Non Indicative Name / Real Life

Even in real life, a lot of names don't actually mean what they mean.

Bear in mind that if a name used to mean what it means until something changed, it's an Artifact Title and should be listed on the appropriate page.

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Food

• Duck sauce doesn't contain any duck (it's a sauce meant for putting in roast duck, though it's used for a lot more than just duck).
• Carl's Jr's 6 Dollar Burger originally launched for about $4 and was named in order to claim that it was of the same quality that you would pay $6 for in a sit-down restaurant. Even with inflation most of the variations that have been introduced are $4.99. The Jim Beam Bourbon 6 Dollar Burger however is the only one currently that is $5.99. Over time, they have been phasing that name out in favor of "Thickburger" so that they don't end up with a "Six Dollar Burger" that costs more than $6 (and also to align their menu more closely with that of their sister chain Hardee's, which used the "Thickburger" name first).
• McDonald's McRib is primarily made from pork shoulder meat, rather than ribs.
• "Hamburgers" are made of beef, not ham. Well-worn Outside Jokes aside, hamburger never did mean "a burger made from ham" but instead "[someone or something] from Hamburg", in this case a ground-meat patty sandwich. The suffix "burger" is itself a snowclone based on the custom in German-speaking countries of naming snack foods after the town with which they're most closely associated (Hamburg, in this case), much as "Frankfurters" (the sausage used for hot dogs) are associated with Frankfurt-am-Main (they're also called wieners, as similar sausages came from Vienna, or "Wien" as it's called in German). In the 19th century chopped beef patties were known as "Hamburg steaks" (and still are in much of the world), so a "Hamburger" was a Hamburg steak sandwich. Also, "ham" is not a meat in its own right, but the cured hindleg of a pig. In the case of actual hamburgers, though, the non-indicative name is complete; there are half-a-dozen potential origin points of the hamburger sandwich ranging from Boston, Massachusetts to Seymour, Wisconsin, anywhere between 1885 and 1900. Regardless the hamburger sandwich was already an extant dish by the time of its debut at the 1904 World's Fair.
• Salisbury steak is not from Salisbury, England. Its name comes from James Salisbury, an American physician who published his recipe for Hamburg steak braised in brown gravy and onions in 1897 to advocate for meat-based diets (it was definitely a different time). The name stuck in large part because of anti-German sentiment during World War I, and is more commonly used than "Hamburg steak" to this day in the US, even when the dish bears little resemblance to Dr. Salisbury's recipe other than being based around a beef patty.
• "Lake trout", a deep-fried dish commonly sold by street vendors in Baltimore, isn't trout, and it isn't fished from lakes. It's actually whiting, a cheap bottom-feeding fish that's trawled just off of Maryland's coast. For discussions on this, watch a few episodes of The Wire.
• What is traditionally sold in British fish'n'chip shops as "rock salmon" (or just "rock") is a whitefish unrelated to salmon. Probably why it's now often called "huss".
• Most of what's sold in American grocery stores as cinnamon sticks are actually the bark of several closely-related species. "True" or Ceylon cinnamon is Cinnamomum verum, while other species in the same genus (C. burmanni, cassia, loureiroi and citriodorum) are collectively called cassia and make up the bulk of "cinnamon" on the market. They taste similar, but not identical. Cassia barks are slightly thicker and keep better than true cinnamon bark.
• Historically, "mozzarella" was supposed to be made of water buffalo milk, while cheese made by the same process from cow's milk was called fior di latte (literally, "milk flower," itself pretty nonindicative). However, today it's taken as read, even in Italy, that what's sold as mozzarella is actually from cow's milk and thus technically fior di latte, although if it's sold as mozzarella di bufala or especially as mozzarella di bufala campana (which has the full force of The European Union's agricultural protection laws behind it), it is pretty certain to be a water-buffalo product.
• Most of what is packaged as "wasabi" in American and European shops is usually not true wasabi due to cultivation and transportation difficulties. It's actually mostly horseradish. (For that matter, most of what’s sold in Japan is typically horseradish, perhaps with a bit of wasabi mixed in; the same factors that make wasabi unavailable in the West make it expensive in Japan.) On that note, wasabi is often called "Japanese horseradish" even though it's not a species of horseradish (although it is fairly closely related to horseradish).
• Horseradish doesn't have anything to do with horses (the word comes from the Early Modern English usage of "horse" to mean "strong" or "coarse"), although it is related to radishes (being part of the family Brassicaceae, which includes mustard, cabbage, and, yes, wasabi and radish).
• In Germany and Austria, there is a food called Leberkäse, which literally means "liver-cheese". It normally has neither liver nor cheese in it, unless you order a special type of it that way ("Leberkäse mit Käse" or "liver-cheese with cheese"), and is commonly translated into English as "meatloaf".
• Another German/Austrian dish has the name Kartoffelkäse, literally "potato cheese". It has potatoes but neither contains nor constitutes cheese: It’s just mashed potatoes with sour cream and onions, seasoned with parsley and caraway seed.
• Similarly; Head cheese does not contain any dairy. It does, however, contain meat and gelatin from a pig's head.
• Hamburger Aalsuppe ("Hamburg eel soup") has a lot of ingredients, none of which is eel. Etymologically, the Aal here doesn't refer to the fish but is a corruption of alles ("all, everything"). Due to touristy expectations you can now also get Aalsuppe mit Aal — "eel soup with eel".
• Chinese fortune cookies. They look Chinese, they sound Chinese, but they're actually an American invention of Japanese descent.
• Butterscotch has nothing to do with Scotland. It most likely got its name from the fact that before it fully cools, the candy is "scotched" or scored to make it easier to break up. Another theory holds that it's a corruption of "scorch." The misnomer is even worse in Canadian French, where it's known as caramel écossais or Scottish caramel.
• Scotch Bonnet peppers have nothing to do with Scotch whisky (though you could put some in to the whisky if you're insane), nor did they originate in Scotland, but rather the Caribbean. They're supposedly named for their resemblance to the Scottish bonnet (aka tam o'shanter), but the only similarity there is that the pepper has grooves where it meets the stem◊ that sort of look like the pleats of a bonnet◊ under the toorie—and most tams don't even have these pleats◊.
• Mince pies (the English kind) are pastries made with a filling of mincemeat. Originally the mincemeat was made up of meat, various fruits and preserves. Nowadays though, most mince pies don't contain any meat (unless you make your own at home) but the filling is still referred to as mincemeat.
• The Nantucket Nectars juice company is based in Texas rather than Nantucket. Justified in that it used to be based in Nantucket, but was then bought out; they just kept the name.
• New York Brand Texas Toast is neither made in New York or Texas, as the company behind it is based in Columbus, Ohio.
• The Buffalo Wing contains no buffalo meat but rather a fried chicken wing tossed in hot sauce, as Jessica Simpson rather embarrassingly found out on her reality show. They were first sold at a bar in Buffalo, NY, which is where the name comes from. This naming has carried over to other foods, so if you see something labeled as "Buffalo style" that just means it's spicy, it has nothing to do with any large nearly extinct mammals.
• Chinese Hoisin (meaning 'Seafood') Sauce doesn't actually contain any seafood. Also, judging from The Other Wiki's description, it doesn't seem to be used on seafood, either.
• Salad cream isn't intended specifically for salads (it's essentially a non-thixotropic version of mayonnaise, hence intended for the same broad range of uses) and (unlike mayonnaise) isn't particularly creamy.
• Many steakhouses in Colorado serve "Rocky Mountain Oysters", also known as bull testicles.
• Red Leicester cheese is orange.
• The sauces of classic French cuisine is full of these things: Sauce Allemande ("German sauce") isn't German.^note A sauce velouté (sauce made by thickening a light stock with a blond roux) with the roux partially or entirely replaced with egg and cream, intended to recall the hearty, simple gravies of the German kitchen. Sauce Espagnole ("Spanish sauce") isn't Spanish.^note A sauce made by thickening a dark beef or veal stock with a dark brown roux, and finished with tomatoes. Supposedly, it was invented for some Spanish dignitaries, who had brought tomatoes—a crop from their New World colonies—to France. Sauce Africaine ("African sauce") isn't African.^note It's Sauce Espagnole with Africanesque spices. "Crème anglaise" isn't English, or a cream!^note It's a sort of custard, and given that it's usually made with cream and the English do like custard and make it well, that's fair.
• Russian dressing, Italian dressing, and French dressing were all invented in the US. In fact in France and Italy you nearly always get oil and vinegar on your salad. Averted by Thousand Island dressing (basically Russian dressing minus the horseradish), which actually is from the Thousand Islands region in upstate New York.
• Grape-Nuts have nothing to do with grapes. Or nuts. They contain dextrose, sometimes called "grape sugar," although dextrose is more commonly known as glucose, which means "grain sugar".
• For the longest time Apple Jacks had no apple flavor at all. In fact, there was an awkward period of advertising where commercials had people surprised that Apple Jacks didn't taste like apples, when the cereal at the time actually DID taste like apples, and even contained apple ingredients.
• French fries actually came from Belgium, or perhaps Spain. There's some debate as to which, although they were brought to the the States by American soldiers serving in France during World War I. Belgian soldiers and American soldiers shared recipes during their downtime; the thought never occurred to the American soldiers that those French-speaking soldiers in France might not actually be French. To those thinking it's about the style of cutting, the original verb meaning to cut in that style of cutting is to julienne (and yes, it is from France); the use of "Frenching" to refer to this comes after and because of French fries. And Belgian fries doesn't have the right ring.
