English borrows from everyone. It took shampoo from Hindi, boondocks from Tagalog and barbecue from the Taíno, turned a Civil War general's whiskers into sideburns, and named a common bacterium after a man instead of a fish. Here are the surprising stories behind everyday words, famous phrases, borrowed words and words that began as someone's name, along with a few beloved origin stories that turn out to be myths.
Every tile in a Word Origins game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Everyday Words
nine stories
1Nice used to be an insult
On the tile: NiceLate 1200s
Calling someone nice was once no compliment. The word came into English through Old French from the Latin nescius, meaning not knowing, and in the late 1200s it meant foolish or ignorant. Then it wandered. Over the following centuries nice meant timid, then fussy, then delicate and precise, a sense that survives in the phrase a nice distinction. Only much later did it settle on pleasant, and later still on kind. Few English words have traveled so far from where they started.
Every detective owes a debt to a ball of yarn. The older English word clew meant a ball of thread, and the spelling clue appeared in the 1400s. In Greek myth, Ariadne gave Theseus a clew of thread to guide him back out of the Labyrinth, and writers turned that thread into a figure of speech. By the 1600s a clue could be anything that points the way through a puzzle, labyrinth or not. The board game Clue began in Britain in 1949 under the name Cluedo.
Flex a biceps and, to an ancient Roman, a little mouse ran under the skin. The Latin musculus meant little mouse, from mus, mouse, and it came to mean muscle because some muscles, especially in the arms and legs, seemed to look and move like mice. The Greeks made the same comparison: their word mys meant both mouse and muscle, which is why the medical prefix for muscle is myo-. Middle English even borrowed the Latin word for lizard as another name for a muscle.
The earliest known nerd in print is an imaginary creature. In Dr. Seuss's 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo, the young narrator promises to bring back a Nerkle, a Nerd and a Seersucker. A year later, Newsweek reported that in Detroit, someone who once would have been called a drip or a square was now a nerd. Nobody has convincingly explained how a picture-book creature became teenage slang so fast, and some dictionaries trace the word instead to nert, earlier slang for a stupid or crazy person. The brainy sense came later.
The story goes that posh stands for port out, starboard home, stamped on tickets for the cooler, shadier cabins on steamships between Britain and India. It is a tidy tale with nothing behind it. The shipping line P&O denies any such term existed, and no evidence of the stamp has ever turned up. Posh appears in print in Punch magazine in September 1918, while the acronym story first surfaces in a 1935 letter to the Times Literary Supplement. The word's real origin is unknown.
The story goes that computer bugs are named for a moth. On September 9, 1947, engineers working on Harvard's Mark II computer found a moth caught in a relay and taped it into their log book, noting it as the first actual case of a bug being found. The joke worked because the word was already old. Thomas Edison wrote of bugs, meaning little faults and difficulties, in an 1878 letter. The log book, moth and all, is now at the Smithsonian. To an entomologist, a moth is not even a true bug.
OK began as a joke about bad spelling. In the late 1830s, Boston newspapers had a craze for abbreviating deliberate misspellings, such as K.G. for know go. On March 23, 1839, the Boston Morning Post printed O.K. for oll korrect, meaning all correct. Most such jokes vanished, but in 1840 supporters of President Martin Van Buren, nicknamed Old Kinderhook after his hometown, formed OK Clubs, and the word stuck. Columbia University scholar Allen Walker Read pieced the story together in the 1960s.
Every goodbye hides a small prayer. English speakers once parted with God be with you, or God be with ye, and everyday speech wore it down. A 1575 letter by Gabriel Harvey already has godbwyes, and Shakespeare spelled the farewell at least three different ways, among them God be wy you. Then, probably by association with good day and goodnight, God turned into good. Forms beginning with good appear in the 1600s, and the spelling goodbye in the 1700s. The French adieu carries a similar wish. It comes from a Dieu, meaning to God.
