weekend
The periodic time period weekend is first found in 1793 as a North England regionalism. It did not enter general English usage until 1878. This delay is probably because instead of “weekend”, you could just as well say “Sunday” or “Sabbath”. Six-day work weeks were the norm for most of history, including the 1800s. Which day was the day of rest differed by religion, typically Sunday for Christian countries, Saturday for Jewish communities, and Friday for Muslim countries.
According to UK records, the average worker worked 70 hours a week in 1800. This number only began to decrease in the 1870s as workers gained bargaining and political power through collective organizing and increased skill requirements. One UK movement in this period advocated for giving workers Saturday off after 2pm in exchange for the pledge to be refreshed and sober on Monday morning. Over the next 30 years, half-day Saturdays went from unthinkable to radical to sensible to policy, enabling the newly radical eight-hour day movement to begin agitating in the 1910s. They advocated for “8 hours for labour, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for recreation” and a fully five-day workweek, which was first instituted by a single US cotton mill in 1908.
Spain became the first country to enshrine the 40-hour workweek into law in 1919. The US did not follow suit until 1940, although Ford was shutting down its factories all day Saturday and Sunday by 1926. The enactment of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which also established the first federal minimum wage of 25 cents per hour, was celebrated on Labor Day for decades. Futurists writing in the 1920s and 1930s extrapolated this historical trend of increased worker power and leisure to fifteen-hour workweeks by the year 2000. Clearly this has not come to be, but average hours worked per year in the UK has at least decreased roughly linearly from 2,257 in 1925 to 1,670 in 2017.
van
The type of motor vehicle van is first used around 1970 in the US as a short form of caravan, which had been used to describe that kind of vehicle in the US since 1962. Minivans, as contrasted with “full-size vans”, were popularized by 1984 Chrysler models, although the phrase “mini van” is sporadically found describing both US and UK vehicles going back to 1959. More generally, van has been used to refer to a covered wagon or covered train car in English since 1820, also beginning as a short form of caravan.
The group of people traveling together caravan has a much older history, first borrowed into English in the 1500s. It was influenced by both French caravane and Italian carovana, both meaning “caravan”, both of which were borrowed from Persian کاروان (kârvân), also meaning “caravan”, in the 1200s due to contact during the Crusades. kʾlwʾn’ (kārawān) can be found in Middle Persian writing as early as the 300s. Although the word can’t be traced back any earlier, we know caravans and their associated infrastructure caravanserais have been prominent since at least 800 BCE.
umami
The basic taste umami is first borrowed into English from Japanese 旨味 (umami) in 1963. It was not widely accepted as one of the currently five basic tastes until after 1985. (I myself learned there were only four basic tastes in elementary school.) 旨味 was coined by its discoverer, Japanese chemist 池田 菊苗 (Kikunae IKEDA) in 1908, from the root うまい (umai), meaning “delicious”, and the noun suffix み (mi), meaning “-ness”. うまい itself is attested as early as 759, but has an unclear origin beyond that.
ketchup
The sauce ketchup first appears English as a description of a Southeast Asian import in 1682, originally spelled catchup. It’s likely from Hokkien Chinese 膎汁 (kê-chiap), meaning “fish sauce”. There’s debate on whether that word was directly borrowed or it first passed through Malay kicap, meaning “soy sauce”. In any case, it was a savory, sweet, and sour sauce using fish or soy as the primary ingredient. Anchovies remained a common ingredient until the 1850s. Catsup quickly gained popularity in British cuisine. Local recipes typically substituted in a more available mushroom base by the 1770s.
Catsup with a tomato base instead of a mushroom base first appears in the US in 1812 and became the predominant form there by 1837. Notably, Heinz began selling tomato ketchup in 1876 with that spelling. Heinz ketchup’s enduring popularity (60% US market share) led to ketchup taking over as the default spelling over catsup. Modern ketchup originates from a 1909 recipe with much more sugar and vinegar to increase shelf stability, after the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act banned the preservative sodium benzoate.
dime
The coin dime was first conceived in the US Coinage Act of 1792, which aimed to standardize the silver coins circulating around the country to the de facto standard of the Spanish dollar. Alexander Hamilton in particular was a big proponent of using a decimal system for the currency, intentionally distancing the new country from the Carolignian system of pounds, shillings, and pence in wide European use since Charlemagne’s edicts a thousand years earlier, in 792. The act specified decimal subdivisions of the dollar with Latin-inspired names: the 1/10 dollar disme (Latin decima meaning “tenth”), the 1/100 dollar cent (Latin centum meaning “hundred”), and the 1/1000 dollar mille (Latin mille meaning “thousand”).
From 1796 to 1853, dimes were mostly made of silver. They were small and thin to maintain their silver content at a tenth of the silver dollar’s. Dimes feature in many phrases that have become frozen into American English, such as a dime a dozen (literally 1861, figuratively 1930), nickel and dime (“cheap” 1879, “wear down” 1913), and stop on a dime (1927; the Ford origin that’s been picked up by LLMs appears to be made up by one person on Quora in 2021).
More recently, drop a dime on originally meant to make a phone call in the 1950s, as pay phones were 10 cents for a local call, before shifting to mean specifically “narc on”, perhaps because pay phones were anonymous. A dime bag of weed was $10 for one gram in the 1970s, not ten cents.