• French toast is not actually French, either. The earliest form of it dates back to a 5th century Roman cookbook, and later spread to and was expanded on by several European countries during the Middle Ages. And it’s not toasted, it's fried. That said, the French do love it (as pain perdu, or "lost bread"), so a connection between the dish and the French is one that some English-speakers might have made (especially given the volume of contact between the British Isles and France from the Conquest to...pretty much now).
• French tacos, by contrast, were invented in France (specifically in Lyon), but aren't really "tacos" in any conventional sense of the term. Large packages of a cheesy filling wrapped on all sides in a flour tortilla and then grilled in a press, they are, from a Mexican point of view, more like a bizarre hybrid of a burrito and a quesadilla^note Burritos are made from flour tortillas and are fully wrapped around the filling, but don't need to have cheese and are usually not grilled and certainly not in a press. Quesadillas are usually made from corn tortillas (though they may legitimately be made from flour tortillas, especially in el Norte), do need to have cheese ("queso" is right in the name; while Mexico City cuisine features "quesadillas" with no queso, everyone else in Mexico agrees that the chilangos don't know what they're talking about), and can be pressed (though they're usually just toasted) and can be made from corn or wheat tortillas (depending on region) but are only folded in half and are open on the edges. (There's a fascinating 19th-century recipe for quesadillas made by stuffing a masa round with cheese like a weird corn empanada and frying the whole affair in lard, but it isn't in common use anymore.) Actual tacos are usually made from corn tortillas and are never grilled (the tortilla is usually toasted, but the fillings are added later). with extra-weird fillings (though admittedly ones Mexicans would thoroughly enjoy). The filling also makes them questionably French, since it's usually made of fries (which are, again, Belgian), gyro/döner meat (brought by Greek/Turkish immigrants), sauces like ketchup, and some very optional vegetables; the most distinctively French item in the device is usually the cheese—which is most commonly Comté (France's favorite melting cheese for sandwiches)—but even that can be replaced with Swiss Gruyère (which is virtually indistinguishable from Comté so whatever) or even (British) Cheddar or processed "American" cheese. To further add to the confusion, they are called "tacos" even in the singular (it's un tacos, s’il vous plaît, not un taco), and the biggest chain for French tacos suggests a (completely nonexistent) connection to Ireland.
• French Bread in Brazil is actually bread they themselves created when asked for bread "like the ones in France" by the time of the first World War.
• To add to the confusion, what we know as "English muffins" aren't English and aren't what we normally call muffins. They were invented in New York City by Samuel Thomas, a British immigrant as a variation of the English crumpet. However, the same kind of thing as English muffins are popular in England — where they are called by many names, none of which are "muffins"^note When you hear the British arguing over baps and rolls and cobs and barms this is it (one name for them, in a very small region, is an oven-bottom muffin, though usually shortened to oven-bottom). The true equivalent isn't really this, though: it's the bread used in fast food chains for breakfast burgers, hence the name Egg McMuffin, which was imported from America and so is in no way English, nor really a muffin. Ask your average English person for an English muffin and they'll probably not even know what you mean, likely giving you a smaller American muffin. The American kind, the sweet, larger cupcake-type confectionary, are sometimes called "American muffins", which are American in origin, but normally just muffins nowadays after Eagleland Osmosis.
• Danish pastries are known in Denmark as 'Viennese bread'... In a twist, neither name for Danish pastries are entirely non-indicative: Danish pastries are something of a speciality of Denmark, might have originated from Vienna, and is classified as a Viennoiserie^note French for 'things from Vienna', specifically referring to enriched and often flaky breads like croissants, brioche, and, well, Danish pastries product.
• What are known in Britain as "Swiss rolls" are known in Switzerland as "roulades" and not associated with a particular country.
• Italian cuisine gives us "Genovese sauce", a stew/sauce for pasta dishes made by simmering beef and onions for over ten hours (you heard us). The sauce is basically exclusive to the Neapolitan/Campanian kitchen; it is unknown in the local cuisine of Genoa (and of Liguria more broadly), and nobody in Napoli or Genoa can give a firm answer how the sauce got its name (suspicion is cast on Genoese merchants during the Renaissance, but nothing is confirmed).
• German chocolate cake is not from Germany, but the US. It was originally made with "German's chocolate", pre-sweetened baking chocolate developed by Sam German (its alternate name of German's chocolate cake is a better indication of that).
• Sweetbreads are meats — specifically, the thymus glands of cows, pigs or sheep. Sweetmeat is a synonym for candy.
• A few noodle dishes in Japan are called "soba", despite soba being a specific term for buckwheat noodles and these dishes do not use buckwheat noodles:
  • Yakisoba's name seems to imply a connection to soba, but it is actually quite different; yakisoba has more in common with Chinese noodles, as ramen does. Authentic yakisoba resembles chow mein and is essentially the Japanese take on the dish (similar to how gyoza is the Japanese equivalent of the Chinese dumpling jiaozi, or potstickers as they're often called in English).
  • There's a debate on whether or not Okinawa Soba should be called soba. As Okinawa soba noodles are not buckwheat, many argue that they are actually more like udon.
• A lot of Chinese cuisine, especially Straits Chinese cuisine, have non-indicative names for various reasons:
  • Some because the dish has a poetic name, usually for delicacies. One example is "Buddha Jumps Over the Wall", type of shark's fin soup with other fancy ingredients like sea cucumber and Jinhua ham. The name is derived from a story that it is so good, a (vegetarian) Buddhist monk would jump over the monastery walls to sample it.
  • Some are due to questionable translations that have become standard.
    • Bak Kut Teh ("Meat Bone Tea") is not a kind of tea, but a pork-rib soup often served with a particular type of tea.
    • Chinese "carrot cake" or "turnip cake" is not made from turnips or carrots, but rather a type of winter radish^note This specific cultivar of the winter radish is white in colour (the root part which is used to make the dish), also known as “Daikon”, its Japanese name. The confusion possibly stems from the differences between Chinese languages. 蘿蔔/萝卜, when unqualified, usually means this white radish in Mandarin, but means “carrot” in Cantonese. And that’s not getting into other related languages and confusions over other similar plants... nor is it a "cake" as most people would recognize it, more resembling a sort of savoury pudding.
  • Some cases are historical:
    • "Hainanese chicken rice" you find in South-East Asia does not actually come from Hainan, China but rather was pioneered by Hainanese immigrants (although this one is in some dispute, as it's very similar to the "white-cut chicken" of Cantonese cuisine and the Wenchang poached chicken of actual Hainanese cuisine).
    • General Tso's Chicken was created long after Zuo Zongtang's ^note See also: Why Mao Changed His Name death and possibly made its debut in America. To add even more confusion, the Hainanese have adopted General Tso's Chicken as their own, finding it tasty and figuring it was about time someone named a dish after Zuo Zongtang.
    • The Sichuanese dish Fuqi Feipian, usually translated as "Husband and Wife Lung Slices" or "Married Couple Lung Pieces" (or variants) combines multiple strands of this. This dish—which consists of cold or room-temperature sliced meat (usually beef) in a spicy sauce—is rarely if ever actually made with lung, and lung was not part of the original recipe. Rather, the character for "lung" was used to replace the one for "offal", which is homophonous (both are pronounced fèi in Mandarin) because the originators of the dish learned their customers found the direct mention of offal offputting. Moreover, while the original recipe did call for offal (particularly beef tongue, heart, and tripe), these are often replaced with regular cuts of beef even in Sichuan. Finally, the "Husband and Wife" thing is basically just because the dish was codified a Chengdu eatery owned by a married couple in the 1930s.
  • 燻蹄 (literally "smoked hoof") is a mild case. It is made of pig's trotters, not including the hoof, and it is traditionally smoked but is now more often simmered.
• Texas Pete hot sauce is made in North Carolina.
• Chunks of ice used in beverages are called ice cubes no matter what shape they're in.
• Dubliner cheese is actually made in Cork.
• Molho à Espanhola ("Spanish-style sauce") is not Spanish, but Portuguese (it was invented in the northern city of Porto). In fact, no Spaniard ever heard of this sauce.
• The sandwich chain Subway is managed by a holding company called Doctor's Associates Inc.; the founder named the company because he was trying to earn enough money to pay for his medical school tuition. The company is not affiliated with any medical organization or personnel (although one of the cofounders had a doctorate, in physics).
• In a bizarre double-example, one variant of the chili dog called the "Coney Island (hot) dog" (or "coney dog" for short) was created in Detroit, while another, very similar type called the "Michigan (hot) dog" was created in Western New York. (Of course, Western New York is nowhere near Coney Island, and indeed has a culture more similar to Michigan than to Brooklyn, but we're just getting ahead of ourselves there.) On top of that, Cincinnati has its own "coney", similar to the Michigan creation and topped with the city's unique style of chili (it involves cinnamon and sometimes cocoa). And just to make things even more confusing, a similar dish known as the "New York System wiener" (or "hot wiener") is from... Rhode Island.
• Mongolian beef and Mongolian barbecue were invented in Taiwan, and the latter technically isn't even barbecue. Originally, Mongolian barbecue was going to be called Beijing barbecue but the politics of the 1950s has made that option volatile^note Beijing had become the de facto capital of Communist China and it even started out as a trademarked name that spawned imitators.
