Boston
42.3603°N -71.0578°W · Q100
4 English words in this atlas trace back to Boston. It sits in United States.
A cake called a pie is named for a city.
It was popularised at a Boston hotel in the 1850s and named for the city. It is a cake, and has never been a pie.
A New England aristocracy named after an Indian priestly caste by a Boston doctor.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. coined the Brahmin caste of New England in his novel Elsie Venner, which began serialization in 1860, borrowing the Hindu priestly class to describe Boston's bookish gentry. The label stuck to families such as the Cabots and Lowells and is now used as often in mockery as in description.
The word exists because two American cities fielded a team called the Sox and headline writers had to tell them apart.
Boston and Chicago both carried Sox in their team names by 1908, so sportswriters welded the city onto the sock: Bosox for Boston, Chisox for Chicago. Neither is an official club name; both came out of the press box, where a short word fits a narrow column. The pair was most common in American sports writing in the 1970s and 1980s.
The phrase describes a common Victorian arrangement that left almost no written record of its own name.
It was used in late nineteenth-century New England for two unmarried women sharing a household, often teachers or writers living on their own earnings. Nobody has found who coined it, and it is usually linked to Henry James's The Bostonians of 1885, which describes such a household. Lillian Faderman's 1981 study revived the term, and David Mamet took it for the title of a 1999 play.