Arts and entertainment
The origins of names from music, film, television, books and games, including more than a few band names with surprising backstories.
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- Anecdote
Around 550 AD, Byzantine court historian Procopius wrote a scathing, gossip-heavy account of Emperor Justinian's private life and inner circle, deliberately keeping it out of general circulation — he titled it, in Greek, "Unpublished Things." That manuscript…
From the Tue, Aug 18, 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 → - Avant-garde
French military writers had used the phrase for the troops marching ahead of the main army since medieval times, but its leap into art and politics is usually dated to 1825, when the utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon and his follower Olinde Rodrigues…
From the Sat, Sep 19, 2026 roundup → - Camouflage
In 1915 the French army needed a way to hide artillery, trucks, and observation posts from aerial reconnaissance, so it formed a dedicated Section de Camouflage led by painter Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scevola and staffed almost entirely with working artists…
From the Fri, Sep 18, 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 → - Circus
"Circus" comes straight from the Latin word for a circular or oval arena, most famously the Circus Maximus, Rome's enormous chariot-racing stadium. The traveling shows of acrobats, animals, and clowns we associate with the word today didn't arrive until the…
From the Sun, Aug 23, 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 → - 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 → - Cubism
When Georges Braque submitted a series of landscape paintings reducing buildings and trees to geometric fragments, critic Louis Vauxcelles dismissively described them as full of "little cubes." Braque and Pablo Picasso, the movement's other founder…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 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 → - Dear Abby
Dear Abby, the long-running advice column, launched in 1956 under a pen name its author, Pauline Phillips, built from two very different sources: "Abigail," after the wise, quick-thinking prophetess in the Book of Samuel, and "Van Buren," borrowed from…
From the Tue, Aug 4, 2026 roundup → - Disneyland
When "Disneyland" opened in Anaheim, California on July 17, 1955, it was designed around a single unifying story and carefully controlled atmosphere, divided into themed "lands," rather than just being a loose collection of unrelated rides — the reason it's…
From the Mon, Aug 31, 2026 roundup → - Doppelgänger
German novelist Jean Paul coined "Doppelgänger," literally "double-goer," in his 1796 novel Siebenkäs. The word was unfamiliar enough at the time that he added a footnote explaining what he meant by it. English picked up the loanword within a few decades…
From the Sat, Sep 5, 2026 roundup → - Easel
The wooden stand that holds a painter's canvas gets its English name from the Dutch word for a donkey, "ezel." The logic is the same beast-of-burden metaphor behind "sawhorse" and "clotheshorse": an "easel" carries a load the way a donkey does, just a canvas…
From the Mon, Sep 7, 2026 roundup → - Eminem
Marshall Bruce Mathers III started performing under his initials, M&M, phonetically spelled out to avoid an obvious trademark headache with a certain candy company — becoming Eminem. The nickname reportedly traces back to high school, rapping alongside a…
From the Wed, Aug 12, 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 → - Encore
"Encore" is simply the French word for "again" or "still." English audiences adopted it wholesale as the shout demanding one more song, with no translation and no changes, which makes it one of the more honest loanwords on this list.
