The correct answer is Old Norse.  How about those Vikings! Along with “egg,” they also gave us “cake.” Is it any wonder there are so many Viking cookbooks? (No kidding–more than 30 popped up on the last Google go-round.)

The correct answer is Celtic. “Banshee” derives from Irish folklore, describing a fairy who sings in an anguished voice about someone’s death. Today we hear the expression “screamed like a banshee,” a wailing that is no longer confined only to someone’s passing.

The correct answer is English, the kind you heard in Shakespeare’s day—i.e., Modern (as opposed to Middle English and Old English). But this is not one of Big Will’s words—it belongs to a later arrival, Jonathan Swift (1667–1745). The Anglo-Irish poet just made it up, along with Lilliputian, for his satire Gulliver’s Travels. Brobdingnagian came to mean overly large and Lilliputian, exceptionally small.

The correct answer is Greek. Pretty surprising, when you consider how adept the ancient Greeks were at slinging words like onomatopoeia at us. Poet is from the Greek for “maker,” and poetry does indeed require makers, of flowing lines of verse. Also pretty surprising: there is, in fact, a connection between poet and onomatopoeia (when a word sounds like what it is describing—“hiccup,” for example). Poeia means to make, as in to make a sound.

The correct answer is Arabic. The original meaning was to make something known: a notification. It would be fair to say that the recent front-page resurgence of the word is certainly making tariffs known.

The correct answer is Japanese. The high-ranking military in Japan were known as hanchō. The English version is more democratic, assigning “honcho” to big-shots in any field.

The correct answer is French. The French-Canadian trappers of the mid-19th century took to describing parts of South Dakota as mauvaises terres pour traverser. English took just the first two words, which translate as “bad” and “lands.” Those were enough to cue anyone who was considering traveling across—or traversing—the land.

The correct answer is Tagalog. American soldiers stationed in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century took the Tagalog word for mountain and turned it into what the Brits might describe as the back of beyond: the boondocks.

The correct answer is Latin. Of course, this is only if we’re talking about papal bulls, which derived from the Latin bulla, indicating a sealed document. It’s where we get “bulletin.” That other bull–the four-legged version–most likely comes from either the Old English bula or the Old Norse boli. So give yourself a win as well if you chose Old Norse.

The correct answer is Taíno: hurakán. It gives you an idea of just how long these ferocious Atlantic storms have been brewing, since the ancient Indigenous language of Taíno was the first language that Columbus and his crew encountered.

Did you pick Spanish as the answer? Give yourself half credit. The Spanish borrowed the word from the Taíno, and the English borrowed it from the Spanish.

The most correct answer is Narragansett. But give yourself full credit if you chose Algonquian, because Narragansett is an Algonquian language.

A quahog, from poquaûhock, is essentially a large clam. You’ll find it described as quahog in Rhode Island, the Narragansetts’ ancestral home. And you’ll find the quahog meat in Rhode Island chowder (say “chowda” and you’ll fit right in). Other chowders also use the meat from quahogs, but outside of Rhode Island they’re called hard-shell clams.

Now, how do you pronounce quahog? Is it “KO-hog” or “KWAH-hog”? Best answer: how everybody around you does.

The correct answer is Spanish, and Mexican Spanish in particular. Cañon is not that old a word—it dates back to just the 1830s. For several decades after that, what we now know as the Grand Canyon was also referred to as the Grand Cañon.