The bench is real. Banca was the ordinary Italian word for the table a money dealer worked at, and it is the same word that gave us bank. Rotta is broken, from the Latin rumpere.²

The breaking is the story. A dealer who could not meet his debts had his table broken in front of him, and that was the end of his trade. Samuel Johnson retold it in his dictionary of 1755.²³

Nobody has produced evidence that it happened. The reading the dictionaries settle on is that rotta is figurative here, in the way an English business is said to be broken, and that no carpentry was involved. I could not confirm the custom.¹²

Breaking the instrument of an office was a real way of ending one. A degraded knight had his belt cut, his spurs struck off and his sword broken over his head; a Garter knight’s banner was pulled down and thrown out of the chapel; and judges have snapped the nib of the pen that signed a death sentence, on the reasoning that it should not be used again.⁴⁵

Nothing I found joins any of that to the money dealer’s table. It does explain why the table is easy to picture: a reader who knows that a broken sword ends a knighthood will read a broken bench the same way.

The company filed for bankruptcy.

Sources

1. Bankrupt — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. Bankrupt — Michael Quinion, World Wide Words
3. A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755 — Samuel Johnson, Internet Archive
4. Degradation of a Garter Knight — College of St George, Windsor Castle
5. The Unbroken Nib — LiveLaw

Europe took the word twice. One route latinised it as cifra, which gave English cipher; the other, through Fibonacci’s zephirum, gave Italian zefiro and then zero.¹²³

So the two are the same word arriving by different roads. Cipher carried both senses into English: zero, in its older use, and a code.²

The total came to zero.

Sources

1. Zero — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. Cipher — Online Etymology Dictionary
3. A History of Zero — MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews

It was built for the chase. Dutch warships were too heavy to catch the pirates and smugglers working their coast, so lighter and faster craft were made to run them down.¹²

One was presented to Charles II in 1660, and he used it to go out on the water for the pleasure of it. English gentlemen wanted the same, and the word stopped meaning the chase.¹²

They spent August on a yacht.

Sources

1. Yacht — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. Yacht — Merriam-Webster

He called them X-rays. The X is the one from algebra, the letter you put where a quantity is not known yet. He did not know what the rays were and said so in the name.¹²

German and several other languages call them Röntgen rays instead. He preferred his own placeholder, and English kept it.¹²

The rays were explained long ago. The word still says nobody knows.¹

The X-ray showed a hairline fracture.

Sources

1. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen: Biographical — The Nobel Prize
2. Wilhelm Röntgen — Linda Hall Library

It came into English in the early thirteenth century and named what there was then—an unglazed opening, often in a roof, that let in the weather along with the light. The wind is in the name because the wind came in.¹

Old English had its own words for it: eagþyrl, eye-hole, and eagduru, eye-door. Both were replaced, but everyone involved had seen the same thing in it—an eye in a wall.¹

She opened the window.

Sources

1. Window — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. Window — Merriam-Webster

He built it from the Greek ou, not, and topos, place: no place. The joke is that it is a syllable away from eu-topos, good place, and More points at it himself—an addendum to the book has a verse saying the island ought rightly to be called Eutopia, the place of happiness.¹²

Both readings sit in the word at once, and the book does not choose between them.¹

Their plan was a utopia and everybody knew it.

Sources

1. Utopia by Thomas More — Encyclopædia Britannica
2. Utopia — Online Etymology Dictionary

A crossroads is a public place. Anyone might be standing in it, and what was said there was what anyone might say, so trivialis came to mean public, and then ordinary, and then of no particular importance.¹

The medieval university used the same word for the first three of the seven liberal arts—grammar, rhetoric and logic—the ones taken before the other four. To be trivial was to belong to that first stage.¹²

The sense the word has now, facts asked and answered for their own sake, is from the 1960s and American campuses.¹

He is unbeatable at trivia.

Sources

1. Trivia — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. Trivium — Encyclopædia Britannica

Rivales were the people who took water from the same watercourse. It was a legal relationship before it was a hostile one: Roman law had provisions for what to do when two of them disagreed.¹²

The water fell away as the word moved through French into English in the later sixteenth century. The competition stayed, mostly over love or honour rather than irrigation.¹²

The shape of the old sense is still there. A rival is an opponent who draws on the same supply you do.¹²

He was her closest rival.

