vinyl
The recording medium vinyl started being called that much later than you’d expect, in 1976. Before that, starting from 1936, the slang term for a record was instead wax, named after the process of creating an original recording by etching onto a wax disk that was then plated with metal.
Records started being made of the material vinyl in 1948 with the introduction of the “long playing” LP format, which could hold 23 minutes of music per side instead of 5. Before that, they were made of shellac, a record format that was still being sold well into the 1960s. We still keep a trace memory of the shellac era in the notion that a record will shatter if you drop it, which is unlikely if it’s made of vinyl.
Vinyl, the material, is a shortening of polyvinyl chloride, better known by its initialism PVC. PVC was first synthesized in 1872, but was not commercially produced until 1933. The “vinyl” in polyvinyl chloride refers to a chemical radical that got its name in 1863 from Latin vīnum, meaning wine. That radical was derived from ethylene, and ethyl alcohol is the type of alcohol found in wine.
shampoo
The liquid surfactant shampoo first became a daily ritual in the 1970s. Modern mass-market shampoos date back to 1933 and Procter & Gamble’s Drene brand liquid, recommended for use at intervals between every 2 weeks and every 6 weeks. What distinguished Drene from its forebears was its use of synthetic surfactants. Earlier shampoos were soap-based, which is alkaline and hair-damaging because of its lye base.
The first popular commercial shampoo was created in 1909, H. S. Peterson’s Canthrox. It was a powdered soap that you’d dissolve in water to make the liquid. It postdates an example of my favorite genre of historical articles: the New York Times explaining how to do something that seems ridiculously obvious to us today, but was novel at the time. Here’s a 1908 NYT article explaining how to use shampoo. Before that, people washed their hair with other natural but less effective surfactants, such as bear fat or eggs.
The generic name shampoo comes from a 1900 Swiss liquid soap with the brand name Champooing, invented by J. W. Rausch. This was named to evoke “shampooing”, a then-popular type of luxurious spa treatment. That shampoo originates with British entrepreneurs Sake Dean Mahome and Jane Daly, who opened the first “shampooing” parlor in Brighton in 1814.
Dean grew up in India and was familiar with the practice of champu, meaning body massage, as part of a spa routine. The word is first found in English in 1762, borrowed from the Hindi word चाँपो (cā̃pō), meaning press, squeeze, or knead. That word can be traced back to Sanskrit चपयति (capayati), meaning pound or knead.
Shampoo is one of those words that has since been borrowed into many, many other languages from English, including making its way back to Hindi as शैंपू (śaimpū).
ox
The animal category ox is an exceptionally old word. It has cognates across many disparate languages, including Dutch os, German Ochse, Welsh ych, Avestan 𐬎𐬑𐬱𐬀𐬥 (uxšan), and Sanskrit उक्षन् (ukṣán). This strongly suggests it is a Proto-Indo-European word, reconstructed as uksḗn, from before the language spread out geographically and began diverging. That dates it to probably before 3000 BCE.
I have idly wondered what became of these ubiquitous beasts of burden. They are everywhere in the history books, even appearing as a Chinese zodiac symbol. Why have I never seen an ox? I was 38 years old when I learned that ox actually means “cow or bull that is used as a beast of burden”. Oxen are cows. I mean, technically cows are the term for female cattle and most oxen are male, but the answer to my question about where they went is “we don’t use cows to pull things any more”. It turns out the ox is a Western zodiac symbol too; it’s just called Taurus there.
ronnagram
The unit of measurement ronnagram was created in 2022, when four new SI prefixes were added. Why weren’t they needed before? Well, the diameter of the observable universe is about 0.88 ronnameters. The size of the entire internet is about 0.0001 ronnabytes. At least the mass of the earth is 5.97 ronnagrams, phew!
