Canaries are named after the Canary Islands off north-west Africa, where the wild birds still live. The islands came first: their Latin name, Canariae Insulae, is usually read as 'islands of dogs', and Pliny linked it to big dogs found there.
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📍 Malay Peninsula & Sumatra
Durian comes from Malay duri, 'thorn', after the fruit's spiky husk. Called the 'king of fruits' in some regions, it smells so strong that Singapore bans it on its metro trains.
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📍 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.
📍 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.
📍 Kasai, DR Congo (Kuba Kingdom)
Kuba cloth comes from the old Kuba Kingdom in the Kasai region of DR Congo. Men weave squares from raffia palm fibre, then women embroider them and snip the stitches into a soft pile that looks and feels like velvet.
📍 Kalahari & southern Africa
The spiky horned melon grows wild around the Kalahari, where it is one of the few sources of water in the dry season. It was the 'African horned cucumber' until the 1980s, when it was renamed kiwano for export from New Zealand.
📍 Kalahari, southern Africa (Botswana, Namibia & South Africa)
Meerkats live in the dry, open country of the Kalahari and Karoo in southern Africa. Some members of each group always stand sentry, and adults teach pups to eat scorpions by first removing the stinger.