Word
Where does Orangutan (the word) come from?
Orangutan is Malay orang 'person' + hutan 'forest': the person of the forest. A Dutch physician first printed it for the ape in 1631. Wild orangutans now live only on Borneo and Sumatra.
More Words
Word
Kumquat (the word)
📍 Guangdong (Canton), China
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.
Word
Anorak (the word)
📍 Greenland
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.
Word
Mako (the word)
📍 New Zealand
Mako is a Māori word from New Zealand for the shark or its tooth; Samoans say mago and Hawaiians manō. The shortfin mako is the fastest known shark and is famous for leaping high out of the water when hooked.
More from Asia
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Nature
Koi (ornamental carp)
📍 Ojiya & Yamakoshi, Niigata, Japan
Koi were first bred about 200 years ago by farmers in the mountain villages of Niigata, Japan, who raised plain black carp for food. The colourful new fish were a sensation when they were shown at a 1914 exhibition in Tokyo.
Nature
Golden hamster (the pet hamster)
📍 Near Aleppo, Syria
In 1930 zoologist Israel Aharoni caught a mother hamster and her litter near Aleppo, Syria. DNA studies show all domestic golden hamsters descend from one female, probably that very mother.
Food
Cloves
📍 North Moluccas, Indonesia
Until colonial times, cloves grew only on a few small islands in Indonesia's Moluccas, the original “Spice Islands”, such as Ternate and Tidore. Chinese merchants sailed there to trade for them.