From the Sat, Sep 5, 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 → - Eurythmics
Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, a Swiss composer, developed a method of teaching music through physical movement in the early 1900s, and it spread through schools across Europe under the name "eurhythmics." Annie Lennox took classes in it as a child in Aberdeen. When…
From the Fri, Sep 25, 2026 roundup → - Explode
Latin "explodere" meant to drive an actor off the stage by clapping and hissing, from "ex," out, and "plaudere," to clap, the same root as "applaud." When "explode" entered English in the 1530s it kept that sense: to reject with scorn. The meaning shifted to…
From the Mon, Sep 28, 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 → - Fauvism
At the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris, a room of paintings by Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, and their circle used color so unnaturally, violent pinks for skin, green for a face, that critic Louis Vauxcelles walked past a lone Renaissance-style bronze statue…
From the Fri, Sep 18, 2026 roundup → - Fedora
The fedora is named after a play, not a person — Fédora, an 1882 melodrama by Victorien Sardou that made Sarah Bernhardt, already the biggest stage star in France, into a full-blown sensation. Everything associated with the show became fashionable overnight…
From the Fri, Aug 14, 2026 roundup → - Fiasco
A fiasco — Italian for "bottle" — became English shorthand for a spectacular flop by way of 19th-century Italian theater slang, where a failed performance was said to "make a bottle." Nobody is fully certain why; the most repeated (and disputed) theory holds…
From the Thu, Aug 20, 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 → - Gargoyle
A gargoyle — those grotesque carved figures jutting off cathedral rooflines — takes its name from the Old French gargouille, "throat," describing its original job as a functional rain spout that let water gurgle out through its mouth, well clear of the…
From the Fri, Aug 21, 2026 roundup → - Genesis
The band didn't pick its own name. A group of Charterhouse schoolboys recording their first demos in 1967 left the naming to Jonathan King, a former Charterhouse pupil turned record producer, who suggested "Genesis," evoking a word that simply means a…
From the Sat, Sep 12, 2026 roundup → - Halsey
Singer Halsey, born Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, built her stage name from two sources at once: it's an anagram of "Ashley," and it's also the name of a Halsey Street subway station in Brooklyn — a neighborhood tied to an early relationship and to where she…
From the Tue, Aug 4, 2026 roundup → - Holiday Inn
Kemmons Wilson came home from a miserable 1951 family road trip to Washington, D.C., convinced America needed clean, predictable motels where kids stayed free. As his architect, Eddie Bluestein, drew up plans for the first one on Summer Avenue in Memphis, he…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 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 → - Hypocrite
In ancient Greek theater, a hypokrites was simply an actor — literally "one who answers," describing a performer responding to the chorus from behind a mask, playing a role that wasn't their own true self. That gap between the mask and the real person…
From the Tue, Aug 11, 2026 roundup → - Impressionism
When a group of independent French painters held their own exhibition in 1874 — a direct response to being repeatedly rejected by the official Paris Salon — a skeptical critic wrote a scathing review mocking one painter's hazy, unfinished-looking harbor…
From the Mon, Aug 31, 2026 roundup → - Inferno
"Inferno" traces back to a plain Latin word for the underworld, but it took Dante Alighieri's 14th-century poem, cataloguing hell in exhaustive, circle-by-circle detail, to turn the word into the vivid, fiery image most people picture today, whether or not…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 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 → - iPod
Apple's iPod got its name from Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter brought in for the 2001 launch, who pitched "pod" because the device's white, sealed-shell design and tiny screen reminded him of the sleep pods and shuttle-bay pod doors in 2001: A Space…
From the Sun, Aug 23, 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 → - Italics
Italic type, the slanted style used for emphasis, is named directly after Italy. Venetian printer Aldus Manutius introduced it in 1501, designing the compact, cursive-inspired typeface to mimic elegant contemporary handwriting and squeeze more text onto a…
From the Fri, Aug 21, 2026 roundup → - J.R.R. Tolkien
In May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), a document devoted largely to questions raised by artificial intelligence. In paragraph 213, the Pope quotes Gandalf directly: "It is not our part to master…
From the Sun, Aug 9, 2026 roundup → - Jumanji
Author Chris Van Allsburg has said Jumanji is Zulu for "many effects" — but there's a catch: no such word appears to exist in the Zulu language with that meaning, and there's no recorded use of "jumanji" before Van Allsburg's 1981 picture book. The most…
