Myths and mix-ups
Tidy origin stories that turn out to be wrong, and real origins that turn out to be accidents: typos, misreadings, and legends that outran the record.
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- Adam's apple
The folk explanation is that a piece of the forbidden fruit stuck in Adam's throat and the bump was passed down to every man since. The real history is duller and stranger. In the Middle Ages, "Adam's apple" was a generic name for several fruits, especially…
From the Fri, Sep 25, 2026 roundup → - Alchemy
Alchemy, the medieval forerunner of chemistry devoted to (unsuccessfully) turning lead into gold, reached English through Arabic al-kīmiyā. Where Arabic got it is where things get genuinely uncertain: one long-standing theory holds that it traces back to…
From the Sat, Aug 22, 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 → - Apricot
The Romans called it "praecoquum," early-ripening, because it fruited before the peach. Greek borrowed that, Arabic borrowed the Greek as "al-barquq," Spanish and Portuguese borrowed the Arabic, and English got "abrecock" in the 1550s. The modern spelling…
From the Wed, Sep 30, 2026 roundup → - Argentina
Argentina's name comes from the Latin argentum, "silver" — but the silver was mostly a rumor. Survivors of a shipwrecked 1516 Spanish expedition led by Juan Díaz de Solís returned with stories (and a few actual silver trinkets, gifted by local peoples) of a…
From the Wed, Aug 5, 2026 roundup → - Assassin
Assassin comes from hashishiyy, an Arabic nickname applied to the Nizari Ismailis, a sect active during the Crusades under the "Old Man of the Mountain," Hasan-i Sabbah. European Crusaders believed the name referred to hashish use before politically motivated…
From the Sat, Aug 8, 2026 roundup → - Avocado
The avocado's name traces to a Nahuatl word for the fruit that, thanks to its shape (and the way they tend to hang in pairs), also doubled as slang for a part of male anatomy in the language of the Aztecs. That's a real linguistic footnote — but it's often…
From the Sat, Aug 15, 2026 roundup → - California roll
The origin of the California roll is genuinely contested. Most food historians credit Los Angeles chef Ichiro Mashita at the former Tokyo Kaikan restaurant, who swapped fatty tuna for avocado during a toro shortage in the late 1960s or early '70s. But…
From the Sun, Aug 2, 2026 roundup → - Chauvinism
Nicolas Chauvin was supposedly a French soldier so devoted to Napoleon that his exaggerated loyalty became a running joke in 19th-century French theater, and eventually a byword for blind, excessive devotion to one's own group. The catch: historians have…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 2026 roundup → - Chauvinist
Chauvinism takes its name from Nicolas Chauvin, a supposed French soldier said to have served under Napoleon, taken 17 wounds in battle, and remained loudly, embarrassingly devoted to Bonapartism long after the empire collapsed and devotion to it had gone out…
From the Thu, Aug 13, 2026 roundup → - Checkmate
"Checkmate" comes from the Persian "shah mat," and nearly every chess book will tell you it means "the king is dead." Etymologists mostly disagree. In Persian, "mat" means helpless, defeated, or at a loss, so the phrase is closer to "the king is stuck." The…
From the Wed, Sep 16, 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 → - Croissant
The romantic version of the "croissant" story has Viennese bakers shaping the pastry into a crescent to mock a failed 1683 Ottoman siege of Vienna. That story doesn't show up in print until 1938, some 250 years after it supposedly happened, in a French…
From the Sun, Sep 6, 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 → - 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 → - Dinosaur
Richard Owen, the anatomist who would go on to found the Natural History Museum, proposed the name "Dinosauria" in 1842 for three fossil reptiles that seemed to belong together: Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus. Every schoolbook translates it as…
From the Fri, Sep 25, 2026 roundup → - Earl Grey
Charles Grey, the 2nd Earl Grey, was British prime minister from 1830 to 1834 and pushed through the Great Reform Act and the abolition of slavery in the empire. The bergamot-scented tea that carries his name is a different matter: he never wrote a word about…
From the Wed, Sep 16, 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 → - 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 → - Eggs Benedict
According to a story Lemuel Benedict told a New Yorker reporter decades later, the Wall Street broker stumbled into the Waldorf Hotel in 1894 nursing a hangover and ordered his own improvised combination of poached eggs, bacon, toast, and hollandaise sauce…
