Mythology and legend
Words that came out of Greek, Norse and other myths and legends, and still carry a trace of the original story.
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- Abracadabra
The earliest surviving record of "abracadabra" is in the Liber Medicinalis of Serenus Sammonicus, physician to the Roman emperor Caracalla in the early third century. His prescription for a persistent fever, probably malaria, was to write the word on an…
From the Fri, Sep 25, 2026 roundup → - Adamant
To be "adamant" is to be unmovable — appropriately, since the word comes from Greek adamas, describing a legendary, impossibly hard and untamable substance, sometimes associated with diamond and sometimes with a mythical unbreakable metal. That same Greek…
From the Sat, Aug 22, 2026 roundup → - Ahura Mazda
Ahura Mazda is the supreme deity of Zoroastrianism, the god of wisdom and light. The Strait of Hormuz — the narrow, heavily watched waterway between Iran and Oman — is widely believed to carry his name through nearly three thousand years of sound changes…
From the Tue, Aug 4, 2026 roundup → - Amazon
In 1541, Spanish officer Francisco de Orellana was sent downriver on a supply run and, thanks to brutal currents and repeated ambushes, simply never made it back — instead he and his crew rode the river all the way to the Atlantic, becoming the first…
From the Mon, Aug 10, 2026 roundup → - Ambrosia
In Greek mythology, "ambrosia" was the food of the gods, said to grant eternal life to anyone who ate it — fittingly, since the word literally translates to "not mortal," combining a Greek negative prefix with the root for "mortal." The same ancient root…
From the Mon, Aug 31, 2026 roundup → - Amethyst
Amethyst comes from Greek a- ("not") + methystos ("intoxicated") — literally "not drunk." Ancient Greeks and Romans carved wine cups from the purple stone specifically believing it would ward off drunkenness, and the popular legend ties it to Dionysus, the…
From the Fri, Aug 14, 2026 roundup → - Apollo
NASA's "Apollo program," which put the first humans on the Moon in July 1969, got its name in 1960 from NASA official Abe Silverstein, who was flipping through a book of mythology one evening and pictured the Greek god of the sun, music, and prophecy driving…
From the Sat, Aug 29, 2026 roundup → - Arachnid
Arachne, a mortal weaver in Greek mythology, made the mistake of claiming she was better at her craft than Athena herself. Athena did not take the comparison well, and Arachne spent the rest of eternity as a spider, an origin story spiders themselves remain…
From the Thu, Sep 10, 2026 roundup → - Armageddon
The Book of Revelation names the site of the final battle between good and evil as a place called Har Megiddo, Hebrew for the hill of Megiddo, an ancient city in northern Israel that had already witnessed dozens of real battles by the time Revelation was…
From the Sun, Sep 20, 2026 roundup → - Atlantis
The legend of Atlantis — an advanced island civilization said to have sunk beneath the sea in a single catastrophic day and night — comes entirely from the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who described it in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias around 360 BCE…
From the Tue, Aug 25, 2026 roundup → - Atlas
A book of maps is called an "atlas" because of a cover illustration, not a coincidence of meaning. When Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator published his own map collection in 1595, he put an image of the Greek Titan condemned by Zeus to hold up the…
From the Wed, Aug 26, 2026 roundup → - Aurora borealis
The aurora borealis borrows its name from two mythologies at once: Aurora, the Roman goddess of dawn, and Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind. Galileo is generally credited with coining the phrase around 1619-1620 after observing a reddish night-sky glow…
From the Tue, Aug 4, 2026 roundup → - Basilisk
The basilisk has been terrifying readers since antiquity: a serpent so venomous that ancient writers claimed its glance, its breath, or even its hiss alone could kill. Pliny the Elder described it as small, but so lethal that it could be defeated only by its…
From the Wed, Sep 9, 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 → - Cobalt