From the Sun, Aug 9, 2026 roundup → - Karaoke
"Karaoke" is a genuinely round-trip word: it combines the Japanese word kara ("empty") with okesutora, itself a Japanese phonetic borrowing of the English word "orchestra." So the word for singing along to a backing track without a live band traveled from…
From the Mon, Aug 17, 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 → - Lana Del Rey
Born Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, Lana Del Rey tried out a few stage names first — Lizzy Grant, May Jailer, even Sparkle Jump Rope Queen — before landing on Lana Del Rey in 2010. The name blends actress Lana Turner (Old Hollywood glamour) with the Ford Del Rey…
From the Mon, Aug 3, 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 → - Limerick
Nobody can fully prove where limerick — the five-line comic verse form — actually got its name. The most repeated story points to a 19th-century parlor game where each guest improvised a nonsense verse and the group sang a chorus ending in "will you come up…
From the Sat, Aug 8, 2026 roundup → - Linkin Park
The band had already been Xero and Hybrid Theory when their label told them to change the name again in 1999. They settled on the name of a Santa Monica park honoring Abraham Lincoln, but as Mike Shinoda has explained, they wanted the .com address, the…
From the Wed, Sep 23, 2026 roundup → - Lord of the Flies
William Golding's title is a literal English translation of Beelzebub — from Hebrew Ba'al Zevuv, "lord of the flies," a name for a Philistine deity that Israelite scripture repurposed as a mocking insult, and which later Christian tradition folded into a name…
From the Fri, Aug 7, 2026 roundup → - Lothario
A "Lothario" is a seducer who uses and discards women, a reputation the word owes to a single stage villain: the libertine title character of Nicholas Rowe's 1703 tragedy The Fair Penitent, whose betrayal of the play's heroine was scandalous enough to turn…
From the Mon, Sep 7, 2026 roundup → - Louvre
Even historians can't fully agree on where the Louvre's name comes from. Competing theories point to an Old French word for a wolf-hunting den (*louveterie*), a Latin word for the reddish, sandy soil the fortress was originally built on, or simply an old term…
From the Tue, Aug 25, 2026 roundup → - Marionette
Marionette is French for "little Mary," a double diminutive built from "Marion" (itself a diminutive of "Marie") plus the affectionate suffix "-ette." The word started out meaning small devotional figurines of the Virgin Mary, then extended to the string…
From the Wed, Aug 12, 2026 roundup → - Museum
A museum was originally a mouseion — Greek for a shrine dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of art, music, and inspiration. The most famous ancient example, the Mouseion of Alexandria, functioned less like a temple and more like a research institute…
From the Sat, Aug 8, 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 → - 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 → - Nirvana
In Buddhism and Hinduism, "nirvana" comes from a Sanskrit word meaning "blown out" or "extinguished," describing the state of liberation reached when the flames of craving and suffering are finally snuffed out like a candle. Kurt Cobain borrowed the word…
From the Mon, Aug 24, 2026 roundup → - Nocturne
The "nocturne" — a lyrical, dreamlike piece of music meant to evoke nighttime — is popularly associated with Frédéric Chopin, but he didn't invent the form. Irish composer John Field published the first pieces to use the name in this modern sense back in…
From the Mon, Aug 31, 2026 roundup → - Obelisk
An "obelisk" — a tall, four-sided, tapering stone pillar — gets its name from a Greek word, obeliskos, meaning "small spit" or "skewer," a diminutive of obelos. Ancient Greek visitors to Egypt, confronted with these enormous stone needles, apparently decided…
From the Fri, Aug 28, 2026 roundup → - Odyssey
Homer's epic poem about the Greek king Odysseus's ten-year, monster-and-god-obstructed voyage home from the Trojan War gave English one of its most durable metaphors. For centuries the word referred specifically to that one poem and that one hero's journey…
From the Sun, Aug 16, 2026 roundup → - Oklahoma!
Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1943 show is widely credited as Broadway's first true "book musical" — the first to weave its songs, dialogue, and dance into one continuous story instead of stringing musical numbers together as a loosely connected variety revue…
From the Tue, Sep 1, 2026 roundup → - Opera
Opera is, grammatically, a mistake that stuck: it's the Latin plural of opus ("a work"), but Italian speakers in the 1600s adopted it as a singular noun meaning a staged musical drama, and every language that borrowed the word from Italian — including English…
From the Sun, Aug 9, 2026 roundup → - Orchestra
In an ancient Greek theater, the "orchestra" was a place, not a group of people: the semicircular space in front of the stage where the chorus sang and danced, from a Greek verb meaning "to dance." Roman theaters kept the word for the same area, by then…
From the Tue, Sep 15, 2026 roundup → - Origami