• Barley sugar ^note For non-Brits, a kind of boiled sweet... er, hard candy does not usually contain any barley. According to some sources, including The Other Wiki, it used to be made with barley water and still is sometimes. Others say it's a mistranslation of sucre brûlé, meaning "burnt sugar".
• A brand of sausages called "Welsh Dragon" was forced to change their name because the sausages were standard pork sausages. Nobody was actually confused over whether they contained dragon meat, but they did raise the marginally more reasonable concern that some hapless vegetarian might think "dragon meat = imaginary meat = vegetarian product".
• "Welsh rabbit" is a slightly more complicated version of cheese on toast: the base is a cheese sauce (usually made with cheese, ale, and mustard), and the sauce is then either then poured over toast and (usually) browned, or served fondue-style in a pot with strips of toast. It has no particular connection to Wales (although it is popular there), and absolutely nothing to do with rabbits. The name might have started as a mildly insulting suggestion that the Welsh just think it's a rabbit, or that the comparatively poor Welsh would call a simple dish of cheese on toast "rabbit" to hide their poverty (rabbit being expensive meat). It may also have been a joke at the expense of the Welsh fondness for cheese (the subject of English ethnic jokes about the Welsh since at least the 16th century). It was probably embarrassment at this that gave rise to the variant spelling "rarebit" (to the great annoyance of lexicographers with a sense of humor; as H. W. Fowler put it, "Welsh Rabbit is amusing and right. Welsh Rarebit is stupid and wrong"). It goes without saying that cheese on toast isn't particularly rare, either.
• Similar to Welsh rabbit, "Scotch woodcock" consists of toast thinly spread with Gentleman's Relish or some other kind of anchovy paste and topped with soft, creamy, lightly-scrambled eggs (and possibly further garnished with anchovy fillets and some fresh herbs). The dish is generally associated with high society, especially London and most especially Parliament (Scotch woodcock having been a mainstay of the Commons refreshment rooms well into the post-World War II period). There's no apparent connection to Scotland or to game birds, nor is there any other apparent reason for the name. By all accounts, the dish appears to have been modelled on "Welsh rabbit" in an almost joking manner ("well if that's a Welsh rabbit, here's a Scotch woodcock").
• Bombay duck is actually a species of lizardfish. It is, however, actually from the waters around Bombay (which is now generally called Mumbai but whatever).
• Canadian bacon did not come from Canada, nor is it eaten there any more than in the US, where the term "Canadian bacon" is used. In Canada it is referred to as "back bacon". It may be that the term may have been inspired by a particular type of back bacon known as "peameal bacon", which seems to be from Ontario. Peameal bacon is very popular in its "homeland" around Toronto, though, with peameal bacon sandwiches being a major draw at the city's famous St. Lawrence Market. The term "Canadian bacon" probably arose when peameal bacon (or some other kind of Canadian back bacon) was imported to the United States.
  • The name is somewhat indicative in that the style of back bacon in Canada—both peameal and otherwise—is distinctively Canadian in origin. Like all back bacon, Canadian-style back bacon is taken from pork loin (unlike streaky bacon, which is taken from pork belly). However, unlike British and Irish-style (back) bacon, Canadian-style back bacons are trimmed of nearly all the fat and secondary meat surrounding the "eye" of the loin; their British/Irish counterparts usually have a "tail" of fat and meat still attached. Meanwhile, back bacon is basically alien in the U.S. except as an imitation of the Canadian product.
  • "Peameal bacon" has itself become nonindicative: Originally, it was named because it was rolled in ground yellow peas as part of the preservation process. The ground peas have since universally been replaced with cornmeal.
• Corned beef is prepared using granular salt, not corn. "Corn" actually refers to any small grain-like object (e.g., peppercorns), hence the corning of beef with grains of salt. This is actually only a non-indicative name for speakers of North American English as the rest of the English-speaking world refers to the plant corn as maize.
• An "Everything Bagel" almost never includes every topping offered on a particular menu. Though recipes vary slightly from eatery to eatery, the traditional combination includes poppy seeds, sesame seeds, onion, and garlic; toppings like cheese, cinnamon, and raisins (offered at most bagel shops) are usually left off. The reason is pretty clear; you don't want clashing flavors.
• The word "chocolate" comes from the Nahuatl "xocolatl", which means "bitter water". While it did describe what chocolate was like to Mesoamerican people (a drink made of unfermented cocoa seeds, which are bitter), what we know as chocolate today is usually neither bitter nor a liquid. However, anyone who has tried baker's chocolate will know that chocolate is actually inherently bitter, and it is only through copious amounts of sugar that modern chocolate bars lose this flavor. In fact, anyone who has tried dark chocolate will actually know that chocolate still has some bitter flavors.
• Texas Roadhouse, a steakhouse chain, was founded in Clarksville, Indiana, directly across the Ohio River from its current headquarters of Louisville, Kentucky.
• "Laverbread", a staple of the Welsh kitchen, isn't really bread as we'd understand it; it consists of laver (a kind of seaweed), boiled for several hours, then minced or pureed into a jelly, rolled in oatmeal, and then fried.
• The French Dip sandwich is not French in origin. It was invented in Los Angeles by two different people (depending on who you ask, they're the original inventor, though it's possible one of them was a French immigrant). The only thing French about the French Dip is it's served on a baguette. Interestingly, many aficionados of the sandwich as it is served at the two original restaurants would argue that the French Dips sold else where aren't really French Dips: while in most places, the sandwich has the hot roast beef in a baguette and served with a cup of the jus for the eater to dip the whole sandwich into, at both of the original places the bread is dipped in the jus first and then the beef is added, with the wet sandwich served to the consumer without a side of jus (because at that point it's overkill).
• Wits in the US armed forces claim that "MRE" (Meal, Ready to Eat) is non-indicative in three ways, i.e. it's not a meal, it's not ready and you can't eat it. The accusations are in some sense correct. While the entree, which is what the packaging is labeled with, isn't a full meal, it does come with a number of sides to make it a complete meal. And if you want it warmed up, they do require some preparation like adding water and heating. The entrees themselves are shelf stable and resmeble canned food (just replace the can with a retort pouch), but eating food straight out of a can is rarely pleasant. How true the third charge actually is varies from meal to meal, though they have certainly been accused of being designed with taste as at best an afterthought.
• Pork butt comes from the pig's shoulder area, not its backside. The term comes from the barrels that would (in the days before refrigeration) be used to store pork shoulder as it was being cured or pickled. (As in, a "buttload of X.")
• Bakeapples are fruit, but they're not apples, they're berries, and they don't even look or taste like apples. Other names for them are cloudberry, knotberry, knoutberry, aqpik, low-bush salmonberry (they have nothing to do with salmon, either, although they can be sort of salmon-colored), averin and evron.
• Marshmallows (the confectionery) were originally made from marsh mallows, a species of mallow that grows in marshy terrain, but are now just made from sugar, gelatin and various other ingredients, making the name of the confectionery now an Artifact Title.
• The chocolate bar known as Fry's Turkish Delight is made by Cadbury, a British company, though it does contain the delicacy known as Turkish delight, which may or may not have been invented in Turkey. It is the sole remaining product line preserved by Cadburys from their takeover of Fry.
• Saltwater taffy got its name from being traditionally sold on the beach or boardwalk; it contains no more salt or water than any other candy that would use those ingredients and tastes neither salty nor watery.
• Many dishes named after Italian city\regions were actually made by immigrants from that place, such as Neapolitan ice cream and chicken/veal/meat parmigiana. Brazil has it even worse, with things such as the Calabrese pepper (no pepper is native to Europe).
• Olive oil:
  • Despite its name, olive oil is considered a juice because it's obtained by juicing olives like you would an apple or orange (true oils are obtained by squeezing the seeds or some other part of the plant).
  • Extra virgin olive oil has (thankfully) nothing to do with whether or not someone has done inappropriate things with the oil or the bottle it's in. It's a measure of acidity, and it has to do with a) how the oil was obtained (only oils obtained by cold-pressing the olives can qualify as extra virgin or virgin) and b) whether or not any chemicals were used to obtain the oil or to refine and process it. (Extra virgin and virgin olive oils cannot have any chemicals used in the process of obtaining the oil, and cannot be refined or processed with chemicals after the fact.) Furthermore, it is not uncommon for oils marketed as extra-virgin or virgin to not qualify in some way (e.g. to have been refined with chemicals after pressing), or to be "cut" with lesser-quality olive oils. The best way to know for sure is by smell and taste: real extra-virgin and virgin olive oils usually have a distinct "fruity" smell and flavor to them, and cause a slight burning sensation when swallowed straight. Color is also a good indicator, as the real stuff tends to be golden yellow or green in color, but this isn't as reliable as the smell-and-taste test—although that being said, even the smell-and-taste test isn't foolproof, as some varietal or regional forms of olive oil (like oil made from the Kalamata olive and oil from Liguria in northwestern Italy) have a natural "buttery" smell and flavor rather than a "fruity" one.
• Someone who invites you to eat a "Dutch baby" is just a pancake enthusiast, not a racist cannibal. Probably. (Speaking of which, pancakes these days are usually cooked on a griddle, not a pan—though Dutch babies are prepared in pans basically by necessity, as they have to be transferred from a stovetop to an oven.)
• A Uruguayan sandwich-style dish known as Chivito doesn't contain goat meat despite its name literally meaning "goaty". Instead being made of toasted bread with a thin slice of beef, mayonnaise, ham and several other ingredients. It was created as an improvised meal when a foreign patron ordered goat meat which the restaurant did not have, the dish become incredibly popular and was named after the incident.
