‘fascinate’ has an utterly delightful etymology
Cliche and stereotype are connected: a stereotype was a piece of boilerplate that printers used: cliche was the French onomatopoetic way of imitating the sound that stereotype makes as it hits the paper.
Great example.
The word “box” can mean to fight, a container, a kind of tree or it’s wood. They all derive from the Greek “pyx”, meaning “fist”. Box, to fight with the fists. Box, a container to hold things as they might be held in the fist. And box, the wood, because it was good for making boxes.
Just don’t leave any pencils around.
One of the given origins for “pumpernickel” is that it derrives from New High German “pumpen” and “nick” - a name often used for goblins. Thus the bread is named “goblin farts.”
It’s not 100% accepted, as noted in Wikipedia, but pretty high up the list.
Algeria is derived from the Arabic word al-Jaza’ir, which means the islands. The name originally only referred to four small islands which were just off the coast of the modern country. Landfill eventually connected the islands to the mainland and “The Islands” referred to the part of the city which was originally islands. The city eventually became known by the name of the neighbourhood and the country eventually was named for the city.
“Bird.” No one knows the origin; there are no cognates in other languages. It may come from “brood,” but no one has any idea where “brood” comes from. I find it fascinating the origin of such a common term can’t be traced.
The origin of “dog” is similarly hard to trace. Originally, in English all dogs were “hounds.” Where exactly “dog” came from is not really known, and why it replaced a perfectly good word is also not really known, both or which are rather amazing for, again, a ridiculously common and well-used word.
(Edit: What **RickJay **said.)
Africa and Asia have similar histories. Each referred to a small coastline of the Mediterranean/Agaean, at the edges of the Roman world. Gradually they came to refer to entire continents.
The word **muscle **comes from the ancient Greek for mouse mys. Why? Because to them, rippling muscles looked like there were small creatures running around under the skin.
True of Africa*, perhaps, but Asia had more or less its current meaning by the time of Herodotus, considerably before the Romans. There’s varied speculation of where it may have come from, but I don’t think there’s any confirmed usages of it just meaning the coast.
There was a Roman Province of “Asia” that was just western Turkey, but that was after the word had come to mean the entire bulk of land East of the Med.
*(Herodotus had the concept of an African continent to, but used the word “Libya” for it).
“isle” was not coined as a shortened form of “island”.
Weird little words like that are usually Anglic, the Angles were weird little people.
Also, “day” is not related to Latin “dies” and its relatives/descendants (like English “diurnal,” French “lundi” and several other days of the week, etc.)
That online etymology is fascinating. I like this reference, for a word that died in infancy - auto-car
Which later led to the name Barbara, meaning foreigner or stranger.
The color puce comes from the French word for “flea.” It’s the color of flea blood.
Funny digression here, sorry for the hijack: In Spanish, “autocar” is a perfectly valid word that means “bus” (alternative form for “bus” in Spanish: “autobús”).
And now on topic: It’s funny to see that the word “bus” itself is a shortening of the word “omnibus”, which is Latin for “for everybody” (in reference to an omnibus being used for public transport). As it is now, “bus” is simply the Latin dative plural ending 
Spanish has a word that weirdly went the other way – retaining an unnecessary “suffix.” Their word for “decal/sticker” is “calcamanía,” which originally meant just what it looks like: “sticker madness.” It referred to some widespread craze for stickers some decade or other, but later became the word for the stickers themselves. It would be like if, in some countries, the Beatles were called “Beatlemania.”