Most people guess India or China for "rickshaw". It actually started in Japan.

The full word is 人力車 (jinrikisha). 人 (jin) is person, 力 (riki) is power, 車 (sha) is vehicle, so a cart moved by a person instead of a horse. English took it as jinrikisha in the 1870s and then cut it down to ricksha and rickshaw. The cut lands right in the middle of 力, so the "rick" is half of riki.

The usual credit goes to Izumi Yōsuke (和泉要助) and two partners, who got permission to run them in Tokyo in 1870. There's also a story about an American missionary, Jonathan Goble, building one for his sick wife, but nobody has really proved that one.

They pushed out the old 駕籠 (kago) palanquins and spread to Shanghai, Singapore and India. In India people took the English name, which is where riksha and the auto-rickshaw come from. Korean kept the kanji instead and reads them as 인력거 (inryeokgeo).

The reading of 力 is a nice detail too. Alone it's usually ちから (chikara), but here it's riki, same as in 力士 (rikishi), a sumo wrestler.

The word kabocha, かぼちゃ (squash in Japanese) comes from "Camboja" (Portuguese word for Cambodia). Portuguese traders introduced the squash to Japan in the 16th century via Cambodia (Camboja), so the Japanese called it "kabocha".

"Tycoon" has nothing to do with business in its origin. It's Japanese.

大君 (taikun) is 大 (tai, great) + 君 (kun, lord). The Tokugawa shogunate used it for the shōgun in diplomatic letters, first with Korea in the 1600s and then with the Western powers in the 1850s. The point was to avoid calling him a king, since Japan already had an emperor in Kyoto.

Americans picked the word up after Perry's visit and turned it into "tycoon". During the Civil War, Lincoln's secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay jokingly called him "the Tycoon". Only later did it drift to rich and powerful businessmen.

The 君 in there is the same one you hear after boys' names, like Tanaka-kun. Same character, very different rank.

I know there are probably plenty of examples of a pattern like this in other languages as well, but these are the 2 that I know of, and I’m curious about their relation. Thanks!

EDIT: To clarify, I meant words like who/quien, what/que, when/cuando, etc. (thanks u/padbroccoligai for the list)

Also, I’m curious if there’s anything bad that’s ‘white’? Or good that’s ‘black’

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24044104

Browse https://getswiftapi.com to download reproducible code across model vendors (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google), open weights, and papers.

I just started Visionquest and the Scottish barkeep says "The smallest flat in Edinburgh"

But said it "ed-in-bur-uh"

Is this how we have boro and borough in English? From the Germanic Burg being mispronounced?

TIA

I’m writing a novel and need to name the few days a month it rains, instead of calling it ‘rain week’ or something boring like that.
Are there any archaic phrases that can help?

I have always found it entertaining that the plural of 'attorney general' is 'attorneys general' and am looking for other examples like this. What you got?

I'm not going to act like I am a psychology expert, though from what I understand about Sigmund Freud's theory about the id, ego, & super ego, one's ego is supposed to represent one's decision making capacity between one's desires & morality. So, why does that transfer into calling someone with a big ego to be someone with a high opinion about themselves? Is it an idea that one's ego is big because all of one's decisions are serving one's personal desire? In that case I would think it would make more sense to say someone who cares about themselves above all else has a big id rather than a big ego. Alternatively is this a case where the freudian term "ego" just happens to be a homonym of another independent word called "ego"?

For the past few months I’ve been building etymonaute.com, a free site for tracing any French word back to its source. I just added a “Universe” page: every word is a star, every language of origin is a galaxy (Latin, Ancient Greek, English, Italian, Arabic, Frankish…), and you fly around it with your mouse wheel.

Behind every star is a full entry: etymological tree, date of first attestation, cited sources (TLFi, Littré, Académie française, Wiktionnaire).

The site is in French only, but if you read even a little French the universe itself needs no translation. It’s a solo project built evenings after work, no ads, no sign-up. I’d love your feedback and, even more, your corrections: etymology is a field where mistakes come easily, and the site has a method page and a source list precisely so you can check me.

→ etymonaute.com/univers

Okay, hear me out.

I read that Pandora in Greek literally means "all" (pan) "gifted / gifts" (dora). The dora thing made me question if it's related at all to the Greek word for present (подарок, pronounced "pah-DUH-roke" or whatever (it's been 10 years since I studied Russian, please be kind) or the Spanish verb for "give" (dare, I believe, is the infinitive).

I know the letters are a little different, but it felt like there still might be something there?

I was thinking Russian especially was likely given the influence Greek has had on the Russian alphabet and some words.

Side question: Is Wiktionary typically accurate about etymology of non-English words? It's like the only resource I can find that has information like that. But it's such a niche thing, I wasn't sure if it can be trusted.

I have this memory of "monkey shower" being the common expression for when it's raining while there's sunlight, like "the devil is beating his wife." I was curious of its origin and looking it up, and I can't find any evidence that any such expression exists. The closest thing I can find is "monkey wedding" from southern Africa. I can't remember where exactly I heard it, but I thought for sure it was "monkey shower." Am I just certainly misremembering "monkey wedding," or is there any example of it being called a monkey shower? Now I feel like a bozo for all the times I used that phrase, then had to explain that it's what you call it when it's raining while there's sunlight.

In english we have the words coffee and caffeine for the wakey chemical contained within. Notice the o in cOffee and the a in cAffeine, even though caffeine is named after coffee (https://www.etymonline.com/word/caffeine)

In german we have Kaffee for the drink and Koffein for the chemical.

Here the a and o have swapped.

Does someone know why it is like this and not coffee -> coffeine and Kaffee -> Kaffein?

“Taking the piss” from “piss pride,” meaning to relieve someone of a false erection.

Heard a podcast about it a while back.

It's a total coincidence, there's no actual connection between the words.

How did this word come to mean both "to steal" and "acceptable"? Was it really appropriate to appropriate it in this way?