From the Mon, Sep 14, 2026 roundup → - Eiffel Tower
The "Eiffel Tower," built as the entrance arch for the 1889 World's Fair in Paris, carries the surname of Gustave Eiffel, whose engineering firm built it and whose name has been attached to it ever since. But Eiffel didn't actually design it: two of his…
From the Mon, Aug 31, 2026 roundup → - Elevator
The vertical people-mover is often credited to a 19th-century businessman who, in fact, only invented its safety brake — elevators of various kinds had existed for centuries before him. What Elisha Otis actually gave the world, in a dramatic 1854…
From the Tue, Sep 1, 2026 roundup → - Emoji
It looks and sounds like it should come from "emotion" or "emoticon," but "emoji" has nothing to do with either — it's a pure coincidence of sound. The word comes straight from Japanese: e, meaning "picture," plus moji, meaning "character" or "letter." The…
From the Wed, Aug 19, 2026 roundup → - Encyclopedia
The Greeks spoke of "enkyklios paideia," the "circle of learning," the rounded general education that a free citizen was expected to have. Latin writers copying the phrase ran the two words together as though they were one, and the ghost word stuck…
From the Sat, Sep 26, 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 → - 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 → - Gorilla
Around 500 BC, the Carthaginian navigator Hanno sailed down the West African coast and reported meeting hairy "wild women" that his interpreters called gorillai; his men killed three and brought the skins home. In 1847, the American missionary and physician…
From the Wed, Sep 23, 2026 roundup → - Guillotine
Contrary to popular belief, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin did not invent the guillotine. In 1789, early in the French Revolution, he proposed to the National Assembly that France adopt a single, swift, mechanical method of execution for everyone sentenced to…
From the Fri, Aug 21, 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 → - Hysteria
Hysteria comes from the Greek hystera, "womb." For over two thousand years, going back at least to Hippocrates, physicians attributed a whole range of symptoms in women — fainting, anxiety, breathlessness — to a "wandering womb," believed to drift through the…
From the Thu, Aug 6, 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 → - Istanbul
For centuries, Greek speakers heading into Constantinople said they were going "eis tin polin," to the city, and Turkish speakers heard that phrase as a name. The Ottomans used "Istanbul" informally alongside the official Konstantiniyye for hundreds of years…
From the Wed, Sep 16, 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 → - 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 → - 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 → - Jumbo
London Zoo's biggest attraction through the 1860s and 70s was an African elephant named Jumbo, whose enormous size, he stood over eleven feet at the shoulder, made him a sensation, and whose sale to P.T. Barnum's American circus in 1882 caused a minor…
From the Sun, Sep 20, 2026 roundup → - Jungle
Sanskrit "jangala" meant dry, arid, sparsely wooded land, and its Hindi descendant "jangal" meant uncultivated ground of any kind. When British administrators borrowed the word in 1776, they applied it to the wild land beyond the fields, which in Bengal…
From the Tue, Sep 29, 2026 roundup → - Kangaroo
For nearly two centuries, the story went that Captain Cook asked a local Guugu Yimithirr man what the strange hopping animal was called, got the answer "I don't know," and mistook the shrug for a name. It's a great story and almost entirely wrong: linguist…
From the Mon, Sep 7, 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 → - Kudos
"Kudos" comes from an ancient Greek word for glory or renown, and grammatically it's singular in Greek — there's no such thing as "one kudo." But because English speakers reflexively read a trailing "-s" as a plural marker, generations of speakers have…
From the Mon, Aug 17, 2026 roundup → - Leopard
Ancient naturalists were sure the spotted big cat was a hybrid: the offspring of a lion and a "pard," their word for a panther. So they named it exactly that, "leopardos," lion-panther, and the belief survived in bestiaries for a thousand years. The "leopard"…
From the Sat, Sep 26, 2026 roundup → - Lieutenant
"Lieutenant" is Old French for "place-holding": someone who holds a superior's place when the superior is absent. That's why a lieutenant governor stands in for a governor, and why the military rank sits just below a captain. Nobody has ever fully explained…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 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 → - 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 → - 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 → - Luddite
