Happy translation accidents

"Algorithm" was a person? These words were born from misheard terms

Image: Matt Popovich

Some words entered the English language with a twist. Originally uttered in Chinese, Quechua, Latin, and many more languages, the terms were misheard, reshaped, and incorporated into local versions. These quirky accidents reveal how human ears left their mark on the words we still use every day. Let’s look at the list!

Image: Shelly Collins

When Spanish explorers in the New World encountered the reptile, they called it el lagarto, meaning "the lizard."

English settlers misheard the phrase, folding the article "el" into the word itself, resulting in "alligator."

Image: Markus Spiske

A popular term nowadays! The English "algorithm" traces back to the Persian mathematician al-Khwārizmī (Algoritmi), whose works reached Europe in Latin translation.

The name was misread and reinterpreted as if it were a common noun. Over time, scholars began to use "algorism" for arithmetic rules, later morphing into algorithm.

Image: Madison Oren

Far from having been born in English-speaking lands, ketchup has roots in the Hokkien Chinese word kê-tsiap, a fermented fish sauce.

The term traveled through trade routes to Malay and then into English, where it was misheard and reshaped. Early English "catchup" and "ketchup" referred to various savory sauces, not tomatoes at all. Only later did the tomato version dominate in America.

Image: Greg Johnson

Another example of misheard Spanish terms! When observing storms at sea, Spanish sailors would use the words tronada (thunderstorm) or tornar (to turn). Of course, English speakers blended and misheard these terms, producing it "tornado."

Over time, the English version stuck, even though it was never a "correct" borrowing to refer to the spinning phenomenon.

Image: Mae Mu

Cherry arrived in English from Old Northern French cherise, which itself came from Latin cerasum. The original word already had an "s" at the end, but when English speakers heard cherise, they thought it was plural.

They chopped it down into "cherry" for the singular, creating a new form by mistake.

Image: Rachael Gorjestani

In a similar way, we created the word "pea." Originally, English borrowed the word "pease" for the vegetable, taken from Latin pisum through French. Pease was a mass noun, like "rice," but English speakers mistook the final s for a plural.

To "correct" it, they created a new singular form: pea.

Image: Dirk Ribbler

Avocado began with the Nahuatl word ahuacatl, which meant both "avocado" and "testicle," a nod to the fruit’s shape. Spanish speakers turned it into aguacate, which English ears later misheard and mangled into… avocado.

Image: Alex Bayev

Jerky comes from the Quechua word ch’arki, meaning dried, salted meat. Spanish colonizers carried it into their language as charqui, which then reached English explorers and settlers, who made it into their own language.

Image: Pawel Czerwinski

The word "junk" began in English as a nautical borrowing. Portuguese and Dutch sailors used junco or jong from Malay, referring to a large Asian ship.

English speakers misheard and simplified the term into "junk." Eventually, "junk" broadened to mean old rope scraps, and then worthless odds and ends.

Image: Yulia Ilina

Hickory traces back to the Algonquian word pawcohiccora. It described a nut-based drink made from pounding hickory nuts, but English settlers found the long native word difficult to pronounce.

They clipped it down to "hiccora" and eventually "hickory."

Image: Neil Kami

The word "ammunition" is a reshaped version of the French la munition (military supplies). Much like the case for "alligator," this is an example of a word that took the leading article too seriously.

Early English speakers misheard the French article "la" as part of the word itself. This turned munition into ammunition, a form that then gained a life of its own in English.

From submarines to video calls: 10 Jules Verne inventions that came true

Image: Albert Robida, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Before science fiction was even a thing, Jules Verne was already inventing the future in his novels. He filled his adventures with strange contraptions, daring machines, and ideas that seemed unlikely in the 19th century. The twist? So many of those daydreams turned into everyday reality. From submarines gliding beneath the seas to rockets racing skyward, Verne’s stories can be read less as fantasy and more as a premonition of what was to come. What follows are ten of his most remarkable visions, proof of how closely imagination can become reality.

Image: Victor Serban

In the 19th century, people regarded Verne’s stories as mere fantasy adventures. But flip through them today, and they feel like you are reading an early NASA mission report. In From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and its sequel Around the Moon (1869), the French writer imagines three daring men being shot into space from Florida, traveling inside a metal capsule. After a five-day trip to lunar orbit, the projectile lands safely in the ocean.

Although it was probably a crazy and far-fetched idea at the time, a century later, Apollo astronauts followed nearly the same playbook, proving that Verne’s "make-believe" wasn’t so impossible after all.