  • A popular variation known as Chivito Canadiense (Canadian Chivito) is also from Uruguay; most Canadians have never heard of it. The key ingredient, however, is Canadian bacon (which, as mentioned, is only semi-non-indicative).
• The Bakewell tart is named such because it was developed as a variant of the less well known Bakewell pudding, not because it actually originated from Bakewell. The Bakewell pudding, however, was first created in Bakewell.
• Fish and chips are seen as this by Americans, as it has chips in the British sense, known in America as fries.
• Plum pudding doesn't contain plums. It does contain raisins, however, which were called plums in Victorian times, hence the name.
• Oranges aren't always orange. In many countries, oranges are green — even when ripe — and are sold that way in the shops. Most of the ones sold in America and Europe have been artificially "oranged" by being sprayed with ethylene gas.^note And before you ask, the colour was named after the fruit. And most languages name the fruit something else completely different..
• The ingredients for Dijon mustard are mostly grown in Canada, and these days it's likely to be mixed and packaged in a neighboring town to, not in, Dijon, France.
• City chicken is almost always made of beef, veal, pork, or a combination of the above, and almost never actually chicken. It was invented in the north midwestern United States, where pork, veal, and beef were commonly transported around in trains, but not chicken. As this was before refrigerated vehicles were common, this meant chicken was very expensive. Someone had the weird idea to skewer chunks of pork or beef into a drumstick shape (or put ground meat into a drumstick-shaped mold), bread and fry it, and sell it as a substitute for chicken. People liked it enough to continue eating "city chicken" even after chicken became affordable in the area, and no one ever changed its name.
• Hawaiian pizza (which in turn inspired a whole bunch of "Hawaiian" dishes with pineapple in them) was invented in Canada. Sam Panopoulos, the alleged creator, supposedly named it this way because of the obvious general relation people make between Hawaii and pineapples.
  • Interestingly, the same guy tried to make a "Hawaiian Burger" but failed because people wouldn't eat it. Now, you can go to several trendy burger joints and order a Hawaiian burger, with pineapple and all. Poor Mr. Panopoulos was probably just ahead of his time.
  • Relatedly, in 1963, Ray Kroc was trying to develop a meatless item for his McDonald's restaurants that could be sold to Roman Catholics on days of abstinence (every Friday). His preferred solution to this problem was what he called the "Hulaburger" (note the trendy '60s Hawaiian branding!), which replaced the meat in the standard McDonald's burger with a grilled pineapple ring. However, at about the same time, a McDonald's franchisee in a heavily Catholic area of Cincinnati had developed his own solution: a sandwich with a square of fried fish in place of the patty, and with fish-appropriate accoutrements as toppings. Kroc challenged the franchisee to prove the fish sandwich against the Hulaburger to target the Catholic fasting market; the franchisee agreed, and the fish offering beat the Hulaburger by a country mile. This sandwich—which (as you might've guessed) was the ancestral form of today's Filet-O-Fish—was added to the chain's nationwide permanent menu in 1965.
  • TV chef Clemens Wilmenrod gave 1950s West Germany Toast Hawaii: A slice of toasted white sandwich bread topped with a slice of ham, a ring of canned pineapple, and processed cheese, quickly popped in the oven for the cheese to melt and then topped with a candied "maraschino" cherry. An incredibly nostalgic dish for many Germans—even to this day—it of course had nothing to do with actual Hawaii.
• In Mexico, Enchiladas Suizas ("Swiss Enchiladas", Enchiladas being soft tacos drenched in some sauce that may or may not have any chilies in it, playing this trope even straighter) are a very popular breakfast. You guessed it, they have absolutely nothing to do with Switzerland. The general theory is that they were called that way because the recipe includes generous amounts of cheese, but then again, the cheese used is not from Switzerland, so nobody is sure.
• In some regions of Mexico, particularly the central states and Mexico City, a taco with melted cheese on a wheat flour tortilla (as opposed to a corn tortilla) is called a Gringa. "Gringo/a"^note depending on grammatical gender is slang for a person or thing from the United States, but Gringas were invented in Mexico, and not their northern neighbor. The general verdict is that they were called like that because wheat tortillas are more popular in America than corn tortillas, but still, very few taco joints in the good old U.S. of A. will know what you're talking about if you order a Gringa.
• The "cacahuate japonés" (literally, Japanese peanut) snack was not invented in Japan, but in Mexico. The creator was a Japanese immigrant, though.
• The "napolitana" variation of veal milanesa was not invented in Napoli, Italy, but in Argentina. The name comes from El Nápoli, the restaurant that invented it, and that it's a combination of a milanesa and a neapolitan pizza. Which, of course, makes it essentially identical to veal parmigiana.
• Croissants are called "medialunas" in some Spanish-speaking countries even though they resemble crescents, not half-moons.
• Himalayan black salt is not black at all. It forms violet to pink crystals (which are dark but still not black), and is pale pink when powdered.
• The "vein" inside of a shrimp, that most chefs will tell you to remove before cooking the shrimp... isn't a vein at all. It's the shrimp's digestive tract. And that dark stuff on the inside? That's not blood. (It's poop.)
• Sichuan pepper/prickly ash is a two-fer. It's unrelated to either type of pepper and it's not related to the ash tree. It's actually more related to the citrus family.
• XO sauce does not contain any XO (extra-old) cognac or any other liquor. Its name comes from Hong Kong slang meaning high quality (though it was coined in reference the XO designation commonly used on well-aged cognacs). Since it's made out of seasoned chopped seafood and ham, it is mostly solid, and barely actually a sauce either.
• Breadfruit, naturally, is not bread, nor is it related to any plants (grains) that are turned into bread. It got its named from the bread-like texture it has after you cook it (which tastes like a potato...).
• Jerusalem artichokes aren't from Jerusalem, or actually artichokes (although they are related). They are native to the Americas, and rather than being prized for their unopened flower buds like artichokes are, they are prized for their tubers, which are used and eaten like another well-known tuber, the potato.
• The French "haricots verts" literally translates to "green beans" in English. However, when an English speaker says "haricots verts", they're referring to a similar but different plant — slightly thinner, longer, crispier, and sweeter — than when they refer to "green beans". The alternate English word for haricots verts, French green bean, is equally non-indicative, since they originate from South America.
• Chocolate and vanilla are made from "cocoa beans" and "vanilla beans" — no relation the Fabaceae (aka Leguminosae) family of actual legumes/beans.
  • On that note, 香草 in Chinese (literally "fragrant grass") may refer to vanilla or herbs in general, despite that vanilla isn't a herb (it is a spice) or a grass (it is an orchid).
• Bunny chow should never ever be fed to a bunny, as it consists of curry within a cube-shaped bread bowl. The most popular explanation for its name is that it was created by the Banias people in South Africa, but it was misheard as "bunnies."
• Onigiri are also known in the western hemisphere as "rice balls". However, their form is usually cylindrical or triangular instead of round like a ball.
• The "Swiss wings" of Canto-Western cuisine (whether it originated in Guangzhou or Hong Kong is a hot topic, but it’s popular across the Pearl River Delta today, as well as in Southeast Asia) has nothing to do with Switzerland. The only guess is that it came from from a misunderstanding of the "sweet" soy-sauce-and-roasted-stock liquid the chicken wings are marinated in. This led to a funny moment when the Swiss consulate in Hong Kong posted a clarification that Swiss wings are not actually Swiss, because they kept getting inquiries on it.
• "Irish potatoes". Because "Irish-American coconut creams (that look like potatoes)" is just not something you can put on a candy box. (For the curious, these cream-based candies, native to Philadelphia, are rolled in cinnamon and sprinkled with nuts for a potato-like appearance; they seem to have arisen among the city’s large Irish-American community and commonly appear in the shops around St. Patrick's Day.)
• Philadelphia Cream Cheese isn't from any of the various cities or towns called Philadelphia. The closest connection is that there's a Philadelphia near to where it was developed (and continues to be made) in Upstate New York, but the brand name was apparently intended to borrow marketing power from the well-known Philadelphia, PA dairy industry in the 19th century.
• In France, döner kebab are referred as "sandwich grec" ("Greek sandwich") in Paris (the rest of the country calls the dish "kebab"). Döner kebab had been invented in Germany by Turkish people working in fast food/street food fields. It seems the confusion came from the 1980s, when Greek merchants settled in Paris to sell gyros (Greek dish similar to the döner kebab).
• Samurai sauce isn't a Japanese but a Belgian hot sauce.
• Chilean sea bass is not related to the sea basses. It refers to two separate members of the toothfish family, the Patagonian and Antarctic toothfishes. One of its other names, the icefish, is also another misnomer; it's not a true icefish.
• Obviously, hotdogs are not made from actual dogs.
• Yangzhou fried rice, Fujian fried rice, Guangzhou fried rice, Western fried rice, Hong Kong fried rice — not a single one came from where it is named after! All of them likely originated from Hong Kong (or Taiwan), with the sole exception of Hong Kong fried rice; no one knows where that came from. Yuanyang fried rice, named after the Mandarin duck, does not usually contain duck, as it is a reference to Mandarin ducks' high sexual dimorphism; the rice dish is made up of two halves in white and orange sauce (plus other contrasting ingredients) respectively. The same applies to Yuanyang, the drink, which has nothing to do with the rice dish either; it is a mixture of coffee and tea.
• Singapore-style noodles is yet another Hong Kong invention.
