Many ordinary words are fossils. They carry a number, a place or a practice that made perfect sense when the word was coined and has since been forgotten.
The word-origin oddities here trace those words back through the historical record: the documents, dictionaries and archives that show when a word first appeared and what it meant then. When the popular story about a word's origin doesn't hold up, we say so.
Word origins
Quarantine comes from the Italian quaranta, meaning forty. During the plague, Mediterranean ports made travelers from infected places wait in isolation before entering. Ragusa (today's Dubrovnik) began in 1377 with a one-month wait; later, 40 days became the standard, notably in Venice. The word kept the number even though modern quarantines are set by incubation periods.
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