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Wombat comes from Dharug, the Aboriginal language of the Sydney area, and was first written down in 1798. Wombats leave cube-shaped droppings, and their pouches face backwards so they don't fill with soil while they dig.
📍 Caribbean (Taíno)
'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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📍 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.
📍 Central Mexico
Spanish tomate comes from tomatl in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. Italy only received its first tomatoes around 1548 and called them pomi d'oro, 'golden apples'.
📍 Eastwood (Sydney), Australia
The tart green Granny Smith sprang up by a creek in Eastwood, now a suburb of Sydney, in 1868. Maria Ann 'Granny' Smith had tossed out some French crab apples there, and she grew the lucky seedling on.
📍 New Guinea
Sugarcane was first domesticated in New Guinea. Austronesian voyagers spread it across the Pacific and west to India, where Alexander's admiral Nearchus marvelled at “reeds that produce honey without bees”.
📍 Inland Australia
Wild budgies live across the dry interior of Australia, and every wild one is green and yellow. The blue, white and yellow pets are colour forms bred in captivity, where budgies have been raised since the 1850s.