Named after people
Eponyms: words that started as someone's name, whether they wanted the honor or not.
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- Adidas
Adidas is a contraction of its founder's name: Adolf "Adi" Dassler. His older brother Rudolf was his business partner for over two decades at their shared shoe factory in Herzogenaurach, Germany — until a bitter falling-out in the late 1940s split the company…
From the Tue, Aug 4, 2026 roundup → - Algorithm
Algorithm traces to the Latinized name of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a 9th-century Persian scholar working in Baghdad's House of Wisdom. His book on solving equations, whose title contributed the word "algebra," was translated into Latin in the 12th…
From the Mon, Aug 10, 2026 roundup → - Ampere
The unit of electric current carries the name of André-Marie Ampère, a French physicist and mathematician — first proposed for the role in 1881 at an international electrical congress in Paris, decades before it was formally locked in as one of science's…
From the Tue, Sep 1, 2026 roundup → - Audi
Audi exists because its founder, August Horch, got sued over his own name. After a falling-out with his first company (which, confusingly, was also called Horch), a court ruled he could no longer use "Horch" for a new car brand — even though it was literally…
From the Tue, Aug 4, 2026 roundup → - August
August started life as Sextilis — Latin for "sixth" — back when the Roman calendar year began in March and had only ten months. Even after the calendar reform bumped it to the eighth slot, it kept the old "sixth month" name for centuries, right alongside…
From the Fri, Aug 7, 2026 roundup → - Bluetooth
Harald Gormsson, who ruled Denmark and Norway in the 10th century, picked up the nickname Bluetooth according to a 12th-century chronicle, apparently for a conspicuously dark or damaged tooth, and is remembered for uniting warring Danish tribes and…
From the Sat, Sep 19, 2026 roundup → - Cardigan
The cardigan sweater is named for James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, the British cavalry officer who led the doomed Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaklava in 1854 — an assault into direct Russian artillery fire caused by a badly garbled…
From the Sat, Aug 15, 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 → - Cincinnati
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was a 5th-century BC Roman statesman who, according to legend, was plowing his own small farm when a delegation arrived to tell him Rome needed him as dictator to fend off an invasion. He took the job, won the war in about two…
From the Sat, Aug 15, 2026 roundup → - Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus is best known for kicking the Earth out of the center of the universe with his heliocentric model — but today's clue points at a lesser-known side hustle. In 1519, the same year Thomas Gresham was born, Copernicus wrote a treatise called…
From the Sun, Aug 2, 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 → - Decibel
Until the 1920s, telephone engineers measured signal loss in "miles of standard cable," which was exactly as clumsy as it sounds. In 1924, Bell Telephone Laboratories proposed a logarithmic "transmission unit" instead, and in 1928 renamed it the "decibel"…
From the Wed, Sep 23, 2026 roundup → - Diesel
Rudolf Diesel patented his fuel-efficient compression-ignition engine in 1892, and both the fuel and the engine type still carry his name. In 1913, at the height of his fame, Diesel boarded a steamer crossing the English Channel, went to bed, and was never…
From the Sun, Sep 13, 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 → - Doberman
The Dobermann is one of the few dog breeds that's literally named after the guy who made it. Louis Dobermann was a tax collector in 1890s Germany who moonlighted as the local dogcatcher — which gave him access to a wide pool of breeds to work with — and he…
From the Mon, Aug 31, 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 → - Edsel
Ford poured years of market research and more than 8,000 candidate names into its new 1958 car line, and Edsel Ford's own sons objected when executives settled on naming it after their father anyway. The car flopped so badly that "Edsel" is still shorthand…
From the Mon, Sep 14, 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 → - Eponym
Most words in this puzzle describe something named after a person, place, or thing, but this one describes that very act: a word taken from Greek roots meaning upon and name, first used in English in the 19th century for the person or thing that lends its own…
From the Sun, Sep 20, 2026 roundup → - Esperanto
