Word
Where does Curry (the word) come from?
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.
More Words
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.
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Word
Denim (the word)
📍 Nîmes, France
Your jeans are part French: 'denim' is short for serge de Nîmes, 'serge from Nîmes', a city in southern France. English had the word by the 1690s, and American mills were weaving cotton denim by 1789.
Word
Aardvark (the word)
📍 Cape region, South Africa
It looks Dutch, but aardvark ('earth pig', for its burrowing) was coined in South Africa in Afrikaans, the language that grew from the Dutch of Cape settlers. English borrowed it in 1833, and aardvarks live only in Africa.
More from Asia
Food
Apple
📍 Tian Shan, Central Asia
The apple's wild ancestor, Malus sieversii, still grows in Central Asia's Tian Shan mountains, where apples were first domesticated before travelling along the Silk Road to Europe.
Game
Judo
📍 Tokyo, Japan
Judo was created in Tokyo in 1882 by Kanō Jigorō, who reshaped older jujutsu styles around safe free sparring; strikes and weapons survive only in set forms. Its name means “gentle way”.
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Invention
Paper
📍 Northern China (Gansu to Luoyang)
The oldest paper scraps, from the 2nd century BC, were found in China, and Han court official Cai Lun refined papermaking around 105 AD. Egypt's papyrus was a different material.