Sources

1. Rival — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. The History of ‘Rival’ — Merriam-Webster

Johannes Hofer, a medical student at Basel, made the word for his dissertation of 1688 out of the Greek nostos, homecoming, and algos, pain. It was his Latin for the German Heimweh, homesickness, and he described it as a disease of the brain.¹²

The patients were often Swiss mercenaries serving abroad, set off by a remembered sight or a tune from home. They stopped eating and sleeping. It was taken seriously enough to be treated, and seriously enough to be written down as a cause of death.³

The word softened as the illness stopped being one. The ache stayed. The algos is half the word.¹²

A wave of nostalgia for the nineties.

Sources

1. Johannes Hofer — Encyclopædia Britannica
2. Nostalgia — Online Etymology Dictionary
3. The Soldiers Who Died of Homesickness — The Conversation

It began as a diagnosis. In the medicine that ran from Hippocrates through Galen and on into the eighteenth century, the body held four humours—blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile—and the mixture of them made a person’s temperament. Too much black bile made you melancholy.¹²

There is no black bile. The humours were abandoned and the treatments went with them, but the word outlived the physiology it was built on.¹²

A melancholy that lasted all winter.

Sources

1. Melancholy — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. What is Melancholy? — Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

It meant that literally. In the medieval university the teacher read out of the book and the students wrote it down, because there was one book, it was expensive, and they did not have it.¹

The sense of a discourse on a subject, rather than a reading out of a text, appears in the 1530s. Printing had been at work for two generations by then.¹

A lecture is now an exposition, and often anything but a reading. The word still names the older arrangement: a room with one copy of the book in it.¹²

The lecture was at nine on Monday.

Sources

1. Lecture — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. Lecture — Middle English Compendium, University of Michigan

One part of the image is plain enough. At the Rath Yatra in Puri, enormous chariots carrying the deities are pulled through the streets by hundreds of people, and something that heavy is genuinely hard to stop or steer once it is moving.¹

The rest was supplied. Claudius Buchanan, an Anglican chaplain who had seen the festival, published Christian Researches in Asia in 1811; it became one of the most widely read English accounts of India of its day. He wrote the procession up as a scene of heathen horror, in support of the case for Christian missions, and that is the book the English word came through.²

English kept the crushing and left the rest behind.¹²

The company became a juggernaut.

Sources

1. The Origins of the Juggernaut — Anatoly Liberman, OUPblog, Oxford University Press
2. Buchanan, Claudius (1766–1815) — History of Missiology, Boston University School of Theology

An augur was a Roman priest who read the will of the gods in birds: how they flew, how they fed, what they called. The job was to find out whether the gods approved of a thing being started at all. It was not a way of predicting what would happen.¹²

So a man was inaugurated—installed once the birds had been consulted and the answer was yes. Nothing of consequence was begun without it.²

Presidents are still inaugurated. The birds dropped out of the ceremony and stayed in the word.¹

The new building was inaugurated in May.

Sources

1. Inaugurate — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. The Origin of ‘Inaugurate’ — Merriam-Webster

It said nothing about intelligence. It described what a person did not take part in. From there the word went to the common man, and from the common man to the ignorant one, since ordinary people were not generally the ones with the learning.¹²

English took it in that ignorant sense and then narrowed it again, from a man without education to a man without sense.²

Some idiot had left the gate open.

Sources

1. Idiot — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. Idiot — Merriam-Webster

The theatre took the word from the kitchen. Phrases were stuffed into the fixed words of the liturgy at festivals, and the same word was then used for the comic business stuffed in among the scenes of a religious play.¹²

The stuffing grew into a form of its own. English borrowed the word a second time in the sixteenth century, and that time it meant the comedy.²

The trial was a farce.

Sources

1. Farce — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. The Culinary Roots of ‘Farce’ — Merriam-Webster

The eavesdrop, or eavesdrip, was the strip of ground around a building where the rain came off the eaves. Old English had it as yfesdrype, and it mattered in law: you could not build too near your neighbour’s boundary, because your roof would drain onto their land.¹²

Anyone standing in that strip is standing against the wall, under the eaves, close enough to hear what is said inside. By the fifteenth century that person had a name. The verb came later, out of the name.¹²

He was eavesdropping on the next table.

Sources

1. Eavesdrop — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. Eavesdrop — Wordorigins.org

The trade travelled from Italy to France and England and the word went with it. The marble hall and the application on a phone both started as a table in a market.²

The bank refused the loan.