When L. L. Zamenhof published his constructed language in an 1887 booklet, its title just called it "Lingvo Internacia," the international language. Zamenhof signed the booklet with a pen name, "Doktoro Esperanto," which in the language itself means "one who…
From the Tue, Sep 15, 2026 roundup → - Eureka
According to a story first written down roughly 150 years after the fact, the mathematician Archimedes was asked by his king to determine whether a crown was pure gold or secretly diluted with cheaper metal, without damaging the crown itself. Stepping into a…
From the Sun, Aug 16, 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 → - Fahrenheit
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a German instrument maker working in Amsterdam, published his scale in 1724 with two fixed points: zero was the coldest thing he could reliably produce, a slush of ice, water, and ammonium chloride, and 96 was the temperature of a…
From the Wed, Sep 30, 2026 roundup → - Ferris wheel
Daniel Burnham, chief planner of Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, told a gathering of engineers that the fair needed something that would "out-Eiffel Eiffel," a rival to the tower that had stunned visitors to Paris four years earlier. George…
From the Wed, Sep 16, 2026 roundup → - Frisbee
Yale students in the late 1800s used to toss around empty pie tins from the nearby Frisbie Baking Company, yelling "Frisbie!" as a warning to anyone in the way. Fred Morrison spent decades independently developing a plastic flying disc of his own, and when he…
From the Mon, Sep 7, 2026 roundup → - Galvanize
Luigi Galvani spent the 1780s running electrical current through severed frog legs and watching them twitch, and became convinced he'd discovered a life force running through animal tissue. He hadn't, not exactly, but "galvanize" survived his mistaken theory…
From the Thu, Sep 10, 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 → - Gucci
As a teenager in the 1890s, Guccio Gucci left Florence for London, where he worked as a porter at the Savoy Hotel, hauling the trunks and cases of wealthy guests and absorbing an education in what elegant luggage was supposed to look like. He returned home…
From the Sat, Sep 19, 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 → - 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 → - 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 → - Lavalier
The small microphone that clips to a collar or hangs around the neck borrows its name from Louise de La Vallière, a mistress of King Louis XIV in the 1660s who was known for her elegant pendant necklaces. Her name attached itself to that style of jewelry for…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 2026 roundup → - Leotard
Jules Léotard was a 19th-century French acrobat credited with popularizing the flying trapeze act, performing his death-defying routine in a snug, one-piece garment of his own design that let him move freely without extra fabric catching on the equipment. He…
From the Wed, Aug 19, 2026 roundup → - Levi's
On May 20, 1873, San Francisco dry-goods merchant Levi Strauss and Reno tailor Jacob Davis received a joint patent for reinforcing work pants with copper rivets at stress points — an idea Davis had come up with after noticing spare rivets lying around his…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 2026 roundup → - Lincoln Logs
Lincoln Logs were invented around 1916–1917 by John Lloyd Wright, the second son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright — and the inspiration came from the family business. While helping his father oversee construction of Tokyo's Imperial Hotel, John studied the…
From the Fri, Aug 7, 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 → - 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 → - 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 → - Machiavellian
Niccolò Machiavelli's 16th-century political treatise, arguing that rulers should be willing to lie, betray, and act immorally to hold onto power, so scandalized readers that his own surname became an adjective. "Machiavellian" has described cunning…
From the Sun, Sep 13, 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 → - Mausoleum
Every grand tomb called a mausoleum owes its name to one specific building: the tomb of Mausolus, ruler of Caria in southwestern Asia Minor, built around 353–351 BCE in his capital of Halicarnassus by his sister and widow, Artemisia II. The structure was so…
From the Tue, Aug 11, 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 → - Maybelline
Thomas Lyle Williams, a young Chicago entrepreneur, watched his sister Mabel darken her eyelashes with a homemade mix of petroleum jelly and coal dust, and in 1915 started selling a version by mail order under the name "Lash-Brow-Ine." When that ran into…