9A word coined in a letter, borrowed from a fairy tale
On the tile: Serendipity1754
Horace Walpole invented serendipity in a letter to his friend Horace Mann dated January 28, 1754. He took it from a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes kept making discoveries, by accident and cleverness, of things they were not looking for. Serendip is an old name for the island now called Sri Lanka. The word stayed rare for a long time. The letter apparently was not published until 1833, and the Century Dictionary still left the word out in 1902.
A popular story says World War II pilots fired the whole nine yards, meaning their entire belts of machine-gun ammunition. Newspaper archives shot that down. In 1907 an Indiana paper, writing about a local baseball game, could not promise the full nine yards, and in 1912 a Kentucky paper, covering the feud between Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft, used the whole six yards. The number wandered, a hint that it never measured anything. Yale law librarian Fred Shapiro, who found the six yards, notes that cloud nine was once cloud seven.
A popular myth says saved by the bell comes from coffins fitted with bells, so that a person buried alive could ring for help. Such safety coffins were real: a Newark, New Jersey, man patented one with a bell in 1868. But there is no evidence anyone was ever saved by one, or that the phrase came from them. It comes from boxing, where the bell that ends a round can rescue a fighter about to lose. A Massachusetts newspaper used it that way in 1893.
Many books claim hunters or escaping criminals dragged smoked red herrings across a trail to throw hounds off the scent, but there is no sign it was ever a real practice. The phrase traces to the radical journalist William Cobbett, who on February 14, 1807, told a story, probably invented, about using a red herring as a boy to pull hounds off the trail of a hare. His target was the press, which had been fooled by false news of Napoleon's defeat. The origin story is itself a red herring.
Lewis Carroll did not invent mad as a hatter. The phrase appears in Blackwood's Magazine in 1829, decades before Alice's Adventures in Wonderland came out in 1865. The usual explanation, likely but hard to prove, points to real hatmakers. Turning cheaper furs into felt meant brushing them with a mercury compound, and hatters in poorly ventilated workshops breathed it in. Mercury poisoning could cause trembling, known as hatter's shakes, along with irritability and memory loss. Some early uses, though, meant angry rather than crazy.
Pass the buck is said to come from poker. In frontier days, a marker, often a knife with a buckhorn handle, showed whose turn it was to deal, and a player who did not want the job could pass the buck to the next player. President Harry Truman turned the phrase around. A friend saw a similar sign at the federal reformatory in El Reno, Oklahoma, and had one made. Mailed to the president in October 1945, it read The Buck Stops Here, with I'm From Missouri on the back.
Burying the hatchet was a real ceremony before it was a figure of speech. In Haudenosaunee tradition, the Peacemaker uprooted the tallest white pine at Onondaga, and the leaders of five warring nations, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca, buried their weapons of war beneath it. That Tree of Peace still appears on the Hiawatha Belt. In 1680, Samuel Sewall recorded Native leaders burying two axes in the ground to seal an agreement, a ceremony he judged more binding to them than any written articles of peace.
When Mercutio teases Romeo about a wild-goose chase in Romeo and Juliet, long credited as the first recorded use of the phrase, he is not talking about birds. The wild goose chase was a horse race in which riders had to follow a leader's every twist and turn, like geese flying in formation. Gervase Markham laid out its rules in a horsemanship manual of 1593. The sport faded, and by 1811 a dictionary defined the phrase much as we use it, as a tedious, uncertain pursuit.
The lime in limelight has nothing to do with the green fruit. It is quicklime, calcium oxide, which glows a brilliant white when heated in a flame of burning hydrogen and oxygen. The Scottish engineer Thomas Drummond put the light to practical work for surveyors, who could spot his lamps from great distances. In 1837 limelight lit a stage for the first time, at London's Covent Garden, and it could be focused into a beam to single out an actor. Electric lights replaced it, but the phrase stayed.
The Rubicon was barely more than a stream, but it marked the border between Julius Caesar's province of Cisalpine Gaul and Italy. Under Roman law, a provincial governor who led troops across it into Italy would be declared a public enemy. In January 49 BC, Caesar crossed anyway with about 5,000 men, starting a civil war. The historian Suetonius, writing about a century and a half later, described an apparition blowing a war trumpet and gave Caesar the line the die is cast. Crossing the Rubicon still means passing the point of no return.