• Fishballs are referred to as "fish eggs" in Cantonese, despite not being made of fish eggs. Chikuwa means "bamboo ring" in Japanese (or "bamboo wheel" in Chinese), but is actually a cylindrical-shaped fishball-like snack (which is traditionally roasted on a stick of bamboo). Even more confusingly, Chikuwa is called 獅子狗 (the Pekingese dog, or literally, "lion dog") in Hong Kong — where it is named after an anime Pekingese dog character, who has Chikuwa as his Trademark Favorite Food.
• Chow mein (炒面) is well-known Chinese fried noodles. However, in Tibet, 炒面 can be used to label Tsampa, which is roasted flour.
• Grass jelly is made with Platostoma palustre, which is a species in the mint family, and not a true grass (despite that it looks a lot like grass, compared to corn or bamboo, which are grasses).
• If a food item or beverage says it's flavored with "natural flavors", it could mean that they literally included flavor from, say, the zest and/or juice of an orange... or it could mean that while the flavor compounds themselves are naturally found in oranges, and therefore they're natural in that sense, these particular ones were made in a lab somewhere. Also, these flavorants are nowhere near as complex as flavor compounds found in nature. What they usually do is isolate a few compounds that have the strongest flavor (out of hundreds or potentially thousands naturally in the fruit or what have you). This is why strawberry candy tastes nothing like biting into an actual strawberry.
• 金門火腿 is a ham, but is not from 金門 (Kinmen in Taiwan); it is a transliteration of English "gammon".
• 珊瑚蚌 ("coral clam") is not a clam, but the innards of a sea cucumber.
• Starfruit is named 楊桃 ("poplar peach") in Chinese, but isn't closely related to either poplars or peaches. Carambola is another name for this fruit in the Americas.
• Sichuan peppers aren't really peppers. Their spiciness comes from a different compound, and they are more closely related to oranges than peppers.
• A "pineapple bun" in Hong Kong usually does not have pineapple in it. The name comes from the golden, cracked crust that resembles a ripe pineapple. And if you see something that reads literally as "pineapple oil", it is the same bun with an added slice of butter.
  • Similarly, the Japanese "melon bread" does not contain any melon in it; it got its name because the texture looks like a melon.
• Japanese "Turkish rice" (トルコライス/Toruko Raisu) is not only not from Turkey, but also has pork as a key ingredient, which is awkward when Turkish people (who are largely Muslim) came across it.
• Neither of what is known as "Portuguese sauce" in Macau or Argentina came from Portugal, and they aren't related with each other either. "Portuguese sauce" in Macau (葡汁) in a coconut-based curry, while "salsa portuguesa" in Argentina is a tomato-based condiment.
• This Chinese article lists several common ones involving China:
  • Lanzhou lamian (usually a beef pulled noodles in broth) often comes from Hualong, Qinghai. This actually prompted the article, because Hualong noodles are now being considered famous enough on its own to shed the non-indicative name. ^note While on the topic of lamian, it literally means "pulled noodles" and is what the more internationally well-known Japanese ramen is derived from, although ramen is more often sliced and not pulled. Hilariously, Wikipedia has this photo◊ of a lamian shop in Australia –- the Chinese sign meant to say "northwest" lamian (Xīběi, as in, originating in northwest China), but the English translation became the completely unrelated "sea bay".
  • Chongqing chicken pot comes from the Wu region (around Shanghai).
  • Tianjin onion pancakes comes from Taiwan.
  • Hangzhou xiaolongbao (a type of small, white bun) usually comes from Shengzhou, but the latter name is not used because its name uses an obscure character in Chinese.
  • Rumali roti is a real Indian dish, translated to Chinese as "Indian flying pancake", but food with that name in China is quite different and likely came from Hong Kong or Malaysia.
  • Most egregiously, "New Orleans wings" are also an entirely Chinese phenomenon, with stories floating around that Chinese NBA player Yi Jianlian visited New Orleans only to not be able to find the dish.
• While Col. Harland Sanders did invent the KFC original recipe at his restaurant/motel in Kentucky (though Sanders was actually born and raised across the Ohio River in southern Indiana), the first franchised location was in Utah, and the name Kentucky Fried Chicken was coined there as well.
• No, there is no coffee in coffee cake or coffee rolls — they were so named because they were originally intended to be eaten while drinking coffee (or tea). Typical coffee cake is vanilla-flavored and sprinkled with cinnamon streusel, while coffee rolls are somewhat flat cinnamon rolls.
• Likewise, teacakes, tea sandwiches, tea biscuits and the like are called that because they're eaten at teatime. Their exact meaning varies from country to country, but it's very rare to see one that actually has tea in it.
• Scampi is the Italian plural form for a word that can either refer to a specific type of lobster or a prawn, with some regional variations. In English, it's used to denote a specific dish preparation of seafood or other meat with a lemon-garlic butter sauce and angel hair pasta. So "shrimp scampi" and "chicken scampi" technically don't have any scampi in them.
• Scotch eggs have no apparent connection to Scotland. Their first appearance is in an English cookbook in 1805, and it's suggested they might actually be a British take on nargisi kofta or egg kofta, an Indian dish of Persian origin.
• Tangerines, the citrus fruits, were named after the city of Tangier, Morocco, but tangerine trees are native to China. It got its English name because the first person in the Anglosphere to grow tangerines, Major Atway, bought his initial stock from a seller in Tangier.
• Blancmange literally means "white food" in French. While the basic recipe is white, chefs since the Middle Ages have sought to make it more interesting by adding colouring agents as well as additional flavourings. In modern Britain, a standard version is flavoured with strawberries, and is bright pink.
• Buffalo Wild Wings contains several categories of sauce based on the spiciness of the sauce. The hottest is Wild which does not contain the literal Wild sauce.
• "White" grapes are light green in colour. Their name comes from the fact that they're used to make white wine (which is also non-indicative, as it's more yellow than white). Similarly, "red" grapes can be red, but they can also be purple or black.

Drinks

• The company that makes AriZona Iced Tea, Arizona Beverages, has always been based in New York (originally in Brooklyn, now in Nassau County on Long Island). The co-founder who named the product (which eventually became the company name) had never traveled west of the Mississippi River at the time.
• Long Island Iced Tea is, um, not what you want to be drinking if you just fancy a cold cuppa. It is iced, though, and presumably from Long Island,^note If not necessarily the one you're thinking of; although most stories hold that the drink was invented somewhere on that big island in New York, but one tale has it that it was invented in a place in Tennessee called "Long Island" during Prohibition for some reason. so it's at least three-quarters accurate. It looks like and can taste a bit like iced tea with lemon, too, if mixed properly, but it still isn't iced tea and still doesn't contain any.
• An egg cream contains neither eggs nor cream; it's made of milk, chocolate syrup, and soda water (it's basically a fizzy chocolate milk). It does, however, resemble a creamed egg (creamed meaning "frothy"). Some researchers believe that early versions of the drink did indeed have both egg and cream as ingredients, as a cheaper variation on the then-recently-invented milkshake. According to this theory, the "New York Egg Cream" then removed egg and cream because they're expensive ingredients.
• A real life drink which aims to provide all the nutrients that one would ever need goes under the name "Soylent". It's named after the fictitious meal from Make Room! Make Room!, which would seem to indicate either a mix of soy and lentils, or else that it's made of people — thankfully, neither of these is the case.
• Ginger beer, root beer, birch beer, ginger ale and butterbeer are all non-alcoholic drinks, though the first four were actually fermented like their more grown-up namesakes, and the last coincidentally shares its name with an actual Tudor-era drink based on heated up beer and butter. Now, most beverages sold as these drinks are made like any other soda-pop/fizzy drink these days; a flavored syrup dissolved in carbonated water. Finding these beverages in the original, brewed and fermented form is rare, although some places do make it and are gaining in popularity (e.g. Small Town Brewery's "Not Your Father's Root Beer", an alcoholic root beer that became popular in the United States c. 2015).
• Red Rock Cider was once the subject of an advertising campaign pointing out that 'It's not red, and there's no rocks in it'.
• Tea:
  • The most common variety of tea in the Western world, known as "black tea", is actually reddish. To be fair, the name refers to the color of the oxidized leaves, but is misleading when talking about the drink itself (which is called "red tea" in Asia).
  • "Orange pekoe" refers to whole, dried, unbroken tea leaves regardless of what color they are. And of course, it has no oranges in it.
• Fucking hell, a beer from The Berlin Republic, is not a "Helles" but a pilsener, nor does it have anything to do with the Austrian village it was named after (which would later change its name to Fugging).
• Buttermilk is beset with these:
  • Historically, it was the thick, sour liquid left over from churning slightly soured cream to make butter.^note In the days before refrigeration, you basically couldn't make a worthwhile amount of butter from a single day's milk yield unless you had a whole hell of a lot of cows. This meant that at least some cream would have waited—and thus fermented—a day or two before being churned. This kind (called "churn buttermilk") contains less butterfat than whole milk does.
  • "Cultured buttermilk" was developed as an imitation of churn buttermilk. It's just regular milk that's been re-inoculated with bacteria, so it's not buttermilk in the sense of having anything to do with butter. It's actually what was historically called sour milk (not to be confused with spoiled milk).
  • As a bonus, the term "cultured buttermilk", while strictly correct, is misleading, since it implies that churned buttermilk isn't cultured (hasn't been fermented by bacteria). If you churn fresh cream, the leftover liquid is thin and not sour.