From the Wed, Sep 16, 2026 roundup → - Melbourne
Before it was Melbourne, Australia's second-largest city was briefly, unofficially "Batmania," after John Batman, one of the settlers who claimed to have founded it in 1835. Governor Richard Bourke rejected that name (along with contenders like Bearbrass and…
From the Mon, Aug 10, 2026 roundup → - Monte Carlo
In the 1860s, the ruling Grimaldi family of Monaco had a problem: their tiny principality had just lost its two richest towns to France and desperately needed a new source of income. Prince Charles III backed a casino venture on a scrubby, unglamorous plateau…
From the Sun, Aug 16, 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 → - Nacho
Nachos were invented in 1943 by Ignacio "Nacho" Anaya, a maître d' at the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico. The story goes that a group of U.S. military wives crossed the border after the kitchen had closed, and Anaya improvised with what was…
From the Sun, Aug 2, 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 → - Neanderthal
Fossils found in Germany's Neander Valley in 1856 gave their name to Neanderthal, but the valley's own name has a layered history worth a beat of its own: it honors 17th-century pastor and hymn-writer Joachim Neumann, whose family had Grecized their surname…
From the Mon, Aug 10, 2026 roundup → - Negroni
As the story goes, Count Camillo Negroni walked into a Florence bar in 1919 and asked the bartender to strengthen his usual cocktail by swapping the soda water for gin. The bartender obliged, marked the new drink with an orange garnish to distinguish it from…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 2026 roundup → - New Orleans
French colonists founded "New Orleans" in 1718 and named it in tribute to Philippe II, the regent then ruling France on behalf of the young Louis XV. The French name wasn't an accident of sentiment so much as a marketing decision — colonial officials worried…
From the Wed, Sep 2, 2026 roundup → - Newton
It took nearly 250 years after Isaac Newton described his laws of motion for physicists to formally name a unit after him. The "newton," the SI unit of force, wasn't adopted until 1948, at an international conference on weights and measures, well into the era…
From the Mon, Sep 14, 2026 roundup → - Nicotine
Nicotine is named after Jean Nicot, France's ambassador to Portugal in the late 1550s, who learned about tobacco's supposed medicinal properties while stationed in Lisbon and sent seeds and powdered leaves back to the French court. Catherine de' Medici…
From the Fri, Aug 14, 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 → - 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 → - 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 → - Oktoberfest
On October 12, 1810, Bavaria's Crown Prince Ludwig married Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen, and the citizens of Munich were invited to a public celebration on a meadow outside the city gates. The centerpiece, on October 17, was a horse race, and the…
From the Thu, Sep 17, 2026 roundup → - Orrery
Clockmakers George Graham and Thomas Tompion built the first modern mechanical model of the solar system in 1704, gears and all. Nine years later, instrument maker John Rowley built a copy for Charles Boyle, the 4th Earl of Orrery, and named it in his…
From the Tue, Sep 8, 2026 roundup → - Ottoman
The low, cushioned seat known as an "ottoman" takes its name from the empire whose furnishing traditions inspired it: a padded platform piled with cushions was the centerpiece of a traditional Ottoman-Turkish sitting room. European furniture makers adopted…
From the Mon, Sep 7, 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 → - Peach Melba
Chef Auguste Escoffier first served Peach Melba in 1892 at London's Savoy Hotel, in honor of Australian opera singer Nellie Melba (born Helen Porter Mitchell, stage name borrowed from her hometown of Melbourne), who'd just performed in Wagner's Lohengrin at…
From the Sat, Aug 8, 2026 roundup → - Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh takes its name from a 1758 letter General John Forbes sent to William Pitt the Elder, notifying him that the newly captured Fort Duquesne site would be renamed in his honor. Forbes was Scottish, and "burgh" — the Scots spelling of "borough," still…
From the Thu, Aug 6, 2026 roundup → - Ponzi scheme
The fraud where new investors' money pays off the old ones is far older than the man whose name it carries. Charles "Ponzi" was arrested in Boston on August 12, 1920, after promising investors huge returns from arbitraging international postal reply coupons…
From the Tue, Sep 8, 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 → - Raglan
