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.
mutt
The dog descriptor mutt meaning a non-purebred is first seen in dog breeding magazines in 1910. The adjective was actually first applied to people, with a meaning of “idiot”, a few years earlier in 1901. It was a short form of muttonhead, which had been a common word for “idiot” since 1803.
Mutton itself is one of the Norman French words that were borrowed into English after the Norman Conquest. Norman French was the high class language to the peasants’ English. One of the ways this manifested is the French words for animals were used for meat, which nobles discussed, while the English words remained in use for animals. Some words for meat with this origin borrowed between 1066 and 1300 are mutton, beef, pork, poultry, veal, venison, and uh, pigeon. The corresponding terms in Old English were scēap, cū, swīn, cicen, cealf, heorot (Modern English hart; deer meant “animal”, as with German Tier), and dūfe (Modern English dove).
pizza
The food pizza was popularized in NYC in 1931. The first American pizzeria, Lombardi’s, had opened in 1905, but called its specialty “tomato pie”. The word pizza is a direct borrowing from Neapolitan pizza, meaning pizza. It was still uncommon enough by 1944 that the NYT ran an article explaining how to eat pizza, clarifying the unfamiliar foreign pronunciation of the word.
The Neapolitan tradition of pizza is a long one, although the modern tomato-basil-mozzarella margherita we’re familiar with only dates back to the 1860s. Tomatoes were still an uncommon food in Europe at the time. They were considered poisonous due to their relation to the deadly nightshade plant. Pizzas were a Naples specialty well before 1800, although we’d classify those items as flatbreads today. The Italian word likely comes from Byzantine Greek πίτα (píta), meaning cake, and is attested in local Latin texts as early as 1107.
glamping
The leisure activity glamping is first attested in The Guardian in 2005, a portmanteau of glamorous and camping. Popular usage had spread to American English by 2007. As with many of this century’s coinages, the concept of luxury camping existed before, but there wasn’t a specific word for it. (Maybe safari, but that now has other connotations due to semantic drift.) For example, this trend’s rise in popularity begins in the 1990s.