Ooh, sorry to continue the hijack, @Quondam_Mechanic, but this is one of my favorite pointless-but-neat factoids: why Americans and Canadians use dollars rather than pounds.
The early modern counts of Jáchymov discovered silver on their estates, and started minting large silver coins, which they called Joachimthalers. These proved popular, and more states in central and northern Europe began minting similar thalers. Eventually, the Netherlands began minting their own thalers, called, in Dutch, daalders. Since the Netherlands was then under rule of the kings of Spain, the coins spread to Spain, where they became in Spanish dólares.
By this time, thaler/daalder/dólar had come to mean “any sizeable silver coin”, so the name got applied to the silver reales that the Spanish coined from their colonial silver mines in Mexico and Peru. By the time of the British colonies in the Americas, Spanish dollars were the most widespread form of currency along the eastern seaboard. They were especially popular because they could be cut up into eight “bits”, to use for small change - lack of low-value currency for small transactions was a major hinderance to the American economy at the time. This, by the way, is the origin of the saying “Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar”.
By the time of the American revolution, the Spanish dollar was so widespread and familiar that Thomas Jefferson, and others, advocated a policy of pragmatism and simply adopting it as the American currency.
Okay, nerd diversion over…
I think you’re still missing the point of the game - it’s to post some common noun that has an obscure geographic origin, and let others guess.
In that spirit, I’ll offer:
dalmatians