Word
Where does Hurricane (the word) come from?
'Hurricane' is a Caribbean word: Spanish explorers borrowed huracán from the Taíno, an Arawakan-speaking people of the West Indies, and English took it from Spanish in the 1550s.
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Word
Tycoon (the word)
📍 Tokyo (Edo), Japan
Tycoon is Japanese taikun, 'great lord', a title foreigners used for Japan's shogun in the 1850s. Lincoln's secretary called him 'the Tycoon' in 1861; the business-mogul sense came after WWI.
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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.
Word
Cola (the word)
📍 Sierra Leone & Guinea, West Africa
Cola drinks are named after the kola nut, a caffeine-rich seed of West African forest trees. The word comes from West African languages such as Temne (kola) and Mandinka (kolo), and kola nuts went into Coca-Cola in 1886.
More from North America
Game
Volleyball
📍 Holyoke, Massachusetts, USA
Volleyball was invented in 1895 by YMCA instructor William G. Morgan in Holyoke, Massachusetts, as a gentler alternative to basketball. He first called it “mintonette”.
Food
Nachos
📍 Piedras Negras, Mexico
In 1943, maître d' Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya created tortilla chips topped with cheese and jalapeños for American customers at the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, Mexico, and named them after himself.
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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.