German miners kept pulling ore from the ground that looked promising but yielded nothing usable and, worse, released toxic fumes when smelted. Blaming a mischievous spirit for the sabotage, they named it after "kobold," a goblin of German folklore, and…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 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 → - 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 → - Echo
An "echo" gets its name from a Greek mountain nymph cursed by Hera to be able only to repeat the last words spoken to her. When Echo falls hopelessly in love with the beautiful Narcissus and he rejects her, she wastes away out of grief until nothing remains…
From the Mon, Aug 24, 2026 roundup → - El Dorado
Long before it meant a golden city, El Dorado — Spanish for "the gilded one" — referred to a person: a king of the Muisca people in the Colombian Andes, who was ritually coated in gold dust before boarding a raft on Lake Guatavita to make offerings to the…
From the Mon, Aug 10, 2026 roundup → - El Niño
Peruvian fishermen along the country's northern coast noticed, well before scientists took interest, that a warm ocean current periodically pushed in around late December, scattering the cold-water fish stocks their livelihoods depended on. They named the…
From the Sat, Sep 19, 2026 roundup → - El Salvador
The only country in the world named directly after Jesus Christ. In 1525, conquistador Pedro de Alvarado's forces founded a settlement they called San Salvador — "Holy Savior" — later formalized as Provincia De Nuestro Señor Jesucristo, El Salvador Del Mundo…
From the Mon, Aug 3, 2026 roundup → - Enthusiasm
Long before it meant "eager excitement," enthusiasm meant something much more literal in Greek: entheos, "having the god within," describing the state of someone possessed or inspired by a deity — the ecstatic trance of Apollo's oracle at Delphi, or the…
From the Fri, Aug 14, 2026 roundup → - Epiphany
"Epiphany" started as a specifically religious term, from the Greek epiphaneia, meaning "manifestation" or "appearance" — used for the Christian feast day commemorating the moment the infant Christ was revealed to the Magi. Over centuries, the word's meaning…
From the Wed, Aug 19, 2026 roundup → - Ether
Ether comes from Greek aither, "upper air" — specifically the pure, bright air the Greeks believed the gods themselves breathed, distinct from the thicker air down at ground level where mortals lived. Ancient cosmology treated it as a literal fifth element…
From the Tue, Aug 11, 2026 roundup → - Excalibur
King Arthur's sword likely started life as the Welsh Caledfwlch. A 12th-century chronicler, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Latinized it into "Caliburnus," a form that happened to echo the Latin word for steel, chalybs. French retellings reshaped the name further over…
From the Fri, Sep 4, 2026 roundup → - Exodus
The Book of Exodus gets its English title, by way of Latin, from Greek exodos — literally "the road out," from ex- ("out of") plus hodos ("road" or "way"). Hodos has a busy family tree: it's also the root behind "episode," "method," and "period." The book…
From the Sun, Aug 9, 2026 roundup → - Galaxy
Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, gets its name — and the generic word "galaxy" along with it — from a Greek phrase meaning "milky circle," describing the pale, hazy band of light early stargazers saw stretching across a clear night sky, long before anyone knew…
From the Fri, Aug 28, 2026 roundup → - Greenland
According to the Icelandic sagas, the Norse explorer Erik the Red was banished from Iceland around 982 AD after a series of killings, and spent his exile charting the coast of a new island to the west. When he returned a few years later to recruit settlers…
From the Sun, Sep 20, 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 → - Helium
On August 18, 1868, the French astronomer Pierre Janssen pointed a spectroscope at a solar eclipse in India and saw a bright yellow line that matched nothing known. Norman Lockyer in England saw the same line without an eclipse and named the element for…
From the Wed, Sep 30, 2026 roundup → - Hypnosis
Scottish surgeon James Braid coined "hypnosis" in the 1840s, drawing on Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, even though Braid himself eventually argued the trance state had little to do with actual sleep. The name stuck anyway, a rare case of a scientist naming…
