From the name of a global currency to a type of sword, and from an Adriatic sailing vessel to twentieth-century political terminology, the towns and countries of Europe – even excluding Britain, France and Greece, which each have their own chapters here – have provided the English language with a remarkably diverse collection of words and phrases, indicative of the continent’s rich history. As well as BALKANIZATION, English has Finlandization, a 1960s political term describing a country’s necessary but unfavourable support for another, derived from Finland’s uneasy alignment with the Soviet Union in the 1940s. As well as COACH, English has both landau, an eighteenth-century horse-drawn carriage developed in Landau in Germany, and Berlin, a sixteenth-century four-wheeled carriage. And as well as RAMILLIES, English has homburg, a type of felt hat made in Homburg near the French-German border; duffel, from the Belgian town of Duffel, near Antwerp; and jeans, which take their name from the Italian city of Genoa. The stories behind ten more words of European etymology are listed here.
A type of large merchant ship typically able to carry great loads, the word argosy derives from an alteration of ragusea, the Italian name for a type of vessel once particularly associated with and named after the Adriatic port of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) in Croatia. The word was first recorded in English in the late 1500s, and as well being the name of a specific type of ship is also used more generally for both a flotilla or fleet of vessels, and, figuratively, as another word for a vast collection or rich source of something.
Dating from the 1920s, the political term Balkanization describes the breakup of a larger country or region into several smaller component nations, often with the implication that these smaller units remain equally hostile to one another. The word derives from the name of the Balkan peninsula of south-eastern Europe – the region bounded by the Adriatic, Aegean and Black Seas, which today includes the countries of the former Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria and Greece. It originally referred to the uneasy dissolution of the European portion of the Ottoman Empire following the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. The aftermath of these conflicts, and the ensuing disagreements between the newly independent nations of Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia and Macedonia, eventually led to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, and ultimately to the First World War.
The word bilbo has two meanings in English, applying both to a type of sixteenth-century sword with a flexible blade, once widely popular in America, and to a long iron bar fitted with shackles that is used to secure the ankles of prisoners. In both cases, the word is said to derive from the name of the Spanish city of Bilbao (once widely and erroneously known in England as ‘Bilboa’) where both items are believed to have been first manufactured.
As the name of a type of carriage, the word coach was first recorded in English as coche in the mid-1500s. It derives via French from the Hungarian word kocsi, which is in turn taken from the name of the town of Kocs, roughly 50 km (30 miles) west of Budapest, where this style of carriage is thought to have first been manufactured in the fifteenth century. Use of the word coach to refer to a tutor or instructor, meanwhile, dates from the early nineteenth century and was originally an American slang term popular on university campuses, implying that a coach would ‘carry’ a failing student through their exams or studies.
Now the name of the principal unit of currency of more than forty different countries and territories worldwide, the word dollar has its more humble beginnings in Jáchymov, a small Bohemian spa town today located in the Czech Republic close to the German border. Previously known as Joachimsthal, in the early 1500s the town gave its name to coins known as joachimsthaler, widely used across Germany and the Netherlands, which were minted from silver mined nearby. Over time, the name shortened to thaler, taler and daler (by which they were first mentioned in English in 1553), and eventually to dollar in the early 1700s. The word first appeared in North America in the late 1500s as another name for the peso or so-called ‘Spanish dollar’, the former currency of Spain and its American colonies, but it was not until 1785 that dollar was first used as the name of the currency of the United States. The dollar sign ($), meanwhile, is thought to have developed either from a combination of the letters P and S, a symbol once used to denote the peso, or else from the number 8, as pesos were the original peso de ocho or ‘pieces of eight’.
Dating from the mid-nineteenth century in English, the word donnybrook is another name for a riotous argument or uproar. The word derives from the Irish village of Donnybrook or Domhnach Broc (‘The Church of St Broc’), now a suburb of the city of Dublin, where from the early thirteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century an annual two-week agricultural fair and farmers’ market was held every August. Originally granted its licence by King John in 1204, over the centuries that followed the event grew increasingly unruly, with various rowdy and bawdy entertainments provided for its visitors. Despite several attempts to cancel it in the eighteenth century – the Mayor of Dublin himself even demanded that all of the stalls and tents be torn down in 1751 – the fair’s original royal permit remained valid, and it was not until the 1850s, when a local reverend raised £3,000 to purchase the licence from its holders, that the fair was finally discontinued. It was last held in 1854.
The Belgian town of Ramillies, around 40 km (25 miles) south-east of Brussels, has given its name to a number of obsolete items of fashion, all of which are said to derive from or commemorate the Duke of Marlborough’s victory over the French at the Battle of Ramillies in 1706. The earliest mention to the town in this context is in the name of the ramillies cock, a type of hat with a wide brim cocked in three places that was popular in the early 1700s, but the name can also be used to refer to a type of wig tied back in a long, tapering plait, known as a ramillies tail, fastened with a large bow at the top and a smaller bow at the bottom.
A type of plastic explosive used both in demolition and by the military, Semtex was invented in 1966 by a Czechoslovakian chemist named Stanislav Brebera at a chemical production plant in Semtín (now in the Czech Republic), from where the name is said to be derived. First recorded in English in a New York Times article of 1985, in recent years Semtex has become increasingly associated with terrorist activities, and was infamously used to destroy Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988.
The original spa from which all others have since taken their name is the small town of Spa in Liège, eastern Belgium; a spring of fresh water with supposed natural healing properties, situated in the town, has been known throughout Europe since the fourteenth century. Deriving its name from a local Walloon word, espa, meaning ‘spring’ or ‘fountain’, the word spa was first recorded in English in reference to a site of similarly curative waters in 1616, and from the mid-seventeenth century onwards has been used more loosely for any town or resort with local natural springs. Use of the word to refer to a commercial health farm, meanwhile, originated in the United States in the 1960s.
One of the most important battles in all of European history, it was at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 that Napoleon was finally defeated by a united British and Prussian force under the command of the Duke of Wellington. Whilst today the village of Waterloo itself stands in central Belgium, just a few miles south of Brussels, at the time of the conflict it stood within the borders of the Netherlands. Indeed, the name Waterloo is believed to be of Dutch origin and is said to mean ‘wet forest’, presumably in reference to a boggy or flood-prone area of land. Given the battle’s great historical importance, it is perhaps unsurprising that the word Waterloo has since slipped into allusive use in the English language as a byword for any similarly decisive event or else some great insurmountable difficulty or defeat – in fact, the first recorded use of the word in this context dates from just one year after the battle itself, when it appeared in the writings of the English poet Lord Byron, who commented on his attempt to learn Armenian that, ‘It is a rich language, however . . . It is a Waterloo of an alphabet.’