Workers at the Foster's factory in Lincoln were told the riveted steel hulls were mobile water containers for the…
From the Mon, Sep 28, 2026 roundup → - Tarmac
"Tarmac" is a blend of "tar" and "macadam," and macadam itself is an eponym: it's named for John Loudon McAdam, the Scottish engineer who pioneered building roads from layers of compacted crushed stone in the early 1800s. Decades later, Welsh surveyor Edgar…
From the Sat, Aug 22, 2026 roundup → - Tarzan
Edgar Rice Burroughs introduced "Tarzan" in a 1912 pulp magazine serial, giving his jungle-raised hero a name built from an ape language Burroughs invented specifically for the character — in that fictional tongue, "Tarzan" means "white skin." The character…
From the Mon, Aug 24, 2026 roundup → - Taser
The TASER is named after a boys' adventure novel. Inventor Jack Cover, a former NASA researcher, based his 1970s design partly on the fictional weapon in the 1911 novel Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle and wanted to name his device after it — but "TSER"…
From the Wed, Aug 12, 2026 roundup → - Tawdry
Saint Æthelthryth — usually shortened to Audrey — was a 7th-century English queen who died of a throat tumor she reportedly blamed on the extravagant jeweled necklaces she'd worn as a vain young woman. An annual fair held in her honor at Ely sold cheap lace…
From the Sun, Aug 16, 2026 roundup → - Teddy bear
In 1902, on a hunting trip in Mississippi, President Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a black bear his guide had already cornered and tied to a tree, calling it unsportsmanlike. A political cartoon of the incident inspired a Brooklyn shopkeeper to start…
From the Sun, Sep 13, 2026 roundup → - The Beatles
John Lennon is usually credited with settling on "the Beatles," reportedly a pun blending "beat" music with the insect "beetles" — partly inspired, by his own account, by Buddy Holly's band the Crickets, which had also named itself after a bug. Lennon later…
From the Tue, Aug 25, 2026 roundup → - Time travel
H.G. Wells's 1895 novel The Time Machine gave the world the idea and most of the vocabulary, but Wells wrote about "time travelling" and the "Time Traveller," never the bare noun. "Time travel" itself is not recorded until 1914, and nobody is on record "time…
From the Fri, Sep 25, 2026 roundup → - Toast
Raising a glass "in a toast" traces back to an old, very practical habit: dropping a piece of spiced, scorched bread into a cup of wine. Cheap or slightly off wine of past centuries was often too acidic or bland to enjoy on its own, and a piece of toast…
From the Sat, Aug 15, 2026 roundup → - Transistor
On December 16, 1947, physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at Bell Labs successfully demonstrated the first working "transistor" — a small semiconductor device that could amplify and switch electrical signals without the size…
From the Sat, Aug 29, 2026 roundup → - Treadmill
The first "treadmill" was not for fitness. English engineer William Cubitt introduced it in 1818 as a punishment for prisoners he considered idle, a huge wheel with steps that inmates climbed for hours, sometimes grinding grain or pumping water and sometimes…
From the Sat, Sep 26, 2026 roundup → - Trench coat
Burberry and Aquascutum have argued for a century over who invented the "trench coat," and both have a case: Aquascutum was waterproofing wool in the 1850s, and Thomas Burberry patented gabardine in 1879 and a belted officer's coat in 1912. What's certain is…
From the Wed, Sep 23, 2026 roundup → - Tube Alloys
When Britain authorized its atomic bomb program in August 1941, the civil servant in charge, Sir John Anderson, and the ICI chemist running it, Wallace Akers, needed a name that would attract no attention whatsoever. They chose "Tube Alloys," which was, as…
From the Sun, Sep 27, 2026 roundup → - Typewriter
Christopher Latham Sholes coined the word "type-writer" himself in his 1868 patent, joining a term for raised printing characters with a term for someone who puts words on paper. He built in a less obvious goal too: the keyboard layout, the same one still…
From the Fri, Sep 4, 2026 roundup → - Ugg boots
Sheepskin boots have been worn informally by Australian surfers and shearers since at least the 1930s, under a name whose own origin nobody wrote down at the time, though the leading guess is that it is simply short for "ugly." A handful of small Australian…
From the Fri, Sep 18, 2026 roundup → - Underdog
One popular explanation for "underdog" — though etymologists will tell you it's more folklore than fact — traces it to two-man logging teams working an old-style pit saw: one man stood on top of the log doing the more prestigious cutting, while his partner…
From the Sat, Aug 22, 2026 roundup → - Uppercase
In the days of hand-set metal type, a compositor worked from two shallow wooden trays: the small letters, used constantly, sat in the lower tray within easy reach, and the capitals, used far less often, sat in the tray mounted above and behind it. "Uppercase"…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup → - Wall Street
In the 1650s, Dutch colonists in New Amsterdam built a defensive wooden wall along the northern edge of their settlement, meant to protect against English colonial forces and Native American raids. The wall itself never saw real combat and was torn down by…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 2026 roundup → - Watergate
Long before the break-in, the Watergate complex was already named — for what once stood on the site: the eastern terminus of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, where a large wooden water gate and an adjoining lock regulated boat traffic flowing into the Potomac…
From the Wed, Sep 2, 2026 roundup → - Waterloo
Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815 gave English an idiom almost immediately, but the specific, personal phrasing "meet one's Waterloo" took longer to arrive. Arthur Conan Doyle appears to be the first to use it in exactly that sense, in a 1905 Sherlock…
From the Fri, Sep 4, 2026 roundup → - Weird
Long before it meant "strange," "weird" was an Old English noun meaning "fate" or "destiny" — the same root behind the Old Norse word for the Norns, the three sisters who spun and cut the threads of human lives in Germanic mythology. English inherited its own…
From the Mon, Aug 17, 2026 roundup → - White House
The popular story is that the President's House was painted white to hide the scorch marks after British troops burned it in August 1814. It's a good story, and it's wrong. The building's porous Aquia sandstone got a lime-based whitewash in 1798, as soon as…
From the Thu, Sep 17, 2026 roundup → - Wristwatch
Men carried pocket watches and women wore watches on bracelets, and that was the rule until the Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont told his friend Louis Cartier that fishing a watch out of his pocket mid-flight was impossible. Cartier's 1904 answer, a…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup → - Yahoo
Long before it was a search engine, a "Yahoo" was a fictional race of crude, brutish humanoids in the fourth part of Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels, kept as filthy livestock by a civilization of intelligent horses. A pair of Stanford graduate…
From the Fri, Sep 4, 2026 roundup → - Zamboni
In 1949, Southern California ice-rink owner Frank Zamboni got tired of watching a five-person crew spend ninety minutes scraping, sweeping, washing, and re-flooding his rink's surface by hand between sessions. He built a single machine — cobbled together…
From the Wed, Aug 26, 2026 roundup →