From the Thu, Sep 10, 2026 roundup → - Inaugurate
To "inaugurate" someone comes from the Latin inaugurare, rooted in augur — a Roman religious official whose job was to read omens in the flight patterns and behavior of birds. No incoming Roman official could be formally installed until the augurs confirmed…
From the Thu, Aug 20, 2026 roundup → - Iris
In Greek mythology, Iris was the goddess of the rainbow and messenger of the gods, her name built from a root meaning "to bend" or "to turn" — an apt description of a rainbow's arc. English later borrowed her name twice over: once for the colored ring around…
From the Wed, Aug 12, 2026 roundup → - Juggernaut
Since at least the 12th century, worshippers in the eastern Indian city of Puri have hauled an enormous wooden chariot carrying an image of the Hindu deity Jagannath, a form of Krishna, through the streets during an annual festival, with crowds pulling ropes…
From the Sun, Sep 20, 2026 roundup → - Labyrinth
The word labyrinth is generally traced to labrys, the Minoan word for the ceremonial double-headed axe found carved and painted throughout the palace of Knossos on Crete — excavator Sir Arthur Evans believed the maze-like palace complex itself inspired the…
From the Sun, Aug 9, 2026 roundup → - Lemur
When Carl Linnaeus was formally classifying the nocturnal, wide-eyed primates now called "lemurs" in the mid-18th century, he skipped past ordinary animal comparisons and reached for Roman mythology instead: lemures, the restless, wandering spirits of the…
From the Wed, Aug 19, 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 → - 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 → - Narcissism
Narcissus, in Greek myth, was so captivated by his own reflection in a pool of water that he couldn't tear himself away, eventually wasting away on the spot. The nymph Echo, who loved him and was ignored for her trouble, arguably had the worse end of the…
From the Thu, Sep 10, 2026 roundup → - Narcissus
The Narcissus myth is one of Greek mythology's cleanest cautionary tales: a beautiful youth, cursed by the goddess Nemesis after spurning a rejected admirer, becomes fixated on his own reflection in a pool of water and wastes away, unable to look away from…
From the Sun, Aug 9, 2026 roundup → - Nemesis
Before it meant "archenemy," Nemesis was a Greek goddess — the personification of righteous anger and retribution against hubris, the specific sin of getting too big for your mortal britches. She was the one who made sure good fortune didn't run unchecked…
From the Sat, Aug 15, 2026 roundup → - Nickel
German miners in 16th-century Saxony kept digging up a reddish ore that looked like copper but stubbornly refused to yield any. Frustrated and more than a little superstitious, they blamed a mischievous spirit and named the ore Kupfernickel — roughly "copper…
From the Wed, Aug 5, 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 → - Nike
Long before it was stitched onto sneakers, "Nike" was simply the Greek word for victory, personified as a winged goddess who accompanied warriors and athletes alike. An employee reportedly suggested the name to the company's founders in 1971, and the swoosh…
From the Thu, Sep 10, 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 → - 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 → - Onyx
The banded gemstone's name comes from the ancient Greek word for "fingernail" or "claw," reportedly because its pale, translucent bands reminded someone of the color of a fingernail. Greek myth adds a flourish: some versions claim onyx formed when Cupid…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 2026 roundup → - Oracle
Before it was a database giant, Oracle was the codename of a classified 1977 CIA project that founders Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates worked on together at a previous company. The project's goal was ambitious even by today's standards: build a system…
From the Tue, Aug 11, 2026 roundup → - Orion
The hunter striding across the winter sky was, in most versions of Greek myth, killed by a scorpion, specifically the one now immortalized as the constellation Orion chases across the horizon. Zeus placed them on opposite sides of the sky so precisely that…
From the Wed, Sep 9, 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 → - Panic
