nope
The interjection nope is first found in print in 1888, although it was likely common in speech well before that. Essentially, when you say “no” quickly and crisply, closing your mouth causes the final vowel to sound like it ends with a /p/. This is because a final /p/ sound is usually made by closing both lips. This phenomenon has the charming name “excrescent p”. Excrescence is the general term for a sound change where a consonant gets added to a word, like the /p/ sound often found in the middle of something or hamster when spoken aloud.
The parallel yep, likely based on yeah, is similarly first attested in 1882. Here’s a 1946 paper where a linguist discusses the phenomenon, including an example usage of welp, based on well, long before its first print usage in the wild in 1987. Welp saw a dramatic rise in usage in the late 2000s and early 2010s, as captured in this 2012 Slate explainer about the word. The regional ope is likely a similar alteration of oh.
Icon with the word “Nope!” in white text over a purple diamond from the video game Balatro
sherlock
The ironic term for a perceptive person sherlock is first seen in print in 1903, naturally named after fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. His full name had been used in this way since 1896 (e.g. “you’re a regular Sherlock Holmes”), an impressive rise considering he first appeared in 1887.
Being given a rare first name likely contributed to this eponym’s popularity. Sherlock is originally an uncommon English last name, which have rarely gotten used as first names since last names were first instituted. It’s the blond version of Blacklock, Silverlock, or Harlock (har meaning “grey” in Old English; the Modern English equivalent is hoar), where scir is another Old English color term meaning “bright” (Modern English sheer) that has fallen out of use.
uranium
The heaviest naturally occurring element uranium was discovered and named by German scientist Martin Klaproth in 1789 by purifying pitchblende, a naturally occurring uranium ore. (Note: Uranium was not discovered to be radioactive until we discovered what radioactivity was by observing uranium, in 1896.) He named it after the planet Uranus, which had been discovered in 1781, but was at the time named George.
Wait, what?! Let’s back up a few links. The planet Uranus was discovered by William Herschel, a German-born British astronomer. He first reported it as a comet due to its motion, but later that year, Royal Society astronomers concluded after repeated observation that its movement meant it had to be a planet. Uranus had in fact been spotted many times before (definitely in 1690, possibly in 128 BCE!) but had previously always been misclassified as a star.
Given naming rights to the first new planet discovered in history, Herschel decided history should remember that this scientific achievement occurred in the reign of King George III (yes, the American Revolution guy). This understandably did not go over well with astronomers from other countries, who generally refused to call it George. Some of the other names in use at the time included Herschel, Neptune, and Astraea. Uranus was suggested by German astronomer Johann Elert Bode and ultimately became the consensus choice, owing in part to his colleague Martin’s naming of uranium in 1789. This conflict was not fully settled until British astronomers finally relented and started calling the planet Uranus like everyone else in 1850.
Johann’s proposal of Uranus followed the pattern of the other planets being named after Roman gods. He chose Ouranos, the Greek god of the sky, not realizing that “Uranus” was actually the Latinized form of that name, not the intended Roman god of the sky’s name, Caelus.
Ouranos is probably named for being the rain god, after Proto-Greek ṷorsó-, meaning ”to rain”. This is the same root used in Greek οὐρέω (ouréō), meaning “to urinate”, from which we get the English word urea.
Even in Ancient Greek, Ouranos can’t escape stupid jokes about his name.
Useful ISO standards for programmers
Out of curiosity, I put together a list of some ISO standards that seem to come up regularly when programming and what year they were first put into practice. These are in rough order of frequency.
botnet
The coordinated attack vector botnet was first named that around 2003, a compound of bot + net. Early botnets mostly focused on sending spam emails that got around simple filters, not the DDoS attacks we associate with them today. EarthLink, a major email provider at the time, claims the first major known botnet in 2001 was responsible for as much as 25% of all incoming emails.
The origin of -net is clear; the short variation of network was a productive affix in contemporaneous compounds like intranet and netizen. The other half, bot, had been in use for over 10 years to refer to chatbots and spambots in chat rooms like IRC. A clipping of robot, it quickly took on the specific meaning of “automated system sending text messages” in the early 1990s, semantically drifting from its use in science fiction (first appearing in 1969) where it just meant “robot”.
Robot itself is an English word with an unusually clear origin story. It’s first found in 1922 in the English translation of Karel Capek’s 1920 Czech play “R.U.R.” (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”), from Czech robota meaning “forced labor”. Karel’s robots were organic, but the term quickly came to be associated with machines, as assembly lines were then transforming manufacturing. A notable example of robots taking people’s jobs is the invention and deployment of fully automated traffic robots in 1922, which replaced human crossing guards at every major Manhattan intersection by 1926. In the intervening decades, this machine’s name changed to “traffic light” in most varieties of English, but remains “robot” in South Africa.
P.S. While researching this, I learned that another example of robots taking people’s jobs happened much later than I was thinking. Otis Autotronic elevators were first installed in 1950, eventually replacing elevator operators in basically every elevator building.