Word
Where does Anorak (the word) come from?
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.
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.
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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.
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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'.
More from North America
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Game
Softball
📍 Chicago, USA
Softball began on Thanksgiving Day 1887 at Chicago's Farragut Boat Club, when a rolled-up boxing glove became the ball and a broom handle the bat.
Food
Jerusalem artichoke
📍 Central North America
Neither from Jerusalem nor an artichoke: it's the tuber of a sunflower native to central North America. 'Jerusalem' is probably a garbling of girasole, Italian for sunflower.
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.