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Spa is named after Spa, a small town in eastern Belgium whose healing springs drew visitors from 1326 on. The popular claim that it stands for the Latin 'sanitas per aquam', health through water, only appeared in the 21st century.
📍 Canadian Arctic (Nunavut)
Igloo comes from iglu, the Inuit word for any house, not only one made of snow; English picked it up in the Canadian Arctic in 1824. It may be −45 °C outside, but body heat alone can warm a snow igloo to as much as 16 °C inside.
📍 Anatolia & Istanbul (Ottoman Turkey)
Yogurt comes from Ottoman Turkish yoğurt, built on a root meaning 'to thicken'. English travellers were writing it 'yughurd' by the 1620s, and the spelling still wobbles between yogurt and yoghurt.
📍 Guangdong (Canton), China
Kumquat is Cantonese for 'golden orange'. The little fruit is eaten whole, skin and all: the peel is the sweet part and the pulp the sour one. The plant hunter Robert Fortune brought it to Europe in 1846.
📍 Apolda, Thuringia, Germany
The Dobermann was first bred around 1890 in Apolda, in central Germany, by Louis Dobermann, a tax collector who also ran a dog pound. With dogs of many breeds at hand, he set out to create the ideal dog to protect him.
📍 Huddersfield, England
Rugby league was born on 29 August 1895 at the George Hotel in Huddersfield, when 22 northern English clubs broke away so they could pay players for wages lost to Saturday matches.
📍 Mountains of northern Greece & Albania
The conker tree of British playgrounds is a Balkan native: wild horse chestnuts survive only in a few mountain forests of northern Greece, Albania and nearby. Everywhere else, it was planted.