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.
debt
The word for a thing that is owed debt first appears in English in the 1200s as a borrowing from Old French dete. As a reminder, in the 1200s in England, the peasants spoke English and the nobility spoke French. The King of England did not speak English. Usually, we retain the English words from that period, but sometimes we retain the French word instead, or both words (e.g. English-derived help and French-derived aid, or English-derived lake and French-derived lagoon). In the case of debt, we retained just the French word and lost the Middle English word shild (Old English scyld, German cognate Schuld).
So wait, if we borrowed the word from dete, and spelled it dette as pronounced in the 1300s, where did the silent ‘b’ come from? In the 1400s, literate people in England typically knew Latin and believed English should be more like the ursprache Latin. Well, in Latin, there’s this word dēbitum, meaning debt, that the French word is descended from. So scribes from that period all ended up agreeing to put the vestigial ‘b’ back into the spelling, cursing us to this day.
Dēbitum would of course later be borrowed into English on its own merits as debit, but that wouldn’t happen for several hundred years.
quark
The subatomic particle quark gets its name from one of the two physicists who independently proposed its existence in 1964, Murray Gell-Mann. Incidentally, Murray is the same person Gell-Mann amnesia (the tendency to take media reporting at face value in fields you don’t know well, despite seeing how inaccurate it is in fields you do know well) was named for by Michael Crichton.
Murray reports he knew what sound he wanted to associate with the theoretical particles, /kwork/, before deciding how to spell it. He came across the spelling in James Joyce’s 1939 book Finnegans Wake, where it is used as a mocking nonsense word, but is pronounced to rhyme with “bark” and “mark”. Making sense of James Joyce’s inspirations is where the trail ends, though it’s often proposed that the nonsense word is ultimately from a German word of Slavic origin, “Quark”, meaning “cottage cheese” or “rubbish”.
Quarks were later proven to actually exist in a 1968 experiment. Murray’s initially proposed three flavors (aligning with Joyce’s usage, “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”) were eventually extended to their current count of six in a 1975 paper. I love the poetic names truth and beauty for the fifth and sixth flavors, but they are now typically called top and bottom. Notably, the top quark was not confirmed to exist until 1995.
George Zweig, the other physicist who proposed the existence of quarks in 1964, instead favored the name ace for the class of particles.
stan
The devotional verb stan begins appearing in 2008 as a generalization of the noun stan. The noun originates from a 2000 song by Eminem, titled “Stan”, about an encounter with an eponymous obsessive fan. This usage didn’t start catching on until after 2005, but by 2015 it was notable enough to merit an entry in the OED’s blog. By 2017, it warranted a full entry in the big dictionary.
As a given name, Stan is short for Stanley, which seems to mostly originate from places named Stanley in England. Stanley is Old English for “stone meadow” (stān + lēah), which seems like a reasonable name to give to a bunch of different places.
minute
The time unit minute is first attested in English in the late 1300s, a borrowing from Old French minute, which is in turn borrowed from Medieval Latin minūta. The story of minūta is where it gets interesting. In Classical Latin, that word only means “very small”. The “small” sense of minute was actually borrowed into English later, in the mid-1400s.
So going all the way back, the Sumerian numeral system was written in base 60, or sexagesimal. We have written evidence for that going back 5,000 years. The Babylonians adopted their own base-60 system thousands of years later due to Sumerian influence. So it happened that Babylonian astronomy, which was developed 2,700 years ago and heavily influenced Greek, Arabic, and Indian astronomy, used a base-60 numeral system. One way this manifested was that they divided circles into 360 degrees, and when they needed subdivisions, each further subdivision was into 60 parts.
Hundreds of years later, when translating Greek astronomy into Latin, the subdivisions of degrees came to be called pars minuta prima, “first small part”. The next subdivisions were pars minuta secunda, “second small part”, and pars minuta tertia, “third small part”. So when measuring very small fractions of a circle, as in astronomy or latitude/longitude, you used degrees, minutes, and seconds for precision. Today we say New York is at 40.7128° N owing to the invention of digital calculators, but just a hundred years ago you’d instead write 40°42′46″ N.
But that pars minuta prima only refers to measurements of arc, not time. Subdividing an hour into 60 parts first happened much, much later, in the الآثار الباقية عن القرون الخالية (Kitāb al-āthār al-bāqiyah `an al-qurūn al-khāliyah) “The Remaining Signs of Past Centuries”, an influential comparative history of timekeeping, written in 1000 by Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni. This subdivision of the hour into 60 parts only makes it into Medieval Latin in 1267, thanks to Roger Bacon.
It blows my mind that there wasn’t a standard unit of time smaller than an hour for so long! The first clock with a minute hand wasn’t constructed until 1577!