A "raglan sleeve" — cut in one diagonal piece running from the underarm up to the collar, instead of stitched in at the shoulder — is named for FitzRoy Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan, a British army commander who lost his right arm at the Battle of Waterloo in…
From the Sat, Aug 29, 2026 roundup → - Richter scale
In 1935, Charles Richter needed a way to compare the size of the dozens of small Southern California earthquakes his lab was logging every week, and turned to colleague Beno Gutenberg, who suggested plotting them logarithmically. The two developed the scale…
From the Sun, Sep 13, 2026 roundup → - Ritzy
Swiss hotelier César Ritz built such opulent hotels in Paris and London around the turn of the 20th century that his own surname turned into an adjective. "Ritzy" has meant extravagant luxury since around 1910, helped along a few decades later by Irving…
From the Mon, Sep 7, 2026 roundup → - Rubik's Cube
Ernő Rubik was a Hungarian architecture professor, not a toymaker, when he built his first working model in 1974. He wasn't trying to invent a puzzle at all: he was trying to solve a structural engineering problem, how to let many small independent pieces…
From the Fri, Sep 4, 2026 roundup → - Salmonella
Salmonella is named for Daniel Elmer Salmon, a veterinary pathologist who ran the USDA's microorganism research program in the 1880s — except Salmon didn't actually find it. His research assistant, Theobald Smith, isolated the bacterium from sick hogs in 1885…
From the Fri, Aug 7, 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 → - 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 → - Sequoia
The towering redwood species native to California carries the name "Sequoia" in honor of Sequoyah, a Cherokee silversmith who — with no background in writing systems and reportedly unable to read English himself — single-handedly devised a complete syllabary…
From the Sat, Aug 29, 2026 roundup → - Shrapnel
In 1784, Henry Shrapnel, a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, designed a hollow cannonball filled with musket balls and a small bursting charge, timed by a fuse to explode in the air above enemy troops. The British Army adopted it in 1803 as "spherical case…
From the Thu, Sep 17, 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 → - 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 → - 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 → - Stetson
In 1865, hatmaker John B. Stetson — who'd headed to the Colorado frontier hoping the dry air would help his health — noticed that nothing on the market actually suited the punishing conditions cowboys worked in, so he designed a wide-brimmed, waterproof felt…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 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 → - 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 → - Tommy Hilfiger
In 1985, with almost every dollar he could raise, a largely unknown Tommy Hilfiger bought a massive Times Square billboard listing "the 4 Great American Designers for Men": Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Perry Ellis — and Hilfiger himself, a man virtually nobody…
From the Thu, Aug 13, 2026 roundup → - Tupperware
Earl Tupper, a former DuPont chemist, took a black, foul-smelling refinery byproduct called polyethylene slag and purified it into a clean, flexible plastic, then designed a lid whose airtight seal he modeled on a paint can's. "Tupperware" launched in 1946…
From the Tue, Sep 22, 2026 roundup → - Uzbekistan
Central Asia's most populous country takes its name from a Turkic ethnic group whose own name is traditionally traced to a 14th-century Golden Horde khan, combined with the Persian suffix meaning land, shared by several of its neighbors. The territory passed…
From the Sun, Sep 20, 2026 roundup → - Uzi
Israel's military adopted this compact submachine gun in 1951 and named it for the young army officer who designed it — even though, according to accounts from those who knew him, Uziel Gal actually asked for the weapon not to carry his name. His request was…
From the Tue, Sep 1, 2026 roundup → - Wisteria
The flowering vine draped over garden trellises across the world takes its name from Caspar Wistar, an American anatomy professor at the University of Pennsylvania. After Wistar died in 1818, his botanist friend Thomas Nuttall named the plant in his honor —…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 2026 roundup → - Yifter
At the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Ethiopian runner Miruts Yifter — competing at around age 40, with an Olympic career already marked by missed chances — won gold in both the 10,000m and 5,000m, becoming the first Ethiopian to take two golds at a single Games. His…
From the Mon, Aug 10, 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 →