Panic comes from Pan, the Greek god of the wild and shepherds, whose sudden, unearthly cries were said to startle flocks and lone travelers into blind terror — especially in the empty quiet of the countryside, exactly where he liked to lurk. The Greeks had a…
From the Thu, Aug 6, 2026 roundup → - Paradise
Long before it meant anything like heaven, "paradise" was an Old Persian word for a walled garden or royal hunting park, the kind of manicured, guarded enclosure a Persian king might retreat to. Greek and Latin writers borrowed the term for exactly that image…
From the Wed, Sep 9, 2026 roundup → - Santa Claus
The plump, white-bearded, chimney-descending gift-giver most of us picture was mostly locked in decades before any soft drink company got involved — and "Santa Claus" was already a working pitchman by then. Back in 1885, Santa appeared in sponsored ads for…
From the Thu, Sep 3, 2026 roundup → - Sinister
"Sinister" comes directly from the Latin word for "left" — nothing more menacing than a direction, originally. But left-handedness carried centuries of superstition across many cultures, viewed as unlucky, untrustworthy, or even sinful, while the Latin word…
From the Thu, Aug 20, 2026 roundup → - Taboo
Captain James Cook logged the word "taboo" in June 1777, during his third Pacific voyage, borrowing it directly from the Tongan tabu, something set apart as sacred or forbidden. It's one of a handful of English words, alongside tattoo, that trace straight…
From the Sun, Sep 6, 2026 roundup → - Talisman
A "talisman" — an object believed to protect its owner or bring good luck — traveled into English through French and Arabic from the Greek word telesma, meaning "consecration" or "religious rite," rooted in the verb telein, "to complete" or "to initiate into…
From the Tue, Aug 25, 2026 roundup → - Tantalize
In Greek myth, King Tantalus was condemned to stand forever in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree — every time he reached for the fruit, the branch lifted out of reach; every time he bent to drink, the water receded. His punishment (for stealing ambrosia…
From the Sun, Aug 9, 2026 roundup → - Tennessee Titans
When the Houston Oilers relocated to Nashville in 1997, owner Bud Adams wanted a new name that signaled "strength, leadership, and other heroic qualities." The Tennessee Titans name, adopted in 1999, borrowed directly from Greek mythology's generation of…
From the Wed, Aug 12, 2026 roundup → - Thursday
Latin-derived Romance languages named the fifth day of the week for the Roman god Jupiter, giving us "jeudi" in French and "giovedi" in Italian, both descended from "Iovis dies," Jupiter's day. When Germanic-speaking peoples adopted the Roman week, they…
From the Sun, Sep 20, 2026 roundup → - Titan
The Titans of Greek mythology — Cronus, Rhea, Oceanus, and their siblings, the generation of gods that ruled before Zeus overthrew them — gave English "titan" for anything or anyone of enormous power or scale. Where their own name came from is genuinely…
From the Tue, Aug 11, 2026 roundup → - Uranium
German chemist Martin Klaproth named "uranium" in 1789, just eight years after astronomer William Herschel discovered a new planet in 1781. Klaproth wanted to honor the freshly discovered Uranus, itself named for the ancient Greek god of the sky — a naming…
From the Thu, Aug 27, 2026 roundup → - Uranus
Every other planet in the solar system carries a Roman name. Uranus is the lone holdout, named directly after the Greek sky god rather than his Roman counterpart Caelus, a naming inconsistency that's stuck around since William Herschel's 1781 discovery and…
From the Wed, Sep 9, 2026 roundup → - Volcano
The word "volcano" comes from Vulcano, a small, perpetually smoking island off the coast of Sicily. Ancient Romans believed it was the chimney of the forge belonging to Vulcan, their god of fire and metalworking, and that the island's smoke and eruptions were…
From the Wed, Aug 19, 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 → - Yoga
The word "yoga" traces back roughly three thousand years to the Sanskrit root yuj, meaning "to yoke" or "to join together" — the same basic image used for harnessing a pair of oxen to pull a cart. Vedic poets borrowed that everyday farm image as a metaphor…
From the Tue, Aug 18, 2026 roundup →