laser
The device laser was named by American physicist Gordon Gould in a 1957 lab notebook describing a theoretical invention. The notebook includes the heading “Some rough calculations on the feasibility of a LASER: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation”, patterned after the existing acronym MASER (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). American engineer Theodore Maiman built the first working laser in 1960. Lasers were commercially viable just 14 years later, with the introduction of barcode scanners in 1974, laserdisc and compact disc (CD) players in 1978 and 1982, and laser printers in 1984.
In the 1960s, lasers were typically called “optical MASERs”, as they operated under the same principle, but emitted visible light rather than microwaves. Laser is notable as one of the first acronyms to lose its acronym status and become a lowercase common noun, along with scuba (1952) and radar (1940). A good rule of thumb is any proposed acronym word origin from before 1940 is made up after the fact. For example, acronymic folk etymologies like “for unlawful carnal knowledge” are common for obscene words.
I find it fascinating to think of lasers in the context of science fiction weapon naming. In the 1920s trend that focused on effects, they’d be called something like “heat rays”. Conversely, under the 1960s paradigm of naming things after particles, they’d be called something like “photon cannons”. I think the current fashion is to notice that technology tends to be named for specific implementation details, as with laser, but that is of course unlikely to remain true over the next hundred years.
maize
The grain maize is first found in English as a loanword from Spanish maíz in 1541. Maíz is first attested in Spanish by Christopher Columbus in 1500 as a loanword from Taíno mahis, meaning “maize”. Maize was first domesticated in what is now southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago (compare to wheat 12,000 years ago, rice 9,000 years ago) from wild teosinte.
Ears of wild teosinte, a teosinte-maize hybrid, and maize, from left to right. The teosinte is reddish-brown and has about 24 total kernels. The maize is two and a half times longer and about six times wider than the teosinte.
The magnitude of this achievement is made apparent by a side-by-side comparison of wild teosinte, which produces a single ear of corn per plant, with maize. Just as striking is the fact that corn, the generic word for “grain” in most world Englishes, only means “maize” in US English and Canadian English. (Corn and grain are an Old English-Norman French doublet that both descend from the same PIE word, ǵr̥h₂nóm.)
How did that meaning shift happen? Even before the first British colony in North America, we can find people referring to maize as “Indian corn”, the grain that those savages eat. That was its common name for centuries. By 1800, it was common to drop the “Indian” qualifier and just call maize corn in the US.
karaoke
The activity karaoke, first attested in 1977, is a loanword from Japanese カラオケ (karaoke), meaning “karaoke”. It’s clear that it’s become a naturalized English word since then when you look at its pronunciation: “carry-OH-key” is almost unrecognizable next to “kah-rah-oh-KAY”.
カラオケ is a portmanteau of 空 (kara), meaning “empty”, and オーケストラ (ōkesutora), a loanword from English meaning “orchestra”. The Japanese neologism also dates to 1977, even though prototype karaoke machines were built as early as 1971. The innovation that distinguishes karaoke from the sing-along songs that inspired it is the removal of the lead vocal track. The opportunity opened up with the extra storage available in jukeboxes powered by 8-track tapes rather than records. Before everyone settled on calling it “karaoke”, some of the prototypes were called “8 Juke”, “Sing-Along System”, and “Sparko Box”.
Orchestra, first attested in English in 1606, is a loanword from Latin orchēstra, meaning “orchestra”. That in turn is a loanword from Greek ὀρχήστρα (orkhḗstra), derived from the root ὀρχέομαι (orkhéomai), meaning “to dance”.
wizard
The archetype wizard arrives at its current meaning of “occult magician” around 1600. Before that, it meant something closer to “sage”, illustrated by its components of wise + -ard when it was coined around 1440. Wise predates English and can be reconstructed back to Proto-Germanic wīsaz, meaning wise, and even beyond that to PIE weyd-, meaning “to see”.
-ard, meanwhile, hasn’t been a productive suffix for a long time, so I found it helpful to look at other words that include it: drunkard, dotard, dullard. Wiktionary aptly describes it as a “pejorative agent suffix”, so wizard probably originally meant something like contemporary “smartass”.
The more modern sense of “ace” or “skilled practicioner” dates to the 1850s, probably generalizing from aces nicknamed “wizard”. Whiz, like in “math whiz”, from 1921, is possibly derived from this sense. The phrase Pinball Wizard was made famous by The Who’s 1969 song. Influenced by the “ace” sense, Microsoft began calling guided multi-step guided workflows “wizards” in 1991, leading to “install wizard” becoming a common phrase by 2001.
really
The general intensifier really arrived at its current meaning around 1561. The word in its original meaning of “actually”, from real + -ly, is attested from the 1450s. Real is one of the many words borrowed into English from Norman French in the 1300s, in this case from reel, meaning “actual”. Reel descends straightforwardly from Latin reālis, also meaning “actual”, which derives from earlier Latin rēs, meaning “thing” or “matter”.
Really’s gradual shift from meaning “actually” to meaning “very” is surprisingly precedented! The “actually” sense of truly (Old English trēowe, meaning “true”) goes back over a thousand years, but its recent meaning shift toward “very” is not even acknowledged by the OED yet. (It is acknowledged in the other dictionaries I checked.) Even the canonical general intensifier very (Latin vērus, meaning “true”) shifts in meaning from “actually” in 1200-1500 to, uh, “very” after 1550. Literally (Latin littera, meaning “letter”) in the process of shifting from “actually” to “very” is in very good company.