Here’s the full table of SI prefix etymologies, another example of what a carefully groomed system might look like after 230 years of only ever adding, never modifying. More detail below.
| 10^1 | deci- | decimus | L. tenth | deca- | δέκα (déka) | G. ten |
| 10^2 | centi- | centum | L. hundred | hecto- | ἑκατόν (hekatón) | G. hundred |
| 10^3 | milli- | mille | L. thousand | kilo- | χίλιοι (khílioi) | G. thousand |
| 10^6 | micro- | μικρός (mikrós) | G. small | mega- | μέγας (mégas) | G. great |
| 10^9 | nano- | νᾶνος (nânos) | G. dwarf | giga- | γίγας (gígas) | G. giant |
| 10^12 | pico- | pico | Sp. little bit | tera- | τέρας (téras) | G. monster |
| 10^15 | femto- | femten | Da. fifteen | peta- | πέντε (pénte) | G. five |
| 10^18 | atto- | atten | Da. eighteen | exa- | ἕξ (héx) | G. six |
| 10^21 | zepto- | ἑπτά (heptá) | G. seven | zetta- | ἑπτά (heptá) | G. seven |
| 10^24 | yocto- | ὀκτώ (oktṓ) | G. eight | yotta- | ὀκτώ (oktṓ) | G. eight |
| 10^27 | ronto- | ἐννέα (ennéa) | G. nine | ronna- | ἐννέα (ennéa) | G. nine |
| 10^30 | quecto- | decem | L. ten | quetta- | decem | L. ten |
A year after the French Revolution, in 1790, the Académie des sciences (French Academy of Sciences) tasked a panel of scientists to come up with a unified national system of weights and measures. The traditional systems they wanted to supplant had definitions that varied between towns, making even internal trade difficult. Also the revolutionaries were on a bit of a crusade to replace everything from the ancien régime with new, rational systems, such as decimal time[1]. By 1795, their proposal was accepted, including the original metric prefixes: deca-, hecto-, kilo-, and myria-, based on the Greek words for ten, hundred, thousand, and ten-thousand; and deci-, centi-, and milli-, based on the Latin words for tenth, hundred, and thousand.
Over the next 170 years of the system’s spread and adaptation, myria- fell out of use in favor of new prefixes based on multiples of 1000. They seem to each have come from regional vernacular before becoming codified and standarized with the creation of the SI in 1960. Mega- is from the Greek for great, giga- for giant, and tera- for monster. Micro- is from the Greek for small, nano- for dwarf, and pico- is, uh, from Spanish “pico” meaning “little bit”.
In the modern era, SI prefix expansion is much more documented and formalized, immortalized in resolutions made at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM). In 1964, the need to measure atomic lengths and extremely precise periods of time led to the addition of femto- (10^-15) from the Danish for fifteen, and atto- (10^-18) for eighteen.
The lopsided prefixes stood until the 1975 adoption of new prefixes for use with world energy usage and radiation, peta- (10^3^5) from the Greek for five, and exa- (10^3^6) for six.
By 1991, there was a clear need for smaller units for working with single molecules and spectral analysis. Vowing never to repeat its past mistakes, the CGPM introduced matching larger prefixes despite there being no known applications at the time. They opted to give them consistent abbreviations by prepending letters to the traditional Greek roots. So zepto- (10^3^-7) is z + seven, yocto- (10^3^-8) is y + eight, zetta- (10^3^7) is Z + seven, and yotta- (10^3^8) is Y + eight.
Finally, we arrive at the 2022 resolution, which recognized that the only remaining unused letters were Q and R. So ronto- (10^3^-9) is r + nine, quecto- (10^3^-10) is q + Latin for ten, ronna- (10^3^9) is R + nine, and quetta- (10^3^10) is Q + Latin for ten. Ironically, these changes were driven by the larger units. People had started using vernacular coinages for prefixes above 10^24 like bronto- and hella-, and the CGPM vowed never to repeat its past mistakes by superseding them with official, designed prefixes.
[1] Each day would be divided into 10 hours of 100 minutes, each composed of 100 seconds. This isn’t an obviously terrible idea. However, the government gave up trying to enforce the use of the new clocks just six years later.
Smaller QR codes for URLs
For historical reasons, QR codes have four different encodings they use depending on the characters they need to represent. Purely numeric codes use the most efficient encoding, then alphanumeric, then binary, then kanji (historical reasons). The thing is, “alphanumeric” here only includes capital letters, not lowercase letters. Specifically, it’s 0-9, A-Z, space, and $%*+-./: which is enough to encode a url AS LONG AS YOU ONLY USE UPPERCASE.
If your url includes lowercase letters, it’ll fall through and get encoded as binary (Latin-1) instead, which is significantly longer, leading to a larger QR code.
(h/t Why are QR Codes with capital letters smaller than QR codes with lower-case letters? )