The word origami combines Japanese oru ("to fold") and kami ("paper") — but it's a surprisingly recent label for an old practice. Paper folding in Japan was originally called orikata, "folded shapes," and the word didn't shift to "origami" until around 1880…
From the Mon, Aug 10, 2026 roundup → - Oscar
The Academy Award's golden statuette nickname is popularly credited to Hollywood gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky, who claimed in his own later writing that he coined the term "Oscar" in a 1934 column, supposedly inspired by an old vaudeville joke. But the…
From the Sat, Aug 29, 2026 roundup → - Ovation
A Roman "ovatio" was a lesser triumph: a general who had won a victory without a proper pitched battle, or against an unworthy enemy, was allowed to enter the city on foot or on horseback rather than in a chariot. Plutarch explained the name by the sheep…
From the Tue, Sep 29, 2026 roundup → - Oxymoron
An "oxymoron" — a phrase that yokes together two contradictory ideas, like "deafening silence" or "jumbo shrimp" — gets its name from two Greek words that themselves contradict each other: oxys, "sharp," and moros, "foolish" or "dull." Literally, the word…
From the Mon, Aug 17, 2026 roundup → - Pamphlet
A "pamphlet" owes its name to an unlikely source: Pamphilus, seu de Amore, a wildly popular 12th-century Latin love poem. Copies of it — cheap, thin, unbound — circulated so widely across medieval Europe that people started using its title, shortened and…
From the Tue, Sep 1, 2026 roundup → - Pandemonium
John Milton invented Pandemonium whole-cloth in Paradise Lost (1667) as the name of Hell's capital city — the "high Capitol" where Satan convenes his fallen angels, designed by the architect-angel Mulciber and described as outshining even Babylon. Milton…
From the Tue, Aug 11, 2026 roundup → - Panorama
Painter Robert Barker coined "panorama" in 1792, blending Greek pan ("all") and horama ("view") to describe his massive 360-degree paintings of Edinburgh and, later, London — displayed on curved walls inside a purpose-built rotunda so viewers felt genuinely…
From the Fri, Aug 28, 2026 roundup → - Paparazzi
When director Federico Fellini needed a name for the aggressive, opportunistic celebrity photographer character in his 1960 film La Dolce Vita, he landed on "Paparazzo" — and later said the surname just sounded right to him, evoking the buzzing, darting…
From the Tue, Aug 18, 2026 roundup → - Phonograph
Thomas Edison patented the "phonograph" in 1877, the first device that could both record sound and play it back — a genuinely new category of invention, not just an improvement on something that already existed. Its name is a straightforward Greek compound…
From the Fri, Aug 28, 2026 roundup → - Pixar
Before it made a single movie, Pixar sold expensive image-processing computers, and its name reportedly reflects that: a blend of "pixel," the smallest unit of a digital image, with a tech-sounding "-ar" ending echoing words like "radar" or "sonar." The…
From the Sun, Aug 23, 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 → - Quixotic
To call a scheme "quixotic" is to name-drop Miguel de Cervantes's 1605 novel Don Quixote without realizing it. The title character, an aging Spanish gentleman who reads too many chivalric romances and sets off to revive knight-errantry, famously charges a row…
From the Sat, Aug 22, 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 → - Recycling symbol
On the first Earth Day in 1970, the Container Corporation of America ran a nationwide student design contest to promote environmental awareness, drawing more than 500 entries, and the winner was 23-year-old design student Gary Anderson, who built his…
From the Sun, Sep 20, 2026 roundup → - Reggae
The most credible story behind reggae's name comes straight from Toots Hibbert, who coined it during a jam session that became the 1968 single "Do the Reggay." The word likely grew out of Jamaican slang rege-rege or streggae, used to describe someone dressed…
From the Wed, Aug 12, 2026 roundup → - Renaissance
Nobody living through the "Renaissance" called it that. The period name, meaning "rebirth," was coined in 1855 by French historian Jules Michelet for the title of one volume of his sprawling history of France. It didn't really catch on until Swiss historian…
From the Tue, Sep 8, 2026 roundup → - Rhapsody
Long before Freddie Mercury, rhapsody referred to portions of epic poetry recited by ancient Greek performers called rhapsodes. The word comes from rhaptein ("to stitch") + oide ("song") — literally a "stitched song," since these performers strung together…
From the Sun, Aug 2, 2026 roundup → - Robot
Playwright Karel Čapek wanted a Latin word, labori, for the artificial workers in his 1920 play about a factory that mass-produces synthetic people. His brother Josef suggested something better: robot, from the Old Church Slavonic robota — "forced labor" or…
From the Fri, Aug 14, 2026 roundup → - Rosebud
Orson Welles's 1941 film Citizen Kane spends its entire runtime chasing the meaning of one word, a dying tycoon's last word, which turns out to be the brand name of his childhood sled. Screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz never definitively explained why he picked…
From the Mon, Sep 14, 2026 roundup → - Saxophone
