Quiz 23

            Word histories and mysteries

• You can find all the answers in the online book 'Word Histories and Mysteries', which investigates the story behind many interesting English words. The book is one of the Credo reference online reference books
• Take a look at the answers here!

1. Which word for 'slices of bread with a filling' comes from the title of the English nobleman John Montagu, who liked to eat without leaving the gaming table?
    
2. Which European plant has an old English name which means 'day's eye'?
    
3. What kind of cotton trousers get their name from the Italian city of Genoa?
    
4. What exclamation is derived from a Greek word meaning 'I have found it', which was supposedly shouted by Archimedes when he discovered that a body displaces its own volume when immersed in water?
    
5. Hamburgers get their name from the city of Hamburg - true or false?
    
6. Which piece of equipment used by painters has a name which comes from a Dutch word meaning 'ass' or 'donkey'?
    
7. Which English word is a shortened form of 'usquebaugh', which English borrowed from Gaelic, meaning 'water of life'?
    
8. What type of headache gets its name from a Greek word meaning 'pain on one side of the head or face'?
    
9. The chemical element uranium was named in honour of the discovery of the planet Uranus - true or false?
    
10. Which word coined by Horace Walpole means 'the faculty of making fortuitous and unexpected discoveries by accident'?
     

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