• Herbal teas are more properly called tisanes or herbal infusions, not teas. True tea is the infusion of specifically the leaves of the Camellia sinesis plant. Also, the different varieties of tea, black, green, white, Oolong, Earl Grey, etc., are different preparations of the same plant.
• "Energy" drinks would more accurately be called "stimulant drinks". In particular, low-calorie energy drinks contain little or no energy.
• The Society for Creative Anachronism's Pennsic War has a drink called the "Strawberry Surprise", which consists of grain alcohol and pepper spray. The surprise is that it tastes nothing like strawberries and everything like PAIN.
• So-called "zero sugar" or "sugar free" drinks actually contain small amounts of sugar. It's not considered false advertising because the amount is less than 1 g/100 mL, which rounded down becomes zero.
• White wine is actually more of a yellowish colour. This also extends to the grapes used to make it, which are referred to as "white" grapes despite actually being light green in colour.
  • To add to the confusion, the Portuguese "vinho verde", literally "green wine", while sometimes greenish, can be of any wine colour (from "white" to rosé to red). The wine is called "green" because it’s young—typically bottled 3-6 months after harvest and sold for immediate consumption soon after (it's a fruity, refreshing, slightly sparkling wine for summer/hot-weather drinking,^note Kind of the exact opposite of port and Madeira, Portugal's other great wine exports and not supposed to be aged at all).
• Port wine, or "vinho do Porto" in the native Portuguese, only barely has any relationship to the city of Porto from which it gets its name. The grapes are (perhaps obviously) grown, crushed, and initially fermented in the rural areas of the Douro River valley east of the city. The wine is then fortified, aged, and blended in the cellars of the port wine houses of Vila Nova de Gaia—the suburb/twin city of Porto on the south bank of the Douro (Porto proper being on the north bank). The connection (beyond just metonymy of "Porto" for "the area around the mouth of the Douro") seems to mostly be that once the wine was aged in Gaia, it would be put on boats across the river and then offloaded onto ships setting sail from Porto for export to the rest of Portugal and the world (but mostly England).
• Similarly to white wine, "white tea" is clear or yellowish. The name is used in the sense that it's plain (ie does not have as strong a flavour as other teas) and does not refer to the colour of the drink.
• Straining water through certain ground up plants like soybeans, coconut, almonds, oats, peas, rice, or flax produces a white or off-white opaque liquid with a milk-like texture, so they've been referred to literally for centuries as "milks" (soy milk, almond milk, etc.), despite the fact that they obviously are not lactated from the mammary glands of a female mammal. In 2018, the United States FDA seriously began considering making a federal rule against referring to such beverages as "milk" specifically because "an almond doesn't lactate." These regulatory efforts were eventually ended basically because everyone not directly involved with the dairy industry realized they were ridiculous (especially given that almond milk in particular had been called that, in English, since the Middle Ages;^note That is, English speakers have called almond milk "almond milk" (or something along those lines) since before it was the language we recognize as English today. here's a recipe/discussion from Tasting History with Max Miller for a c. 1430 English recipe whose first ingredient is "Mylke of Almaundys").
• Hawaiian Punch was invented in California (the "Hawaiian" was because the initial batch was made from fruit juices imported from Hawaii).
• Duck Shit Tea fortunately does not involve duck feces or feces at all, it is actually a type of oolong tea. No one knows for sure how it got its name but allegedly it's because of the soil it grew in or it was called that to scare away thieves.
• Many restaurants will call their drinks medium and large sizes without having a small size. However, a medium implies that there is supposed to be something less, only using the name because it is the average size of a medium, but still not having anything to compare it to.

Government and Military

• A pretty sizable portion of United States Secret Service agents aren't exactly very secretive about who they are, since their job hinges upon being recognized as security enforcers by the public. Granted, they do have undercover operatives, but they also have a uniformed division, and even their "plainclothes" operatives are instantly recognizable by the black suits and earpieces that they wear. Of course, these "plainclothes" officers are different from the actual plainclothes officers, who are dispersed among the crowd, do not always wear black suits, and have other ways of keeping in contact.
• In most countries, the "Interior Ministry" or "Interior Department" is responsible for administering the country's law enforcement, national security, elections, and immigration (among others). The United States Department of the Interior does none of that — they are responsible for federally-owned lands and resources like national parks, as well as federal programs related to Native American tribes.^note The terminology does have common origins: In the early 19th century, most European countries typically had about five chief ministries—one for national finances, one for the army, one for the navy (if they had one), one for diplomatic affairs, possibly a chief legal officer, and one for literally everything else, i.e. internal affairs. The US followed this model, but in the early days assigned both the diplomatic and internal functions to the Secretary of State, largely because the federal government had few domestic powers not directly related to the financial business of the Treasury. When the job got too big for one secretary, the domestic functions of the Secretary of State were assigned to a new "Secretary of the Interior", whose role didn’t seem too divergent from his European equivalents back in the 1830s (as at that time these European Interior Ministries were still the catchall "wastebasket" departments); it was just that there was no general federal law enforcement service at that time (there was the Marshals Service, but that was strictly for the support of the judiciary and under their control; there were also some tax enforcement services under the Treasury Department).
• The Railroad Commission of Texas is a powerful regulatory body that deals with the state's energy industry—oil and gas, certain mining operations (specifically coal and uranium), and some environmental laws. It does not, however, have any authority to regulate railroads. Its name is an Artifact Title. The body was founded in 1891 to regulate railroads, and expanded over time to also include the energy industry. It continued to regulate the state's railroads until 1984, when the federal government took over regulation of rail transportation.
• At least two prominent historical Anarchist tracts were published under the title, "Down with the Anarchists!"
• The British "Special Air Service" (SAS) is actually part of the British Army, and not particularly involved in airborne operations (they can drop from both aeroplanes and helicopters, but it's not their primary task). It was named such at the unit's creation during World War II to make the Axis forces think it was a paratrooper regiment. For added fun, it was originally referred to as the "Special Air Service Regiment", in spite of not being, nor ever having been anywhere near, regiment strength.
• The U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division is also a rather non-indicative title, or at least today's 10th Mountain. The original was genuinely specially trained to fight in mountainous terrain, but was reorganized into the 10th Infantry Division after the war, before getting deactivated in 1958. In 1985, a new light infantry division was named the 10th Mountain Division to tie into the historical 10th Mountain, but their training and role is more generalized. They even joke about it, with the division's unofficial motto being "We Don't Do Mountains".
• At the time of SEAL Team Six's naming, there were only two US Navy SEAL teams — Commander Richard Marcinko intentionally named it "Six" to try to confuse Soviet intelligence into thinking there were at least six such units, if not more.
• Several of the United States District Courts have these names. Most prominent is probably the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, which is based in Los Angeles and whose jurisdiction is exclusively (or almost exclusively) in Southern California (depending on your definition of Southern California); the Southern District is based in San Diego. There are a few other choice ones; a good example would be the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, which, while indeed based further south of most of the State of New York (in Manhattan), it does not include the most southern point in the state (Staten Island, which is in the Brooklyn-based Eastern District of New York).
  • There's also the Supreme Court of the State of New York, which is actually the lowest state court of general jurisdiction in New York. (There are a mess of local courts below the Supreme Court with limited jurisdiction.) The higher courts are called the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division and the New York Court of Appeals.
• Speaking of "Supreme Courts", South Africa has a strange history in its use of this term.
  • When the Union of South Africa was established in 1910, the Supreme Court was the name of the court system, which had both local and provincial divisions. The highest court was simply called the "Appellate Division", a single court based in Bloemfontein. This terminology continued in use after the Union was replaced by the Republic of South Africa in 1961.
  • In 1994, with the demise of apartheid, the Constitutional Court, sitting in Johannesburg, was established as the highest court in constitutional matters. The Appellate Division remained the highest court for all other matters.
  • The Supreme Court system was abolished in 1997. Its local and provincial divisions, as well as the supreme courts of the apartheid-era Bantustans, became separate High Courts. The Appellate Division was renamed the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA). It had authority to hear constitutional cases, though the Constitutional Court remained the highest court for those matters. In all other matters, the SCA remained the highest court.
  • A 2013 constitutional amendment again reorganized the court system. Relevant to the SCA, it became subordinate to the Constitutional Court in all matters. (The previous High Courts became subdivisions of the new High Court of South Africa.)
• The Germans were incredibly fond of these as they started to subvert the Versailles Treaty. The "Troops Office" was ostensibly a human resources office and instead served as the high command until the Wehrmacht was formed. The next generation of U-boat crews were trained at the "Anti-Submarine Defense School" in Kiel, while the Luftwaffe readied its new pilots at the "commercial flying school" (which was run by German airline Lufthansa). It only got worse once the Nazis came to power, where a phone tapping headquarters was labelled as a "research office".
• The House of Commons and Senate in Canada start every legislative session after the King's Speech from the Throne by introducing An Act respecting the Administration of Oaths of Office and An Act relating to Railways, respectively. Neither of these bills has anything to do with Oaths of Office or Railways. The text of both acts are nearly identical and basically say "We're discussing this bill to prove to that we're independent and don't have to follow His Majesty's instructions if we don't want to. So there."
• Low-level texts on The American Revolution often refer to the British Army's German auxiliaries as "Hessian mercenaries", neither of which is necessarily true, on several levels:
  • They weren't really "mercenaries". The British Army "borrowed" several regiments by entering into alliances with various German principalities in exchange for payment in cash or trade concessions (a somewhat shady but technically legal way of waging war). They were thus not truly "mercenaries", as they were regular soldiers in the army of a (nominal) belligerent ordered to the theatre by their government, instead of being Private Military Contractors.