Belgian instrument maker Adolphe Sax spent the 1840s trying to build something that combined the projection of brass instruments with the agility of woodwinds, and when he succeeded, he did what more than a few proud inventors have done before and since: he…
From the Sat, Aug 29, 2026 roundup → - Scooby-Doo
In 1968, CBS daytime programming executive Fred Silverman was on a flight to a development meeting for a new Saturday-morning cartoon, then in a very different, more serious live-action-style format. Listening to Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night" on…
From the Wed, Sep 2, 2026 roundup → - Scrimshaw
Sailors on long 18th- and 19th-century whaling voyages passed the endless idle hours by engraving detailed scenes into whale bone and teeth — a folk-art craft now known as "scrimshaw." Oddly, no one actually knows where the word itself came from. Etymologists…
From the Mon, Aug 31, 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 → - Silhouette
Étienne de Silhouette was France's finance minister for all of eight months in 1759, appointed during the Seven Years' War to fix a brutal budget crisis. His fix was brutal too — steep new taxes and slashed pensions, aimed even at the nobility — and the…
From the Mon, Aug 3, 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 → - 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 → - Starbucks
In 1971, the founders sat down with artist Terry Heckler to name their new Seattle coffee company, wanting something with a sense of Pacific Northwest adventure and old maritime coffee-trading roots. Heckler pushed for names starting with "st," and somewhere…
From the Fri, Aug 7, 2026 roundup → - Surrealism
The poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined "surrealism" in 1917, using it in a program note for Parade, the Jean Cocteau ballet with sets by Picasso and music by Satie, and again in the subtitle of his own play Les Mamelles de Tiresias. Apollinaire died the…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup → - Synchronicity
The Police named their 1983 album, and Sting named the whole record's thematic arc, after Carl Jung's 1952 concept of synchronicity — "meaningful coincidence" between events with no causal link between them, laid out in Jung's book Synchronicity: An Acausal…
From the Mon, Aug 3, 2026 roundup → - Tango
Nobody agrees on where the word came from before it became a dance: some trace it to a Spanish term imitating a drumbeat, others to Kikongo or other West African languages carried across the Atlantic by the diaspora communities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo…
From the Sat, Sep 19, 2026 roundup → - Tarantella
This fast, whirling folk dance from southern Italy takes its name from Taranto, a port city in the region where, between roughly the 15th and 17th centuries, locals believed the bite of a wolf spider caused a frenzied condition called "tarantism" — curable…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 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 → - Television
On January 26, 1926, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of a working television system, in a cramped attic room at 22 Frith Street in London's Soho district, to members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The…
From the Mon, Aug 24, 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 → - Titanic
James Cameron's "Titanic" opened in December 1997 and went on to become the first film in history to cross $1 billion at the worldwide box office — a milestone no movie had ever hit before. It held the all-time box-office record for more than a decade, until…
From the Sat, Aug 29, 2026 roundup → - Ukulele
The Hawaiian name for the small four-stringed "ukulele" translates literally to "jumping flea," one popular explanation being that it described how quickly a player's fingers moved across the strings. A competing story credits the nickname of Edward Purvis, a…
From the Thu, Aug 20, 2026 roundup → - Utopia
Thomas More coined utopia in 1516 for his book of the same name, describing a fictional ideal society. It's a pun in the original Greek: ou-topos means "no place," but it sounds almost identical to eu-topos, meaning "good place." More built the joke into the…
From the Sun, Aug 2, 2026 roundup → - Villanelle
The villanelle — a tightly structured 19-line poem built from just two rhymes and two refrains that repeat and recombine down to a final quatrain — is best known today through Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night," his 1951 plea to his dying…
From the Wed, Aug 19, 2026 roundup → - Walkman
When Sony's portable cassette player launched in 1979, it didn't have one name — it had four. Japan got the brand name that eventually went global; the US got "Sound-About"; the UK got "Stowaway"; Sweden got "Freestyle." Co-founder Akio Morita reportedly…
From the Wed, Aug 26, 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 → - Woodstock
The most famous music festival of the 20th century isn't named after the town it was held in. Organizers wanted to hold it in the artsy town of Woodstock, New York, but local opposition killed that plan, and the whole event ended up on a dairy farmer's field…
From the Sat, Sep 12, 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 →