Sources

1. Bank — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. Bank — Merriam-Webster

The story everybody knows is that workers threw their clogs into the machinery. It is repeated everywhere and recorded nowhere: no account of anyone actually doing it has been produced.²

The likelier route is duller and stays inside the language. French saboter meant to clatter about in wooden shoes, and from there to work clumsily, and from there to botch a job on purpose.¹²

The clog is in the word either way. Nobody can show that one was ever thrown into a machine.²

The line was shut down by sabotage.

Sources

1. Sabotage — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. Sabotage — Wordorigins.org

It was not a description. Other Muslims used it against the Nizari Ismailis as an insult, in the sense of low-class rabble or people of lax morals, with no claim attached that they used the drug.¹

The literal reading came later, and from outside. Crusader-era reports and then Marco Polo told of an Old Man of the Mountain who drugged young men and showed them a garden of paradise so they would kill on command. Farhad Daftary’s work on those accounts traces them to European invention and rumour rather than to anything recorded at Alamut.¹²

The legend crossed into English and took the word with it. The drug is still in the name, and nobody has been able to show it was ever there.¹²

He was killed by an assassin.

Sources

1. Assassin — The Institute of Ismaili Studies
2. Introduction to The Assassin Legends — Farhad Daftary, The Institute of Ismaili Studies

The story attached to it is that Roman soldiers were paid in salt, and the story has a source. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, says salt is bound up with public honours and military service, and that salarium is named from it.¹

That is all he says. He does not write that soldiers were paid in salt, and no other ancient writer does either. The sentence about legions receiving salt instead of coin appears to be a later addition, filled in by dictionary-makers who wanted the connection to mean something definite.³

So the salt is genuinely in the word and the reason for it is missing. I could not find an ancient source for the payment, and the scholarship says there is none to find.¹³

She took a cut in salary.

Sources

1. Natural History, Book XXXI, chapter 41 — Pliny the Elder, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University
2. Salary — Online Etymology Dictionary
3. Salt and Salary: Were Roman Soldiers Paid in Salt? — Peter Gainsford, Kiwi Hellenist

It is named after what you see in it. Stand close enough to someone and there is a tiny figure of you in their eye, about doll-sized. Greek did the same thing with korē, girl, which meant both the doll and the pupil.¹

The schoolchild comes from the same Latin root by another road. Pupillus and pupilla also meant an orphan or a minor in someone’s care, and the English pupil began as that legal sense before it meant anyone being taught.¹²

The doctor checked his pupils.

Sources

1. Pupil — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. Pupil — Merriam-Webster

The idea behind it was a medical one: that some kinds of madness came and went with the phases of the moon, and that the moon was what moved them.¹

The belief went, and the word stayed in the law long after it. English statutes used lunatic as a legal category into the twentieth century, and it was the Mental Treatment Act of 1930 that turned lunatics, officially, into patients.²

Nobody who uses the word now is thinking about the moon.

Some lunatic overtook us on the bend.

Sources

1. Lunacy — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. 90 Years Ago: the Mental Treatment Act 1930 — Claire Hilton, Royal College of Psychiatrists

Al-jabr is restoring, or reuniting what is broken. In the book it names a particular move: a term subtracted on one side is restored by adding it to the other, until the equation balances.¹²

The everyday sense travelled with the word. When algebra first came into English in the sixteenth century it could still mean the surgical setting of a fracture, and in Spanish an algebrista was a bone-setter.³

The same book gave the other word. Algorithm came out of the author’s name.¹

He teaches algebra to first-year students.

Sources

1. Al-Khwarizmi — MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews
2. The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing — Encyclopædia Britannica
3. Algebra — Online Etymology Dictionary

The stone was not Turkish. The finest of it was mined in Persia, and Europe knew it because Venetian merchants bought it in Turkish markets and the overland routes ran through Ottoman territory.¹²

So the name records the way it came rather than where it came from. The colour was named after the stone in the 1850s, and the colour is now what most people mean by the word: a country’s name, on a paint chart.¹

The ring was set with turquoise.

Sources

1. Turquoise — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. Turquoise History and Lore — Gemological Institute of America

It reached English in the 1550s by a long route, through Turkic into Russian and Polish and on westward. The h at the front appears to have been picked up in Polish.¹

It travelled with the Golden Horde and the armies of the steppe, seen from outside and at a distance. By the 1610s the word was being used for any uncivilised gang.¹

An ordu is an organised thing, with a chain of command and a place for everything. A horde is a rabble. The word travelled west and ended up meaning the opposite of what it started as.¹²

A horde of tourists filled the square.

