There is a special pleasure in knowing where a word came from. It feels like a little secret about the language we have been speaking our whole lives.
The trouble is, a lot of those origin stories are completely made up. They spread because they make a great story and nobody stopped to check.
Here are five word histories you have probably heard. And the real truth behind each one.
“News” Does Not Stand for North, East, West, South
You may have seen this one floating around: the word news is an acronym for North, East, West, South; meaning information gathered from all four points of the compass. There is also a version that claims it stands for “notable events, weather, sports.”
Neither is true. The compass version actually dates back to 1640, but only as a joke in a jest book. It got picked up, reprinted over the years, and the joke part got quietly dropped along the way.
The real story is far simpler. News is just the plural of new. In Middle English it was spelled several different ways, newys and newes among them, which makes it impossible for the word to have ever been an acronym. It traces back through the French word nouvelles all the way to the Latin nova, meaning “new things.” It has been in use since the late 14th century.
“Crap” Did Not Come from Thomas Crapper
You have probably heard this one at a dinner party. Thomas Crapper, the plumbing engineer, invented the flushing toilet and the word crap comes straight from his surname.
Both parts of that story are false. They both originated in a 1969 book called Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper by Wallace Reyburn, which turned out to be riddled with inaccuracies.
Crapper did make some genuine improvements to toilet design, including the U-bend drainage pipe and the floating ballcock. But the first flushing toilet was actually invented by Sir John Harington in 1596, a full 240 years before Crapper was even born.
As for the word itself, crap as slang for human waste dates back to at least 1846, when Thomas Crapper was only ten years old. It comes from the Medieval Latin word crappa, meaning “chaff”, the waste material left over from grain. People were using the word long before Crapper ever picked up a wrench.
Julius Caesar Was Not Born by C-Section
The story goes that Julius Caesar was cut from his mother’s womb, and the procedure was named after him. A 10th century historical encyclopedia called The Suda even reported it that way, stating that dissection was called “Caesar” in the Roman tongue.
But Caesar’s mother, Aurelia Cotta, lived for many years after his birth. In ancient Rome, that surgery was only performed on women who were already dead or dying, it was far too dangerous otherwise. So Caesar simply could not have been born that way.
It is possible the procedure’s name traces to an earlier Roman who actually was born by caesarean, but that is uncertain. The more straightforward explanation is that caesarean comes from the Latin word caesus, the past participle of caedere, which simply means “to cut.”
420 Was Not a Police Code
April 20th has been associated with marijuana for decades now, and the most common explanation is that 420 was either a penal code or a police radio code for cannabis possession.
Neither exists. No state’s 420 penal code has anything to do with marijuana, and there is no 420 police code.
The real origin is a bit more colorful. In 1971, five students at San Rafael High School in California started meeting at 4:20 p.m., right after extracurricular clubs let out, to get together and get stoned. The time became their private code word for cannabis.
One of those students, Dave Reddix, later became a roadie for the Grateful Dead. The phrase spread through the band’s fan base, known as Deadheads. In 1991, a group of Deadheads put out flyers promoting getting high at 4:20 p.m. on April 20th. High Times editor Steve Bloom printed one of those flyers in the magazine along with the false police code story and 420 went from a Deadhead inside joke to a widely recognized date.
SOS Does Not Stand for Anything
“Save our souls” and “save our ship” are satisfying explanations for SOS. They are also both wrong.
In 1906, international maritime authorities decided the world needed a single, universally recognized distress signal in Morse code. Different countries were using different signals, and the inconsistency was a real danger at sea. Germany had already been using SOS: three dots, three dashes, three dots and it was chosen as the international standard.
The letters were picked deliberately because they meant nothing. That was the point. A meaningless combination was fast to send, hard to miss, and impossible to confuse with something else.
Morse code was eventually phased out at the end of the 20th century in favor of modern satellite systems, but SOS lived on. It turns out those three letters are remarkably useful from the air, SOS is both a palindrome, reading the same forwards and backwards, and an ambigram, meaning it looks identical upside down. A rescue crew flying overhead can read it from any direction.
Not bad for three letters that do not actually stand for anything.