Shampoo first meant a massage. English borrowed it in the 1760s from the Hindi champo, from a verb meaning to press or knead. In Britain the practice found its champion in Sake Dean Mahomed, born in Patna, India, in 1759. He wrote a 1794 travel book now regarded as the first work in English by an Indian author, ran a London restaurant serving Indian food, and then opened baths in Brighton offering shampooing with Indian oils. He became shampooing surgeon to Kings George IV and William IV.
Tycoon came from Japan with a bit of diplomatic spin. Foreigners dealing with Japan's shogun in the 1850s knew him by the title taikun, great lord, which his supporters apparently used to suggest he outranked the emperor. A Japanese delegation's visit to the United States in 1860 put the word in American newspapers. By April 1861, Abraham Lincoln's secretary John Hay was calling his boss the Tycoon in his diary. Only after World War I did tycoon settle on powerful business leaders.
The first things ever called robots were characters in a play. In Karel Čapek's 1920 drama R.U.R., short for Rossum's Universal Robots, a company mass-produces artificial workers, built without feelings or souls, to do the work people would rather not. Čapek first thought of calling them labori, from the Latin for labor, but feared it sounded too bookish. His brother Josef suggested roboti instead, from the Czech robota, forced labor, the kind of work serfs owed as rent. The play reached New York in 1922, and robot soon entered English.
Alcohol began as eye makeup. The Arabic al-kuhl was kohl, the fine black powder used to line the eyes, with al simply meaning the. Medieval Latin borrowed alcohol for powdered antimony ore, and the alchemist Paracelsus used it for fine powders and also for a volatile liquid. By the 1670s English used it for the pure spirit of anything, and by 1753 for the intoxicating part of strong drink. Kohl itself is ancient: in Egypt, men and women alike lined their eyes with it, and chemists have analyzed kohl still clinging inside ancient Egyptian makeup pots.
Checkmate is often translated as the king is dead, but the story is more tangled. The word reached English in the 1300s through Old French eschec mat, from Arabic shah mat, read as the king died. Some etymologists think that misreads the Persian, in which shah mat meant something closer to the king is helpless, or stumped. Either way, the Persian shah, king, lives on in check and in chess. It even hides in exchequer, named for a checkered cloth on which England's royal accounts were counted.
Cookie is a souvenir of New Netherland, the Dutch colony that became New York. Dutch lingered there long after the English took over. In 1730 a New York printer published a Dutch-English dictionary, and in 1764 a New York City Dutch church called a minister who could preach in English as well as Dutch. Words crossed over along the way: cookie, from koekje, little cake, plus coleslaw, waffle, cruller, boss, caboose and Santa Claus. Americans were calling small sweet cakes cookies by 1808.
A popular story says barbecue comes from the French barbe à queue, beard to tail, for an animal roasted whole. Pigs have no beards, and the real source is Caribbean. The Taíno people of Hispaniola built a framework of sticks over a fire to dry meat and called it barbacoa, a word Spanish explorers borrowed. In 1699 the navigator William Dampier wrote of sleeping on such frames. Fittingly, Dampier had been a buccaneer, a word that also comes from a wooden frame for drying meat.
The original boondocks are in the Philippines. After the United States took the islands from Spain in 1898 and fought a war there from 1899 to 1902, Americans in uniform picked up the Tagalog word bundok, mountain, and used it for any wild, remote country. By about 1910 a Webster's dictionary listed it. For decades it stayed mostly military slang, kept alive by the Marine Corps, and the shortened boonies was in print by 1954. After the Vietnam War the boondocks spread into everyday speech, and today they can be anywhere far from town.
The tulip is named after a hat. Turkish speakers called the flower lale, but the name Europeans carried home was the Turkish word for turban, tülbent, apparently because the blossom looked like one. The word passed through Dutch, German or French into English by the 1570s. The earliest known tulip to flower in a European garden bloomed in Augsburg, Germany, in 1559. Dutch growers made the flower famous, and in the 1630s Holland was gripped by a buying frenzy later called tulipomania.