Sources

1. Horde — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. Horde — Collins English Dictionary

Its first English sense was the literal one: a warehouse, and particularly a store of military supplies and ammunition.¹

In 1731 Edward Cave started a monthly in London called The Gentleman’s Magazine, made up of pieces gathered from other publications. He meant the word as it sounds, a storehouse of writing, and it is the first periodical the word was used for.¹²

The rifle kept the older sense. The part that holds the cartridges is a magazine because it is where they are stored. The shelf at the newsagent and the box of ammunition are named for the same thing.¹

The article ran in a monthly magazine.

Sources

1. Magazine — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. The Gentleman’s Magazine — Encyclopædia Britannica

The connection is less odd than it looks. Free time was what you needed in order to sit and argue about something, so the word moved from the time to the discussion held in it, and then to the people holding the discussion and the place they held it in.¹²

Latin kept some of that width. Schola could mean leisure for learning, a lecture, a debate, or a place of learning.¹²

English took the narrowest of those senses: a building, a register and a timetable.¹

She teaches at a school in the city.

Sources

1. School — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. Get Schooled on the Origins of ‘School’ — Merriam-Webster

It was named for what people believed caused it. Fevers were common around marshes, and the vapour coming off stagnant water was held to be what made people ill.¹²

The parasite was identified in 1880 and the mosquito was shown to carry it before the century was out. The air had nothing to do with it.²

The name did not change with the theory. We understand the disease now, and it is still called after an idea about air that nobody believes.¹

Malaria is still one of the world’s deadliest diseases.

Sources

1. Malaria — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. Bad Air — Science History Institute

Edward Jenner’s report of 1798 was an inquiry into the Variolae vaccinae, the pustules of the cow: his term for cowpox. People who had caught cowpox, usually from milking, turned out to be protected against smallpox.¹

The method spread and the name went with it. Vaccines are made in many ways now and almost none of them involve a cow, but the word still says where the first one was found.¹²

The vaccine was given in two doses.

Sources

1. Etymologia: Variola and Vaccination — Emerging Infectious Diseases, CDC
2. Vaccine — Online Etymology Dictionary

An Athenian who wanted a man banished for ten years scratched his name on a sherd and handed it in. Broken pottery was everywhere, which is why the vote was taken on it.¹²

Thousands of those sherds have come out of the Agora and the Kerameikos, names still legible on them, most of them from refuse dumps.²

The procedure ended and the word kept only the exclusion. The object dropped out of it: a piece of rubbish with a name scratched on it.¹

He faced ostracism from the whole village.

Sources

1. Ostracism — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. Ostraka from the Athenian Agora, 1970–1972 — Hesperia, American School of Classical Studies at Athens

In medieval towns built largely of timber, a bell rang in the evening and households banked or covered their hearths for the night. A fire left untended was everybody’s problem.¹²

The cover itself was called a curfew too: a lid of terracotta or metal put over the embers to hold them safely until morning.²

The bell stopped and the fire went out of the meaning. By the nineteenth century the word had become what it is now, an hour after which you have to be indoors.¹

The city was under curfew.

Sources

1. Curfew — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. The History of the Curfew — John Moore Museum, Tewkesbury

Counted from around six in the morning, the ninth hour fell at about three in the afternoon. That is where noon was in English for a long time.¹²

Between the twelfth century and the fourteenth it moved to midday. Why is not settled. Unreliable clocks, daylight that stretches and shrinks with the northern seasons, and the fact that a day’s fast ended at nones have all been offered as reasons.¹²

Noon settled at twelve and stayed there. The hour it is named after is three hours later.

We’ll meet at noon.

Sources

1. Noon — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. ‘Noon’: Not Always at Twelve O’Clock — Merriam-Webster

A köşk was a pavilion, open on some or all sides, built in a garden to be sat in. The Çinili Köşk at Topkapı, put up in 1472 under Mehmed II, was a pleasure pavilion in the outer gardens, used to watch the games and spectacles held in the square it faced.²

Europe borrowed the building first, in the seventeenth century, as ornament for parks and gardens. Then the word was handed down to smaller and smaller things: a newspaper stand by the 1860s, a telephone box in the 1920s, and now a machine bolted to the floor of an airport.¹

She bought a ticket at the kiosk.