Image: Lena Koval

Jules Verne was probably one of the first to dream of machines fueled by water instead of coal or oil. In his vision, the humble liquid would be split into hydrogen and oxygen, releasing its hidden energy to drive engines of the future. For readers in the 19th century, this idea felt both magical and oddly precise, as if Verne had peeked into tomorrow’s laboratories. Today, hydrogen power is still experimental, yet it remains one of science’s most promising—and elusive—goals, holding the potential for clean energy on a grand scale.

Image: David Rodrigo

Rising from the earth like shimmering glass mountains, Jules Verne imagined ever-shining cities. He pictured towers of steel and glass that didn’t go dark at sunset but glowed brilliantly through the night, powered by the then-new magic of electricity. Inside, elevators would whisk people effortlessly upward, transforming the way cities could be built. Back then, most buildings barely climbed ten stories, and the idea of infinite skylines was almost otherworldly. Today, it’s exactly what we see through the window in any modern city.

Image: seth0s

Imagine reading about a ship that could submerge into the waves and roam the oceans like a sea creature long before such a thing was possible. That’s exactly what Jules Verne wrote about in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). His Nautilus was a 230-foot machine, armed with a library of 12,000 books and capable of sinking any ship.

Although Verne didn’t actually invent submarines, at the time of the book’s publication, they were no more than unreliable and primitive prototypes. If anything, Verne’s fictional vessel anticipated the technology of the submarines that now explore the oceans of the real world. His invention might have been a fantasy, but it was also a glimpse into the future.

Image: Maxim Hopman

Can you imagine having to hear the news secondhand in the town square? Jules Verne probably knew that, in the future, people would need to be informed at all times. So, he invented a daily news report delivered by voice—spoken bulletins that could be piped straight into homes and even announced at public kiosks. We can only imagine what this meant for his readers in the 19th century, but we can now easily relate to the news being available whenever we want. Long before antennas or TV screens, he foresaw a world where the latest headlines could arrive instantly, without a scrap of paper.

Image: Rebecca Johnsen

Many years ago, a machine flying through the sky as high as a cathedral with the ease of a bird would have seemed improbable. But Jules Verne’s imagination could go as far as he wanted. In Robur the Conqueror (1886), he introduces the "Albatross," a fantastic flying ship that can lift straight off the ground, hover in place, and maneuver with uncanny grace. Does this description sound familiar? That’s because Verne outlined the blueprint for the helicopter decades before engineers made it real in the 20th century.

Image: Windows

What seemed like a futuristic gadget in 1889 now feels like part of our everyday lives. In his novel In the Year 2889, Jules Verne describes the "phonotelephote," a device that allows people not only to communicate with others who are miles away but also to see each other’s faces in real time. For 19th-century readers, the idea was dazzling, almost too magical to believe. Yet today, we hardly think twice before tapping into a video call on our phones or computers. Verne essentially predicted FaceTime and Zoom calls a full century before the first computer was even connected to the internet.

Image: Or Hakim

Many decades before the first electric cars ever rolled off an assembly line, Jules Verne was already letting his imagination race ahead. In The Mysterious Island (1874), he described wagons that needed no horses, powered instead by rechargeable batteries. To 19th-century readers, the idea of a vehicle moving smoothly on its own was unthinkable, closer to magic than mechanics. Yet Verne’s vision sounds strikingly familiar to anyone who has seen a quiet electric car glide down the highway today. What was once a dream in the pages of a novel has become a daily sight in traffic.

Image: Geoff Maredi

Poetic yet technical—that was Jules Verne’s gift. Take his vision of music made not with violins or flutes, but with machines. In his once-shelved novel Paris in the Twentieth Century (written in 1863 but not published until the 1990s), the writer imagined concerts filled with sounds produced by electrical instruments. For 19th-century readers, it probably sounded absurd. Yet a hundred years later, synthesizers and electric keyboards defined popular music, proving Verne had once again tuned in early to the future.

Image: Tim Dennert

A ship that needs no fuel, gliding through space on nothing but light—it sounds like poetry. Yet Verne imagined exactly that. He described enormous sails stretched wide, catching not the wind but the faint pressure of sunlight itself and using it to push vessels across the vast silence of space. In his day, it was a dream almost too delicate to believe, like navigating the ocean with moonbeams. But the image stuck, and now scientists and space agencies are testing real solar sails, proving that his most poetic vision wasn’t just fantasy but a glimpse of tomorrow waiting to unfold in orbit.