  • Most of them weren't Hessian. The Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel was one of the principalities that did a deal like this with Britain, but not the only one.
  • Not all the Germans fighting for the British were this kind of rent-a-regiments. A sizable contingent of the Germans that fought for the British in America were the loyal subjects of one Georg, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, Elector of Hannover,^note If you want to go full German: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Herzog von Braunschweig und Lüneburg, Erzschatzmeister und Kurfürst des Heiligen Römischen Reiches—George William Frederick, Duke of Brunswick and Lüneburg, Arch-Treasurer and Prince-Elector of the Holy Roman Empire. whom the British Government did not need to ask, let alone pay off, to get his participation in this particular fight. The Duke-Elector's great-grandfather had inherited some islands off the coast of France when the islands' council of nobles and leading commoners decided, after much deliberation, to prune the family tree of their royal family. As a result, Duke Georg was rather in the habit of calling himself "George III, King of Great Britain and Ireland..."
• Tanks were originally called land cruisers or landships, but the British government decided to call them "water tanks" during the development stage to fool any spies into believing that their purpose was to carry water around. The name "tank" stuck.
• Relatedly, in English-speaking military parlance, plain solid ammo without hollow points, tracers, or incendiary loads is still called "ball", despite universally being either a cylinder with one rounded end (pistol ammo) or pointed (rifle ammo). In fact, the word "bullet" comes from the French word boulette, meaning "little ball", as prior to modern rifles almost all firearms shot spherical lead balls. And the current French word for "bullet" is balle.
• German tank names:
  • Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus. Now, with a name meaning "mouse" in German, you'd expect it to be a small light scout tank, right? Wrong. It is a 188-ton superheavy tank, the largest and heaviest tank ever built, with a 128mm and a 75mm coaxial gun, 200mm front/185mm side/160mm rear (with the turret having 240/210/210mm front/side/back respectively) armor. Who said Germans had a bad sense of humor? However this was done on purpose, so that the Allies wouldn't guess anything about the vehicle if they discovered the name, as the Germans had given away a couple of secrets earlier in the war by using code names that were too reflective of the actual devices or operations.
  • Landkreuzer P-1000 Ratte on the drawing board. A rat is slightly bigger than a mouse. The Ratte? Not so much. It was theoretically 1000 metric tons (in practice it would have been twice that) with two 280mm naval guns, a 128mm antitank gun, eight 20mm anti-aircraft guns and two 15mm heavy machine guns!
  • More "mundane" German AFVs got this naming treatment at the same time. Hummel means "bumblebee", and was the name initially given to a Self-Propelled Artillery gun. Rather amusingly in this instance, Hitler disapproved of the name because he felt calling an SPG "bumblebee" was a little inappropriate. Its smaller, lighter, team-mate, based on the standard light tank chassis, was, however, called Wespe — the Wasp. Carrying on the naming convention, a version of the Hummel which mounted the potent 88mm anti-tank gun, used specifically as a tank-destroyer, became the Hornisse — the Hornet. The Hornisse was eventually renamed the Nashorn (Rhinoceros) thanks to Hitler's dislike of the insect labels, but the names Wespe and Hummel stuck around. But even Nashorn is an odd name since a Rhino sounds more indicative of a heavily-armored close-range brawler while the Hornisse/Nashorn was lightly-armored, designed to use the range of its 88 to knock out tanks from a longer distance away.
  • At the other end of the spectrum, Germany experimented with developing a small remote-controlled mobile bomb on tank treads. What did they call this little thing? Goliath.
• Soviet military vehicles often had rather confusing designations for political reasons. For example the Tu-22 and Tu-22M are entirely different aircraft with different NATO reporting names. The "M" designation normally simply denotes a modernized version of a previous piece of equipment, but the Tu-22M was so named to downplay that the previous Tu-22 was a failure largely thanks to the party's meddling. Similarly, the final variant of the famous T-34 tank is made to look like its a minor update to a war time model, but is actually a significant revision of the design with a new engine, treads, and most electronics.
• A Claymore mine is not a sword.
  • The swords themselves are an example of this. The term "claymore" is an anglicisation of the Gaelic "claidheamh-mór", or "great sword", and has nothing to do with clay or having more of it than anyone else. Additionally, the term "claymore" is used to refer both to large, two-handed swords and smaller, basket-handled swords, which only have being larger than most swords in common use in their respective time periods in common.
• The term "land mine" originally referred, unsurprisingly, to mining, i.e. digging. An army could dig tunnels under fortifications to collapse the wall from below. Later, the tunnels were stuffed with explosives, and eventually the term began to refer to the explosive charge instead of the hole it was buried in. Now, it refers to many explosive devices that aren't even buried, like naval mines and the claymore.
• Also, a Chicago Typewriter is not a typewriter, it is a nickname for the Thompson submachine gun (also known as the Tommy Gun). It was also not developed in Chicago, but Cleveland, Ohio. The "Chicago" in this instance refers to its use by gangsters in Chicago during the Prohibition era, while the "typewriter" is a play on its sound, which resembles the sound of rapid typing.
• The Saturday Night Massacre was not a bloodbath. It was just the term used by political commentators to refer to President Richard Nixon's dismissal of the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and as a result the protest resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus on October 20, 1973.
• Reforms to the higher education sector in England proposed in 2017 involves establishing an Office for Students. It's not an university students' advocacy bureau; it's an unified higher education regulator.
• Zig-zagged with the use of the word "grau" (grey) in naming 20th century German military uniform colours. Some of these shades are actual greys or off-greys, while others are more accurately described as dull greens or browns (e.g. khakigrau).

Political Parties

As demonstrated by these examples, politicians aren't exactly the most trustworthy people.

• The "Grand Old Party" (AKA the Republican Party) is not the oldest party in American politics. That would be its main rival, the Democratic Party.^note Though confusingly enough, what's now the Democratic Party actually called itself the Republican Party at the time of its founding, with the "Democratic Party" name coming about when it split into two factions and the other faction (the National Republican Party, also not an ancestor of the modern Republican Party, at least not directly) dying out shortly afterward. The first recorded instance of the nickname being used was a mere ten years after the party's official founding. That being said, the party's current demographics tend to skew towards older voters.
• In America, Democrats are also republicans, and Republicans are often democrats as well (beyond being democrats and republicans, respectively). Both were chosen to connote ideas that the whole American nation could get behind (democracy and republicanism), and therefore are not in the least bit indicative of each party's ideology.
• The Liberal Party of Australia is the nation's primary conservative party and are more likely to support the Monarchy. From an Australian perspective, this isn't quite so unusual, as "liberalism" in Australia normally refers to what most Americans would call "libertarianism". Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser left the party on the grounds that the name had become an Artifact Title (in his eyes, the party had abandoned its original liberal ideals for an illiberal conservatism).
• The Spanish "Partido Popular" (People's Party) is not leftist at all, being the main conservative/right party. This happened in the past too when they were named "Alianza Popular" (Popular Alliance). Before the association of "people" with leftist movements, White Russian forces invoked this and some reactionary parties are doing this too now, even though they are accused of being stooges for elites themselves. Likewise, the People’s Party of Canada is loosely libertarian/paleoconservative.
• In British Columbia provincial politics, the main conservative party is called the British Columbia Liberal Party (or BC Liberals), which is considered further to the right on social and economic policies than the federal Liberal Party of Canada and arguably closer to the Conservative Party of Canada (though the party itself describes itself as a "coalition" of federal Liberals and federal Conservatives united in opposition to the provincial NDP — unlike in every other province, there has not been a viable, explicitly "conservative" provincial party in decades, with the BC Conservative party being very minor and holding little influence); the party averted this in 2023 when it rebranded as BC United. Similarly, the Quebec Liberal Party leans to the centre-right, although it also acts as a catch-all federalist party, having been led by former federal Tory leader Jean Charest, while simultaneously also being the previous political home of former federal New Democratic Party leader Tom Mulcair.
• Many Portuguese parties have names leftier than their ideologies, especially the main ones: the Social Democratic Party (PSD) is actually the centre-right party and the Socialist Party (PS) is actually just centre-left, while the Social and Democratic Centre – People's Party (CDS–PP) is the most right-wing party represented in parliament until the rise of the populist-right Chega in 2019. This is because they were formed after a revolution against a fascist dictatorship, a time when everyone was left (compared to the last 40 years of ruling government) and anything that was right was "salazarist" (as in "Salazar", the former dictator).
• The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia is a pretty-much radical far right party advocating Pinochet-esque dictatorship. Or rather was; nowadays they are more or less political clowns and no one takes them seriously. The origin of this party's name is that it was formed in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was slowly crumbling apart and "liberal" and "democratic" were buzzwords of instant political success.
• Japan's Liberal Democratic Party is not a centrist to "classical liberal" party, but a right-wing party with far-right factions (especially those associated with Nippon Kaigi). (They do have a relatively moderate centrist-classical liberal wing, as well, but it has not been ascendant since Shinzo Abe's rightward turn during his years in the wilderness in the late 2000s-early 2010s.)
  • As of now (July 2022), Japan has a party called the NHK party. Their goals include scrambling the NHK feed, and their slogan is "Destroy NHK !"
