vibe
The intangible quality vibe was popularized in 1967 as a clipping of “vibration” in the wake of the Beach Boys’ 1966 chart-topper “Good Vibrations”. “Vibrations” meaning intangible qualities or communications, inspired by ESP, made it into the lyrics through California drug slang. Perhaps coincidentally, the cordless vibrator, also abbreviated vibe, was first marketed for sexual purposes in 1968.
Vibe and its relatives were ubiquitous enough to be called the cliche of the 1960s. Both the plural form vibes and the verb vibing, suggesting being “in tune with the vibration of the universe”, were in common use by 1970.
The word experienced a resurgence in the late 2010s, perhaps buoyed by political commentary about vibes being off and running on vibes. Novel phrases like vibe shift and vibe check were popularized as recently as 2022. Vibe coding was coined by Slovak-born AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in 2025.
serendipity
The phenomenon serendipity was named by English writer Horace Walpole in 1754, by analogy to the accidental discovery in the Persian fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip”. Walpole used the neologism in a letter to his friend, which became part of a collection that was published in 1833, 35 years after his death. The word remained obscure until an 1877 US magazine called attention to the letter. It only began appearing in dictionaries in the 1890s.
The fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip” took quite a journey before finally arriving in England in 1722, as a translation of a French translation. It first appeared in Italian in 1557, part of a translation of the Persian هشت بهشت (Hasht Bihisht), meaning “Eight Paradises”, written around 1302. The story is set in the Sassanid Empire of 420-440 and is first found written down in the Hasht Bihisht.
Serendip (سرندیپ) is the Classical Persian name for the island that is now called Sri Lanka. It is possibly from Sanskrit सिंहल द्वीप (Sinhala-dvipa), meaning “Sinhala Isle”. Sinhala is the name of the ethnic majority living on the island, who first arrived and began taking over around 543 BCE. That name is derived from Sanskrit सिंह (siṃhá), meaning “lion”. The Sinhalese name for the island is Sinhale. By the 800s it was pronounced Saylan, which the Portugese transliterated as Ceilão (English Ceylon) when they colonized it in 1517. Since its independence in 1972, the island has been named Sri Lanka. श्री (śrī́) is the Sanskrit honorific and लङ्का (laṅkā) is Sanskrit for “island”.
goth
The aesthetic goth originated from the goth subculture, which spread from British club scenes in the early 1980s into mainstream awareness in the 1990s. The scene was named after the genre of music they coalesced around, gothic rock. Goth rock began as a post-punk subgenre of British rock in the late 1970s. Contemporary writers described it as “positive punk” or “punk gothique”, due to one of the genre’s main influences being gothic fiction.
Gothic fiction describes the popular British fiction style that peaked in the 1790s, but was popular for 40 years in either direction. It’s characterized being set in the medieval period and evoking strong emotions, particularly fear and awe. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a canonical example. As you might suspect at this point, gothic horror literature is named after gothic architecture. Specifically, the feelings of “medieval” and “barbaric” the era evoked.
Gothic architecture refers to two different movements: the Gothic Revival movement prevalent in early 1800s England, and the original movement it sought to emulate, the European style of medieval castles and cathedrals from roughly 1200-1500. Like Baroque architecture, the movement was named by its replacement. So their names emphasize their perceived negative qualities. Baroque there meaning needlessly complicated, and gothic here meaning barbaric and uncivilized. Contemporaries instead referred to gothic architecture as “modern work”, “French style”, or “German style”.
Gothic came to mean barbaric or uncivilized around the year 300 by association with the Goths, a group of Germanic people who were driven from their homeland in what is now Ukraine by the Huns, to Roman lands. As such, most of their modern characterization is limited to “eastern barbarians who sacked Rome as it fell”. Sadly, this is where our trail goes cold. It is unclear what the Goths were named for. There’s some suggestive gesturing at the island of Gotland south of Sweden, but nothing concrete.
supper
The meal supper is another of the many English borrowings from French where our first written evidence is from around 1300. Old French soper, meaning “supper”, is derived from Old French sope, meaning “soup”, the traditional evening meal at the time. English soup was also borrowed from sope in the same time period. It makes sense that food terms from the more prestigious language tended to stick.
Sope is descended from Late Latin suppa, meaning “sopped bread”. I could imagine a food getting named after the thing you use to eat it. The part I found hard to believe is that Latin suppa is an ouroboros-like borrowing from Proto-Germanic supô, originally a form of “to drink”. Supô also has a direct English descendant that doesn’t improbably go through French: soap.
Maybe the synonym dinner has a less silly origin story? It’s another of those 1300s borrowings from Old French, in this case from disner, meaning… “lunch”. Disner is descended from Vulgar Latin disiūnāre, also meaning “lunch”, which is in turn from Late Latin dis- + iēiūnāre, which means “fast” as in time without eating. It’s from Latin “break fast”. Incredible.
fractal
The mathematical concept fractal was named by Polish-born French-American mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot in his 1975 book “Les Objets Fractals: Forme, Hasard et Dimension”, translated to English in 1977 as “Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension”. Fractal is based on Classical Latin fractus, meaning “broken”. Its Latin root form is frangō, “to break”, which has the English descendant frangible.
Mandelbrot, whose Jewish parents fled with him from Warsaw to France in 1936, was a visiting professor at Yale and a researcher at IBM in Westchester at the time. As fractals and their study spread, this dual career allowed him to be the first person to visualize what is now called the Mandelbrot set in 1980. First defined by Robert W. Brooks and Peter Maleski in 1978, Mandelbrot’s access to IBM’s compute allowed him to be the first person to glimpse its infinite wonder. The set was named in his honor in 1985.
Mandelbrot is the German word for almond bread (like a biscotti). Mandel, meaning “almond”, is descended from Classical Latin amygdala, from Ancient Greek ἀμυγδάλη (amugdálē), both meaning “almond”. Brot means “bread”, like its English cognate and sibling.