Eight everyday English words with surprising pasts

Words change. Some drift slowly; others pick up a story on the way. Knowing where a word came from is more than trivia — a story is a hook, and hooks are how vocabulary sticks.

Quarantine — forty days

In the 14th century, Mediterranean ports began making ships from plague-hit places wait before anyone could come ashore. Ragusa, today's Dubrovnik, set a waiting period in 1377; the forty-day version became associated with Venice, where quaranta giorni means forty days. The word for waiting came from the number.

Muscle — a little mouse

Latin musculus meant little mouse. A muscle moving under the skin was compared to a mouse moving under a cloth, and the name stayed.

Clue — a ball of thread

A clew was a ball of thread. In the Greek myth, Theseus unwinds one to find his way back out of the Minotaur's labyrinth. So a clew became anything that guides you through a puzzle, and the spelling became clue.

Nice — ignorant

From Latin nescius, not knowing. In the 1300s nice meant foolish. Over the centuries it passed through shy, fussy and precise — you can still make a nice distinction — before settling on pleasant.

Silly — blessed

Old English sælig meant happy or blessed; German selig still does. In English it slid to innocent, then to pitiable, and finally to foolish.

Disaster — a bad star

From Italian disastro, an ill-starred event — astro is star. The word carries an old belief that the positions of the stars and planets could bring misfortune.

Robot — forced labour

From Czech robota, forced work. It reached English through Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R., about artificial workers; Čapek said the word was his brother Josef's idea.

Goodbye — God be with you

A 16th-century contraction of God be with ye, gradually reshaped to match greetings like good day and good night.