Sources

1. Kiosk — Online Etymology Dictionary
2. Çinili Köşk, İstanbul — Archnet, Aga Khan Documentation Center, MIT Libraries

The word comes through Old French from Latin considerare, to observe attentively or contemplate.¹²

A long-standing explanation connects the Latin verb with sidus, meaning a star, heavenly body, or constellation. On that reading, considerare may once have meant something like observing the stars closely, perhaps for navigation or divination.¹²

The connection is probable rather than certain. Other explanations for the Latin verb have been proposed, so the star story is best kept as a strong possibility rather than a literal definition.²

English kept the idea of close attention even after the stars disappeared from ordinary use.

I need some time to consider the offer.

Sources

1. Consider — The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
2. Consider — Online Etymology Dictionary

English got the word through Old French from Latin desiderare. In Latin, the verb could mean to long for something, but also to miss it or feel its absence.¹²

There is a well-known explanation that connects desiderare with sidus, star or constellation. On that reading, the word may once have carried an idea connected with looking to the stars or waiting for what they would bring.¹²

The exact origin is not certain. Etymologists have proposed other explanations too, so the neat claim that desire simply means something like “from the stars” goes further than the evidence allows.²

What is secure is the older sense of longing for what is absent.

He had a strong desire to go home.

Sources

1. Desire — The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
2. Desire — Online Etymology Dictionary

The word came through Old French from a Late Latin form built from com-, together, and panis, bread. Its older sense was a fellow or associate understood through the idea of sharing bread or a meal.¹²

The meaning widened into the familiar sense of a person who accompanies another. The bread is no longer part of the definition, but it is part of the word’s construction.¹²

She was his companion on the long journey.

Sources

1. Companion — The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
2. Companion — Online Etymology Dictionary

The word came into English through French from Italian disastro. The second part comes from astro, star. One of the earliest English senses referred to an unfavourable influence or position of a star or planet.¹²

The word then settled into the broader meaning of a great misfortune or catastrophe. The astrological belief disappeared from ordinary use, but it remains in the word’s history.¹²

The storm became a disaster for the coastal towns.

Sources

1. Disaster — The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
2. The Secret Histories of 'Catastrophe,' 'Debacle,' and More — Merriam-Webster

The word comes from Latin candidatus, meaning white-robed. In ancient Rome, a man seeking public office was associated with a bright white toga, and the word for the clothing became the word for the office-seeker.¹²

English later widened candidate beyond elections to people being considered for many kinds of positions or outcomes.¹

She was one of three candidates for the position.

Sources

1. Candidate — The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
2. candidatus — Logeion, University of Chicago

The word entered international use through Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R., where it named artificial workers. Čapek later credited his brother Josef with suggesting the word.¹²

Josef drew it from Czech robota, a word connected with forced labour, serf labour, or hard work. The labour was already in the name before the modern machine existed.¹²

The factory uses robots for welding.

Sources

1. Čapek’s R.U.R. published in Filipino — Embassy of the Czech Republic in Manila
2. Karel Čapek — Radio Prague International

The word ultimately comes from the name of the ninth-century mathematician al-Khwarizmi. A Latin version of a work associated with him on Hindu-Arabic numerals used a form of his name, Algoritmi. That name gave rise to algorism, a word for arithmetic using those numerals.¹²

Over time, the spelling and meaning changed. Algorithm came to mean a defined procedure for calculation and then, more broadly, a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem.¹²

The search engine uses an algorithm to rank results.

Sources

1. Al-Khwarizmi — MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews
2. Arabic numerals — MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews

During the American Civil War, dead line was used for a boundary inside some military prisons. Prisoners were forbidden to cross it, and guards could fire on those who did. Andersonville is the best-known example, but the National Park Service notes that such lines were used at several prisons.¹

The modern sense of a final time limit appeared in American newspaper jargon by 1919. The older prison use may have influenced it, but the connection is not certain.²

The deadline is Friday.

Sources

1. The Deadline — Andersonville National Historic Site, U.S. National Park Service
2. Deadline — Online Etymology Dictionary

The word comes from Guy Fawkes. Effigies of him burned on November 5 came to be called guys. The word then spread to people who looked strange or badly dressed.¹²

In American English, guy became a general word for a man, and the plural guys later widened further in everyday speech.¹²

He seems like a nice guy.

