Word
Where does Boomerang (the word) come from?
Boomerang comes from an Aboriginal language of the Sydney area, written down as 'bou-mar-rang' in 1822. Yet the oldest known boomerang, carved from a mammoth tusk, was found in a cave in Poland.
More Words
Word
Curry (the word)
📍 Southern India
Curry comes from kari, a word for spiced sauce in Tamil and neighbouring South Indian languages. Portuguese traders made it caril, and English picked it up from them in the 1590s.
Word
Tycoon (the word)
📍 Tokyo (Edo), Japan
Tycoon is Japanese taikun, 'great lord', a title foreigners used for Japan's shogun in the 1850s. Lincoln's secretary called him 'the Tycoon' in 1861; the business-mogul sense came after WWI.
Word
Jersey (the word)
📍 Jersey, Channel Islands
The jersey is named after Jersey, one of the Channel Islands between England and France, which became a big exporter of knitted goods in Elizabethan times. New Jersey in the USA was named after the same little island.
More from Oceania
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Nature
Tea tree (source of tea tree oil)
📍 Northern New South Wales & southeast Queensland, Australia
The tea tree isn't related to the tea plant: it's an Australian myrtle that grows wild along streams and swampy flats in northern New South Wales and southeast Queensland. Its leaf oil became a commercial product in the 1920s.
Nature
Budgerigar (budgie)
📍 Inland Australia
Wild budgies live across the dry interior of Australia, and every wild one is green and yellow. The blue, white and yellow pets are colour forms bred in captivity, where budgies have been raised since the 1850s.
Nature
Sugarcane
📍 New Guinea
Sugarcane was first domesticated in New Guinea. Austronesian voyagers spread it across the Pacific and west to India, where Alexander's admiral Nearchus marvelled at “reeds that produce honey without bees”.