Word
Where does Bayou (the word) come from?
Bayou sounds French and reached English through Louisiana French in the 1760s, but it began as bayuk, a Choctaw word for a creek or small stream. Houston, Texas, is nicknamed the Bayou City.
More Words
Word
Guano (the word)
📍 Peru
Guano comes from wanu, the Quechua word for dung used as fertiliser. The Inca strictly protected the seabirds nesting on islands off Peru, and in the 1800s ships carried their droppings around the world to fertilise farms.
Word
Jeans (the word)
📍 Genoa, Italy
Jeans goes back to Genoa (Gênes in French): English merchants called a hard-wearing fustian cloth from the Italian port 'Gene fustian', later just 'jean', and were importing it in bulk by the 1500s.
Word
Yogurt (the word)
📍 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.
More from North America
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.
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Invention
Ski chairlift
📍 Sun Valley, Idaho, USA
The world's first ski chairlifts opened in 1936 at Sun Valley, Idaho. A railroad engineer, Jim Curran, designed them by swapping the hooks of a banana-loading conveyor for chairs.
Food
Tacos al pastor
📍 Puebla & Mexico City, Mexico
Tacos al pastor are shawarma's Mexican grandchildren. Lebanese immigrants brought spit-roasted meat to central Mexico; in Puebla and Mexico City it became pork marinated in chilli and pineapple, shaved from a spinning 'trompo' into corn tortillas.