6: Band-aid 创可贴

In the early 1920s, a woman named Josephine Dickson – who tended to injure herself in the kitchen – grew tired of trying to wrap her cuts with bulky, clumsy gauze.

This inspired her husband, Earle, to invent what became a simpler, sleeker alternative: sterilized, pre-made adhesive bandages. Earle offered them to his employer, Johnson & Johnson – whose marketing triumphs included shipping free Band-aids to the Boy Scouts.

Although the noun Band-aid is still protected under trademark (i.e., "Band-aid brand"), the adjective band-aid is generic. Since 1970, folks have been using such the term in such phrases as "a band-aid solution."

7: Ping-Pong 乒乓球

In the late 1800s, some creative Brits reportedly used cigar box lids to bat rounded wine corks across a table. A line of standing books provided the net.

The game quickly gained a number of names, among them table tennis, gossima, flim-flam, and also – based on the sounds of the sport – "ping-pong."

Before long, the British manufacturer J. Jaques & Sons had registered the term Ping-Pong. The American rights to that name were soon purchased by Parker Brothers (and are now owned by Escalade Sports).

By 1934, ping-pong had acquired a generic meaning: "something resembling a game of table tennis, especially a series of usually verbal exchanges between two parties."

That's fitting, because by then Parker Brothers and the International Table Tennis Federation had spent years going back and forth over the names.

Since 1988, table tennis (not Ping-Pong) has been an Olympic sport.

8: Moxie 胆量、精力、勇气

These days, moxie is a synonym for energy and pep, courage and determination, know-how and expertise.

The original moxie was a patent medicine and tonic – Moxie Nerve Food – invented by Dr. Augustin Thompson and sold in New England in the 1870s. According to one story, Dr. Thompson got the name from a Lieutenant Moxie who discovered the South American plant that was the elixir's secret ingredient. Another story traces moxie to an Algonquin word.

Within a decade, Thompson had carbonated Moxie and was marketing it as a beverage with a "delicious blend of the bitter and the sweet." The soft drink and its advertising slogans (among them Make Mine Moxie!) caught on around the country.

By 1930, moxie had acquired its earliest modern sense of "energy, pep." Appropriately enough, although the drink's popularity has fizzled in most of the U.S., the word moxie determinedly lives on.

9: Mah-Jongg 麻将

Mah-jongg (spelled with one or two gs) is a game of Chinese origin in which players try to create winning hands from a set of domino-like tiles.

The game was imported to the U.S. after World War I by Joseph P. Babcock, who also coined (and trademarked) the name. The game's Chinese name, which sounds similar to "mah-jongg," means "sparrow." A sparrow or a mythical "bird of 100 intelligences" appears on one of the tiles.

Mah-jongg became a fad in the 1920s, but Babcock was more interested in promoting the game than in protecting his trademark, and mah-jongg became a generic term.

In the U.S., the game enjoys periodic revivals, but has never regained its early popularity. In China, it's still widely played.

10: Thermos 保温瓶

What we now know as the thermos was invented in 1892 by British scientist Sir James Dewar, a scientist at Oxford University.

A German company marketed Dewar's invention, and soon thermos became the generic term for any container with a vacuum between an inner and outer wall that helps its contents retain their initial temperature (rather than cool or warm to the ambient temperature).

The American Thermos Bottle Company bought the trademark rights in the U.S., but never managed to stuff the language back into its bottle. After decades attempting to prohibit the generic use of thermos, the then-renamed American Thermos Products Company lost its trademark in court in 1962.

So where did the word come from? A contest: the winning submission recalled the Greek thermē, meaning heat.