In 1880, tenants in County Mayo, Ireland, asked for lower rents after a bad harvest, and the land agent, Captain Charles Boycott, refused. Following Land League leader Charles Parnell's call to shun such men rather than use violence, the community stopped dealing with him. His workers walked off, shops would not serve him, and even the post boy stopped delivering. About 50 volunteers came from Ulster to bring in his crops, guarded by some 900 soldiers, at a cost of up to £10,000 to save a harvest worth at most £350. By year's end, boycotting had spread across Ireland.
Ambrose Burnside was no great Civil War general, but he left a lasting mark on men's faces. He wore thick whiskers down his cheeks, joined to a full mustache, with a clean-shaven chin, and by 1866 newspapers were writing about Burnside whiskers. The style became known as burnsides, and then, since the whiskers grow on the side of the face, English flipped the name to sideburns. Burnside also made a carbine rifle and served Rhode Island as governor and senator, but his whiskers made him a household name.
Étienne de Silhouette became Louis XV's finance minister in March 1759 and was out of office by November. He tried to cut spending, close tax loopholes for rich officials and trim the royal court's luxuries, and his enemies branded him a skinflint. Somehow his name ended up on black profile portraits. One theory says they were portraits on the cheap, mocking his economies. Another says Silhouette himself liked tracing his guests' shadows. Nobody knows which is true, and he almost certainly did not invent the art.
Jules Léotard practiced as a teenager above the swimming pool at his father's house in Toulouse, which served as his safety net. On November 12, 1859, at the Cirque Napoléon in Paris, he performed the first flying trapeze act on record, with only mattresses below. He became the daring young man of a hit music hall song, and his snug costume showed off his muscles. English named the garment the leotard around 1881, about a decade after his death in 1870.
Salmonella has nothing to do with fish. It honors Daniel E. Salmon, an American veterinary pathologist. The bacterium was isolated from sick pigs in 1885, while researchers hunted the cause of hog cholera, but many believe the real work was done by Salmon's laboratory assistant, Theobald Smith. The two clashed over credit more than once. In 1900, the French-Argentine bacteriologist Joseph Lignières proposed naming the bacteria for Salmon, and the boss's name is the one the world remembers.
The first dunces were followers of a genius. John Duns Scotus, a Scottish philosopher and theologian who died in 1308, was one of the greatest of the medieval scholastics, and his followers held sway in the universities until the Reformation. When Renaissance humanists turned against medieval theology in the 1500s, they made Duns the model of a hairsplitting pedant, and a Duns man became an insult. By the 1570s a dunce was any dull-witted student. The dunce's cap is recorded by 1792.
Samuel Maverick, a Yale-educated Texas landholder, bought a farm on Matagorda Peninsula in the 1840s that came with some 400 longhorns. When he moved his family back to San Antonio, he left the herd with Jack, an enslaved teenager whose requests for help went unanswered. Few calves were ever branded, and unbranded cattle across South Texas became known as Maverick's. When he sold the herd, the buyer's cowboys claimed every unbranded animal they could find as Maverick's. Now a maverick is anyone who goes their own way.
Hey, guys owes a debt to a failed plot. On the night of November 4, 1605, Guy Fawkes was caught guarding gunpowder beneath the House of Lords, part of a plan to kill King James I at the opening of Parliament. England marked the plot's failure every November 5 with bonfires, and children paraded stuffed effigies of Fawkes, called guys, asking for a penny for the guy. By the 1830s a guy was a grotesquely dressed person, and by the mid-1800s Americans used the word for any man.
Every algorithm carries the name of a ninth-century scholar. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi worked at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, and his name means the man from Khwarazm, a region of Central Asia. He wrote a treatise on Hindu-Arabic numerals whose Arabic original is lost. It survives in a Latin translation whose title begins with his name as Algoritmi, and from that came algorism, later algorithm, first meaning the Arabic way of calculating. His book on equations gave English the word algebra.