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Kohl container from Egypt

From Care2, a website on healthy and green living (strangely enough), comes this list of 22 unusual word origins:

7. DogI mentioned before that some etymologies are just plain baffling; dog is unquestionably one of those. The word dog was docga in Old English, but nobody can decide where it actually came from. The word hund (of Germanic origin, which became modern-day hound) was much more common, so it’s likely that dog/docgawas an informal or non-literary word… but how did it spring into existence? No one really knows for sure. 

8. ButterflyThere are several conflicting explanations for the origin of butterfly. It may come from a combination of Old English bēatan “to beat,” and flēoge “fly.” The first part of the word may instead come from butere, or “butter,” which may have originally referred only to yellow-colored butterflies. However, my favorite explanation of butterfly is that is could have come from the Middle Dutch word boterschijte, which referred to the fact that their excrement may look similar to butter: literally, “butter-shitter.” Think of that the next time you encounter a gorgeous butterfly!

10. AlcoholThe word alcohol came into English with the help of Latin, but it’s originally from the Spanish Arabic al-kuḥul, which means “the kohl” (kohl being a black powder that is used as eye makeup). Wait, what? Well, the process that is used to make kohl involves vaporizing and then cooling a solid substance, while the process of distilling alcohol is the same deal, but with a liquid. So, over the course of centuries, it began to mean an “essence obtained by distillation” and then finally “spirit of wine, ethanol.”

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