Comment by tkgally | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tkgally | Hacker News Reader

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The most common word in Japanese for “stapler” is hochikisu or hotchikisu, which seems to come from the name of the E.F. Hotchkiss Company [1], an American manufacturer whose staplers were imported to Japan in the early 20th century. Some Japanese sources [2] say that the word comes from Benjamin Hotchkiss [3], an inventor of machine guns, and that is what I learned many years ago, but that etymology apparently has not been documented [4].

[1] https://connecticutmills.org/find/details/e.h.-hotchkiss-co

[2] https://gally.net/temp/20240222hotchikisugogensetsu.jpg

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_B._Hotchkiss

[4] https://wis.max-ltd.co.jp/about/company/trivia/h_story/inven...

X rays are called Rentogen in Japanese, after Wilhelm Röntgen, who produced/detected them first.

Same in Czech, tbh it's possible that English is the outlier here

English is definitely not an outlier. In french it's Rayon X

I had a moment to check and it’s actually interesting - looks like the world is split in two. Looking at a few languages closer to home (for me) we have:

X-ray-like: English, Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, Turkish, Portuguese

Röntgen-like: German, Danish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Czech, Polish, Russian, Hungarian

There’s way more of each than I’ve listed, of course. I just picked a few languages

People in Turkey definitely don't use X-ray, they use Röntgen. Same for Azerbaijan.

X-Strahlen (X-Rays) is the name Röntgen invented for his discovery :)

X rays are called Röntgen rays in German, which is where the Japanese got it from, like many medical terms.

"Sabiro" for a suit comes from "Savile Row", a street in London famous for its tailor shops, which in turn is named after Dorothy Boyle, Countess of Burlington and Cork (née Savile).

In Switzerland, we call staplers Bostitch, which happens to be the name of an US company that (used to or still does) manufacture them.

More: https://jisho.org/forum/5d132f2ed5dda71944000054-origin-of-n...

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