The story is that in 1779, an apprentice named Ned Ludd from Anstey, near Leicester, smashed two knitting frames in a fit of rage after being whipped or taunted. There is no independent evidence he existed; the tale first appeared in the Nottingham Review in…
From the Wed, Sep 16, 2026 roundup → - Margarine
The story behind "margarine" runs through two different scientists. In 1813, French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul isolated a fatty acid he named "margaric acid," from the Greek word for pearl, for its lustrous, pearly deposits. When Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès…
From the Sun, Sep 13, 2026 roundup → - Mayonnaise
The most popular story behind mayonnaise holds that in 1756, the Duke de Richelieu's chef, besieging Port Mahon on the Spanish island of Menorca during the opening battle of the Seven Years' War, needed a victory feast sauce but had no cream on hand. He…
From the Mon, Aug 10, 2026 roundup → - Napoleon
The delicate, many-layered French pastry known in English as a "Napoleon" is called mille-feuille ("thousand leaves") in its home country, where it has nothing to do with the emperor at all. Food historians trace the English name to Napolitain — French for "a…
From the Wed, Sep 2, 2026 roundup → - New Zealand
In December 1642, Dutch navigator Abel Tasman became the first European to sight the islands, naming his discovery Staten Landt — he mistakenly thought it might connect to a landmass of the same name off South America. Dutch cartographers back home quietly…
From the Wed, Aug 26, 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 → - Nobel Prize
In 1888, a French newspaper mistakenly published Alfred Nobel's obituary instead of his brother's, who had actually died — and according to a widely told (if possibly embellished) story, the premature notice cast him in an unflattering light as a profiteer…
From the Mon, Aug 31, 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 → - Noon
Latin "nona hora" was the ninth hour of daylight, which by Roman reckoning fell around 3 p.m., and Old English "non" meant the same. Then, in the 1100s, the word slid three hours earlier. Nobody is certain why; the leading theory is that monastic communities…
From the Mon, Sep 28, 2026 roundup → - Nylon
The tidy story about "nylon" — that it blends "New York" and "London" from an intercontinental flight where two DuPont chemists dreamed up the name — is a myth that only started circulating after the fiber hit the market in 1939. Company records tell a much…
From the Tue, Sep 1, 2026 roundup → - Obsidian
Pliny the Elder wrote that the glassy black volcanic stone was discovered in Ethiopia by a Roman named Obsius, so the Latin name was "lapis Obsianus," Obsius's stone. Somewhere in the copying of manuscripts an extra syllable crept in, giving "obsidianus," and…
From the Tue, Sep 29, 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 → - Oreo
Nobody, including Nabisco, has ever definitively settled where Oreo got its name. Leading theories point to the French word "or" for gold, echoing the cookie's original gold-embossed packaging, or the Greek "oros" for mountain, describing an early hill-shaped…
From the Wed, Sep 9, 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 → - Ouija
The talking board trademarked as "Ouija" in 1890 supposedly named itself: according to company lore, its makers held a séance and asked the board directly what it wanted to be called, and it spelled out O-U-I-J-A. A popular (and much repeated) explanation…
From the Fri, Aug 28, 2026 roundup → - Oviraptor
In 1923, a fossil-hunting expedition in Mongolia's Gobi Desert found a skeleton lying directly on top of a nest of eggs believed to belong to a different dinosaur, and paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn assumed he was looking at a nest raider caught in the…
From the Fri, Sep 18, 2026 roundup → - Oxygen
Oxygen was named by Antoine Lavoisier in 1777 from Greek roots meaning "acid-forming," because he (incorrectly) believed every acid contained it. He wasn't even first to isolate it — Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestley both got there earlier — but…
From the Sun, Aug 2, 2026 roundup → - Pretzel
The twisted, knotted "pretzel" has two competing origin stories, and nobody's fully settled the argument. One traces the name to a Latin word for a small reward, pretiola, supposedly given to children who'd memorized their prayers. The other says medieval…
From the Thu, Aug 27, 2026 roundup → - Puzzle
Even the word "puzzle" is something of a puzzle. First recorded in English in the 1590s, its origin is officially listed as unknown by the Oxford English Dictionary, despite decades of guesses — one leading theory ties it to an old, obscure verb meaning "to…
