Where things really come from

Everyday words often began far from where they are used today. Each story shows where a word’s source language was spoken when the word was coined or borrowed, and how it travelled from there.

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.

Word

Boondocks (the word)

📍 Southern Luzon, Philippines

This all-American slang for the middle of nowhere is Tagalog: US soldiers in the Philippines in the early 20th century picked up bundok, 'mountain', and brought it home as 'the boondocks'.

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

Anorak (the word)

📍 Greenland

Anorak comes from Greenlandic anoraq, a hooded, waterproof jacket. English adopted it in 1924, and by the 1980s British slang also used it for a socially awkward nerd.

Word

Tapioca (the word)

📍 Northeast coast of Brazil

Long before bubble tea, the Tupi people of Brazil's coast called the starch that settles out of squeezed cassava tipi'óka, roughly 'sediment'. Portuguese settlers took up the word after 1500, and cassava itself is native to Brazil.

Word

Kangaroo (the word)

📍 Cooktown, Queensland, Australia

Joseph Banks wrote down 'kanguru' in 1770 at today's Cooktown, where Cook's ship was being repaired, from the Guugu Yimithirr word gangurru. The tale that it means 'I don't know' is a myth.

Plenty of foods that feel local started somewhere else entirely. Each story shows where a food or dish first appeared and how it spread around the world.

Food

Ackee

📍 West Africa (Senegal to Cameroon)

Ackee is Jamaica's national fruit, but the tree is native to West Africa and was carried to the Caribbean by the late 1700s. Its scientific name, Blighia sapida, honours Captain William Bligh.

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.

Food

Peach Melba

📍 London (the Savoy), England

French chef Auguste Escoffier created Peach Melba at London's Savoy Hotel in 1892 or 1893 to honour Australian soprano Nellie Melba, then starring at Covent Garden.

Food

Buffalo wings

📍 Buffalo, New York, USA

Named after Buffalo, New York, not the animal. The Anchor Bar says co-owner Teressa Bellissimo first tossed fried wings in hot sauce there in 1964, though local chef John Young said he was frying wings in Buffalo from 1961.

Food

Peanut

📍 Southern Bolivia & NW Argentina

Peanuts were domesticated in South America, most likely in southern Bolivia or northwestern Argentina, where the most wild-like varieties still grow. The oldest known remains, about 7,600 years old, come from Peru.

Food

Macadamia nut

📍 Southeast Queensland & northern NSW, Australia

Macadamias are native to eastern Australia, the only widely grown food plant native to that continent. Seeds reached Hawaii in the 1880s, and Hawaii led world production for decades until Australia overtook it in 1997.

Inventions are often credited to the wrong country. Each story shows where an invention first appeared and how it reached everyone else.

Invention

Dolos (breakwater block)

📍 East London, South Africa

These giant concrete 'jacks' that lock together to tame waves were designed in 1963 for the harbour of East London, South Africa. Their Afrikaans name refers to knucklebones, and they now guard coasts around the world.

Invention

Bristle toothbrush

📍 China

Brushes with stiff hog bristles set in bone or bamboo handles were being used in China centuries before William Addis began mass-producing toothbrushes in England around 1780.

Invention

Aerosol spray can

📍 Oslo, Norway

Norwegian chemical engineer Erik Rotheim of Oslo applied for the first aerosol spray can patent in 1926. Americans later made spray cans famous with WWII 'bug bombs' that sprayed insecticide against malaria mosquitoes.

Invention

Ferris wheel

📍 Chicago, USA

Engineer George Ferris built the first Ferris wheel, 80 m tall, for Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. It was meant to rival the Eiffel Tower from Paris's 1889 fair.

Invention

Animated feature film

📍 Buenos Aires, Argentina

The first feature-length cartoon wasn't Snow White (1937) but El Apóstol, made in Buenos Aires in 1917 by Quirino Cristiani from 58,000 frames of cut-out animation. Its only copy was lost in a 1926 studio fire.

Invention

Didgeridoo

📍 Arnhem Land, Australia

Aboriginal peoples of northern Australia, probably in Arnhem Land, developed it centuries before Europeans arrived. The name 'didgeridoo' isn't Aboriginal; it's an imitative English word first printed in 1908.

Farmers, traders and explorers carried plants and animals far from home. Each story shows where a species or crop originally comes from.

Nature

Bird-of-paradise flower (Strelitzia)

📍 Eastern Cape & KwaZulu-Natal coast, South Africa

Bird-of-paradise flowers grow wild along South Africa's eastern coast, where sunbirds perching on the blue petals get pollen dusted onto their feet. Joseph Banks named the plant after Queen Charlotte, Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

Nature

Chicken

📍 Mainland Southeast Asia

Chickens descend mainly from the red junglefowl of Southeast Asia. The oldest known chicken bones, roughly 3,500 years old, come from Ban Non Wat in northeast Thailand, where wild birds were likely drawn to farmers' rice fields.

Nature

European rabbit

📍 Iberia & southwestern France

Rabbits are Iberian natives: the oldest fossils of the species, 600,000 years old, come from southern Spain. Australia's rabbit plague began with just 24 rabbits released in Victoria in 1859.

Nature

Dahlia

📍 Central Mexico highlands

Almost every wild dahlia species grows only in Mexico, the genus's home and centre of diversity. Spanish botanist Antonio José Cavanilles named the flower in 1791 after the Swedish botanist Anders Dahl.

Nature

Bougainvillea

📍 South America (Brazil & neighbours)

Bougainvillea, the flower of Mediterranean balconies, is a South American native that grows wild from Brazil to Peru and Argentina. It is named after French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, whose expedition recorded it.

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.

Games and sports often outgrow their birthplace. Each story shows where a game or sport began and how it spread.

Game

Gateball

📍 Memuro, Hokkaido, Japan

Gateball was dreamed up in 1947 in Memuro, Hokkaido, by Eiji Suzuki, who handmade sticks and balls so children short of toys after the war could play a croquet-like game. It later became a favourite of older people.

Game

Cribbage

📍 England

Cribbage grew out of noddy, an old English card game, and the poet Sir John Suckling is credited with inventing it in the early 1600s. Points are scored by moving pegs along a wooden board full of holes.

Game

Crossword puzzle

📍 New York City, USA

The modern crossword began as a “word-cross” by Liverpool-born journalist Arthur Wynne, printed in the New York World on 21 December 1913. Britain's first newspaper crossword followed only in 1924.

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”.

Game

Korfball

📍 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Korfball was created in 1902 by Amsterdam teacher Nico Broekhuysen, who adapted ringboll, a Swedish game he'd seen in Nääs. Each team mixes four women and four men.

Game

Netball

📍 London, England

Netball grew out of basketball at a women's PE college in Hampstead, London, from 1893, and its first rules were published in England in 1901. It then spread across the British Empire.