Sources

1. Guy — Merriam-Webster
2. The Life of Guy: Guy Fawkes, the Gunpowder Plot, and the Unlikely History of an Indispensable Word — Oxford Academic

The word comes from Samuel A. Maverick, a nineteenth-century Texas landowner. Unbranded cattle associated with him came to be called mavericks, and the word spread through cattle country for unbranded animals.¹²

By the end of the nineteenth century, the word was also being used for people who went their own way.¹²

She was a maverick in her field.

Sources

1. Mavericks and Mavericking — Texas State Historical Association
2. Maverick — Merriam-Webster, Word of the Day

The word comes from Charles Boycott, an English land agent in County Mayo, Ireland. In 1880, during a dispute over rents and evictions, local people and members of the Irish Land League isolated him. Workers left, businesses refused to deal with him, and his name became attached to the tactic.¹²

The name spread quickly from one dispute to a general word for organized refusal.¹²

They agreed to boycott the company.

Sources

1. Boycott — The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition
2. Boycott — Merriam-Webster, Word of the Day

The word was used first for scattering seed over a wide area, usually by hand. That agricultural sense is much older than radio.¹²

In the early twentieth century, broadcast was taken up for radio transmission. The older idea of sending something out widely was kept, but the seed had become a signal.²

The agricultural meaning still exists today.¹

The interview was broadcast live.

Sources

1. Broadcast — Merriam-Webster
2. Broadcast — Online Etymology Dictionary

The original Rosetta Stone was found in Egypt in 1799. The same decree had been written on it in three scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Ancient Greek. Scholars could read the Greek. For the first time, they had a way to compare a known text with writing they could not yet read.¹

Thomas Young made important early advances. In 1822, the French scholar Jean-François Champollion made the decisive breakthrough and showed that hieroglyphs could record the sounds of the Egyptian language. The old writing began to speak again.¹

The name outlived the stone. A Rosetta stone is now anything that provides the crucial key to understanding something that had resisted explanation.

There is a replica in the National Cryptologic Museum beside the headquarters of the NSA. It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate place for it.²

The new evidence proved to be a Rosetta stone.

Sources

1. Hieroglyphs: unlocking ancient Egypt — The British Museum
2. Language — National Cryptologic Museum, NSA

In the old belief, the mare oppressed the sleeper and brought a feeling of suffocation. The word later moved from the creature to the experience, and then to a frightening dream.²

The creature disappeared from belief, but the word stayed. Related forms survive in other Germanic languages too.²

It was a nightmare.

Sources

1. Nightmare — The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
2. Nightmare — Online Etymology Dictionary

During the plague, ships arriving from infected places could be kept at anchor for forty days before anyone came ashore. The Italian for forty is quaranta. The period became quarantena.³

In 1920, ships carrying Russians who had fled the civil war were kept in quarantine off İstanbul before their passengers were allowed to land. Typhus was one of the main fears. Some later accounts say forty days, but contemporary memoirs and recent scholarship describe quarantines lasting from a few days to two weeks. I could not confirm forty days for the 1920 arrivals.¹²

A quarantine is rarely forty days now. It is ten days, or two weeks, or whatever the illness needs. The forty is still in the word.

The ship was held in quarantine.

Sources

1. Mütareke Döneminde İstanbul'daki Rus Mültecilerin Yaşamı — Atatürk Araştırma Merkezi Dergisi XXII, 64–66 (2006)
2. Constantinople/Istanbul as an Artistic Hub of the Émigrés from the former Russian Empire in 1919–1927 — Ekaterina Aygün, doctoral dissertation, LMU München (2024)
3. Etymologia: Quarantine — Emerging Infectious Diseases, CDC

In the Middle Ages, influence was believed to be a fluid that streamed down from the stars into people and shaped their character and their fortune.¹

Influenza is the same word. It is simply the Italian for influence, and epidemics were once blamed on the stars. Flu is what is left of it.¹

He was under the influence.

Sources

1. Influence — Merriam-Webster

It became current in English in the nineteenth century through J. J. Morier’s 1834 novel Ayesha, the Maid of Kars. What was empty in Turkish became empty talk in English, and then nonsense.¹²

It is old-fashioned now, but it is still there.

You’re talking bosh.

Sources

1. Bosh — The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
2. Bosh — Murray’s New English Dictionary, historical entry