From the Thu, Sep 3, 2026 roundup → - Restaurant
In 18th-century Paris, a "restaurant" was a thing you drank: a concentrated meat broth, from the French for "restoring," sold to the delicate as a health food. The story that a soup seller named Boulanger opened the first sit-down establishment in 1765, under…
From the Sun, Sep 27, 2026 roundup → - Rio de Janeiro
Portuguese explorers sailing with Gaspar de Lemos entered Guanabara Bay on January 1, 1502, and — despite there being no actual river — mistook the wide bay entrance for a river mouth. They named it accordingly: Rio de Janeiro, "River of January." No one ever…
From the Sun, Aug 9, 2026 roundup → - Rolex
According to founder Hans Wilsdorf's own account, given in a 1958 speech, the name Rolex came to him as a word whispered in his ear by a genie while he rode a horse-drawn omnibus through Cheapside, London, sometime around 1908. It's a wonderful story and…
From the Sun, Aug 9, 2026 roundup → - Sabotage
The popular story says striking French workers threw their wooden sabots into machinery to jam the gears — a satisfying mental image, and almost certainly not what actually happened. Linguists trace sabotage instead to saboter, a French verb originally…
From the Mon, Aug 10, 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 → - Sarcophagus
A sarcophagus is literally a "flesh-eater" — from Greek sarx ("flesh") + phagein ("to eat"). The name comes from a specific limestone quarried near Assos in ancient Troas, which Pliny the Elder claimed could rapidly dissolve the flesh of any corpse placed…
From the Wed, Aug 5, 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 → - Shenanigan
Nobody actually knows where "shenanigan" comes from. The two leading, equally unproven theories point either to the Irish word "sionnach," meaning fox, for the animal's reputation as a cunning trickster, or to the Spanish "chanada," a shortened form of a word…
From the Thu, Sep 10, 2026 roundup → - Sophomore
Here's a case where the "clever" explanation isn't quite the true one, and the question above is careful about it: sophomore actually derives from "sophist" (Greek sophistes, "wise person"), not from a genuine Greek compound. But by the 1700s, the spelling…
From the Thu, Aug 6, 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 → - Spoonerism
Reverend William Archibald Spooner, an Oxford don, was apparently so prone to swapping the initial sounds of words that it became a documented tic, turning "a well-oiled bicycle" into "a well-boiled icicle" and similar slips. Whether he actually said most of…
From the Wed, Sep 9, 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 → - 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 → - Tariff
A "tariff" — a government tax on imported goods — is popularly, and probably wrongly, linked to Tarifa, a Spanish port town at the mouth of the Strait of Gibraltar where pirates or local rulers supposedly once levied tolls on passing ships. It's a tidy story…
From the Thu, Aug 20, 2026 roundup → - Telescope
The "telescope"'s name combines Greek roots for "far" and "to look" — but it wasn't Galileo Galilei who coined it, even though he's the astronomer most associated with the instrument. Galileo actually called his own device a "perspicillum." The word…
From the Sat, Aug 29, 2026 roundup → - Tornado
Spanish "tronada" means a thunderstorm, from "tronar," to thunder. English sailors picked it up in the 1550s for the violent squalls of the tropical Atlantic, and over the next decades the spelling wandered through "ternado" and "turnado" before settling as…
From the Mon, Sep 28, 2026 roundup → - Turquoise
The blue-green gem now called "turquoise" was actually mined near Nishapur in Persia, but Europeans first encountered it through Turkish traders moving the stone along Silk Road routes in the 13th century. The name that stuck, from an Old French phrase for…
From the Mon, Sep 7, 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 → - 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 → - Umpire
An umpire is, etymologically, someone who is "not equal" to either side of a dispute — which is exactly the point. The word comes from Old French nonper ("not equal," from non + per), which entered Middle English as "noumpere." Over time, "a noumpere" got…
From the Thu, Aug 6, 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 → - 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 → - Yosemite
In 1851, the Mariposa Battalion, a California state militia, entered the valley while pursuing the Ahwahneechee people who lived there. Lafayette Bunnell, the battalion's doctor, proposed naming the valley after what he understood to be the tribe's name…
From the Wed, Sep 16, 2026 roundup →