Kumquat is Cantonese for 'golden orange'. The little fruit is eaten whole, skin and all: the peel is the sweet part and the pulp the sour one. The plant hunter Robert Fortune brought it to Europe in 1846.
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📍 Northern India
Today most wild cheetahs live in Africa, but their name is Hindi: chītā, from a Sanskrit word meaning 'variegated' or 'speckled'. Cheetahs were once abundant in India, and English borrowed the word by 1704.
📍 Taranto, Italy
The name comes from Taranto in southern Italy, home of a wolf spider whose bite was popularly blamed for 'tarantism', a frenzy said to be cured by dancing. English later gave the name to big hairy American spiders.
📍 Jersey, Channel Islands
The jersey is named after Jersey, one of the Channel Islands between England and France, which became a big exporter of knitted goods in Elizabethan times. New Jersey in the USA was named after the same little island.
📍 China
Tofu comes from China. Legend credits Han-dynasty Prince Liu An with inventing it over 2,000 years ago, but the first clear written mention dates from around 965 AD. Japan's first record of it is from 1183.
📍 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.
📍 NE India, Bangladesh & Myanmar
Mangoes originated in the region between northeastern India, Bangladesh and northwestern Myanmar. The English word came via Portuguese from Malayalam “manga”.