• The Nordic countries have had a good bit of this in their political parties:
  • The "Venstre" (Left) party in Denmark is the largest centre-right party. In the 19th century, it was the largest left-wing party, representing the interests of the liberal (in the sense of pro-democracy and capitalist) bourgeoisie, standing against "Højre" ("Right"), which represented the landed gentry and opposed democratic reform. Eventually, the rise of the Danish working classes led to the establishment of the Social Democrats, who were left of Left, and today Venstre usually finds itself governing in coalition with the descendant party of Højre more often than not.
  • The Danish political party "Radikale Venstre" (Radical Left) is possibly the most centrist party in Danish politics. This is because it was the breakaway of the left wing of the aforementioned Venstre—but since Venstre was by then centre-right, its left wing was at most slightly centre-left and most typically just centrist.
  • The Norwegian party called "Venstre" (also meaning "Left") similarly started out as the party of the 19th-century urban democratic bourgeoisie standing against the rural landed aristocracy of "Høyre" (also meaning "Right"). However, the different political dynamics in Norway mean that Norwegian Venstre is actually (slightly) of the left, being broadly centrist but leaning ever so slightly to the left (rather like the Danish Radikale Venstre) and often in opposition to Høyre (which still exists under the same name, and whose name has only gotten more appropriate over time).
  • The Swedish party "Moderaterna" (the moderates) is the country's main right-wing party. Before 1969, it was known by the more accurate name "Högerpartiet" (the right [wing] party). The rise of the far-right Sverigedemokraterna since 2010 has, however, managed to make them appear more moderate by comparision, though their actual positions have not changed.
• Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party—the ruling party of Mexico under various guises from the end of The Mexican Revolution in 1920 through the election of Vicente Fox in 2000, and today the main centrist party (broadly speaking)^note To some extent, they are not so much centrist as they are purely pragmatic and transactional in their view of politics—heirs to the Porfirian maxim of poca política, mucha administración (not much politics, much administration). in the Mexican political system—has a name containing contradictory terms. In historical context, it makes a little more sense; it was founded in 1929 by ex-President and éminence grise Plutarco Elías Calles to institutionalize the coalition that ended up in charge of Mexico after the end of the revolution.
• France's "Radical Party of the Left" sounds like it should be more left-wing than the main centre-left party, the Socialist Party. While it is left-leaning it is actually one of the most moderate left-wing parties, being even closer to the political centre than parties that advocate social democracy. It is actually the left-wing splinter group of the "Radical Party"—today a centrist party that sat somewhat uncomfortably in the rightist coalition and actually split off with a number of other centrist parties in that coalition to form another moderate one.
• The National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazis, for short, were never intended to actually be socialist; indeed, Hitler himself admitted in a paper it was just named that to cash in on the popularity of socialism at the time. Not that this stops political conservatives from attempting to lump real socialists in with the Nazis, the Nazis' actual stance on socialism notwithstanding.
  • There were Nazis who actually took the "socialist" part of the name seriously; this is known as Strasserism. But after the Strasser brothers failed to displace Hitler as leader of the party, most of this branch's adherents (including founder Gregor Strasser and Hitler's former Number Two Ernst Röhm) were killed in the Night of the Long Knives and the few remaining had to go into hiding or outright flee Germany. While Otto Strasser was among the survivors, the Nazi association made it impossible for the ideology to get any traction post-WW2. Which is no loss since Strasserism is basically Nazi racism merged with Stalinist economics.
• Both of Jamaica's main political parties are examples. Despite their names suggesting the exact opposite situation, the People's National Party is the social democratic party and the Jamaica Labour Party is the conservative party.
• A similar situation exists in Liechtenstein. The Patriotic Union is the most left-leaning party, while the Progressive Citizens' Party is the mainstream right-leaning one.

Items

• A minigun sounds like a Little Useless Gun but is in fact a very powerful multi-barreled, rapid fire gun. The name actually means that the gun is a scaled down (rifle caliber, 7.62mm) rotary gun of the standard aircraft 20mm (Vulcan) cannon (cannon shells can explode, gun bullets don't... usually), but it's still confusing to people who don't know. Lampshaded by Serious Sam:
  Sam Stone: "If this is a minigun, I wonder what a maxigun is!"
• The English Horn, Cor Anglais if you like, is neither English (most likely originated from Poland), nor is it a horn (it's in the oboe family, i.e. a woodwind instrument, instead of a brass instrument). Apparently, the name came from the fact that it resembled the horns of the angels in religious images of the middle ages, and therefore was called engellisches Horn (angelic horn). However, engellisch also meant English back then (vernacular), hence the name stuck.
• The Jew's harp, a plucked musical instrument played from the mouth, has no known historical association with Jewish people. Weirdly, a reasonable-sounding etymology, that it's a corruption of "jaw harp" (since it is held partly with the mouth), appears to be a folk etymology; "Jew's harp" is actually the older name.
• "Gothic" art is actually not based on art of the East Germanic tribe. It was originally used to distinguish newer forms of art from "classical" art. It was meant to be derogatory in the same way as calling something "barbaric." By the same token, popular literature that involved dark, violent, and sexual themes was dubbed "gothic literature," and provided the basis for the "Goth" subculture.
  • For that matter, the lolita fashion subculture has pretty much nothing to do with Lolita, and if one would ask any Japanese member of the subculture they'll usually say that men hate the style, which is the reason why certain women wear it.
• In the series of woodblock prints, ''Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji" by Katsuhika Hokusai, there are actually 46 prints; Hokusai added ten more prints after its initial publication.
• The letter W (doubleyou) is actually a double V in many fonts. In Classical Latin, U and V were the same letter, sometimes pronounced like a U and sometimes like a W (but never like a V, or a voiced F), and some languages (e.g., French, Danish, Swedish, Spanish) refer to the letter W as Double V. The reason English is different is that for some time v and u were pronounced differently depending on where in the word they were. If the word began with 'v' it was pronounced as we pronounce 'v'; if the word had a 'v' or a 'u' in it elsewhere it would always be 'u'. 'Have' would be written as 'haue', but 'value' would be 'value'.
• Another letter example: the German ß is called "eszett". "Es" and "zett" are the German words for 's' and 'z', making it seem like the letter represents "sz", but it actually represents "ss" (ex. the German word for "white" can be written as "weiß" or "weiss")
• The "gas pedal" in your car controls the flow of air, not gasoline.^note Of course, air is a gas, while gasoline is a liquid, so maybe it is a sensible name in a perverse way. If you drive a diesel, it controls fuel pressure, but then the fuel's not gasoline. In modern electric cars, it controls the flow of electrons. Its official name is the "accelerator", which is a perfectly indicative name.
• Pencil lead is actually graphite. The first "writing rods" were made from lead by Romans, but when graphite pencils were invented later, the name stuck. (Also, graphite looks more than a bit like lead; they both have the same dark gray color.) Writing with literal lead is a good way to get lead poisoning.
• Banana oil: It's not made from bananas, and it's not oil.
• Despite being commonly known as a tidal wave, a tsunami has nothing to do with tides. It took the news focusing on an actual tsunami (that killed over 100,000 people in 2004) for "tsunami" to supplant "tidal wave" in everyday vocabulary.
• The Panama hat is made in Ecuador. Before the construction of the Panama Canal, many South American goods were shipped to the Isthmus of Panama before they were loaded on ships bound for other parts of the world. As a result, the hats were named for the point from which they were sold to North America and Europe, instead of their place of origin. The name "Panama hat" is known to have been used in 1834.
• The US five-cent piece, the nickel, is composed of three-quarters copper and only one-quarter nickel. It was never made of pure nickel either; it's always been cupronickel alloy with copper being the primary element. In Canada it's even worse — it's 94.5% steel, 3.5% copper, with just a 2% nickel plating.
• Genres of fiction called "operas" (such as space operas, soap operas and the now-obscure horse operas) typically contain no singing at all. The "opera" in the name refers to the formulaic and melodramatic storylines being considered similar to those found in operas. Also, "soap operas" were not about soap. The name refers to the kind of advertising on the original U.S. radio soap operas in the 1920s and 30s; because they aired during the daytime, these melodramatic serials usually aired commercials targeted at housewives, of which soaps and other cleaning products were most common.
• Those unfamiliar with (American) Civil War firearms and slang would be surprised to learn that "minnie" balls: A: Were pretty darn big (usually .50 to .60 caliber) and B: Were conical (pointed cones). The first part of the name is a corruption of the name of its French inventor, Claude Minié (pronounced something like "min-nay" by Americans). The second, well it just rolled off the tongue—mini-cones doesn't have the same ring...
  • Well, that and the French word for bullet is balle so the term Minié balle in French was used straight.
• Roller Coasters often have nonindicative names:
  • They are also sometimes called "Russian Mountains". The attraction does look vaguely like mountains and traces its origins to 18th century Russia, albeit in a very different form. However, the innovations that made into modern roller coasters are American inventions. In Russia itself, they are referred to as "American Mountains" to differentiate them from the original "Russian Mountains".
  • In Poland they are called "Mountain Rail" despite having nothing to do with the mountain, railway or cable cars that are sometimes called by that name.
  • In Chinese they are called "Over Mountain Cars". There probably is at least one roller coaster that actually goes over a mountain, but for the most part, there's just air underneath the tracks.
• A ten-gallon hat will only hold three quarts of liquid. The word was originally 'galon' and referred to braids tied around the crown.
• The green room in show business is almost never actually green. No one knows where the term comes from, but one theory holds that the original "green room" was in the Blackfriars Theatre and was so called because it was actually green.
• The "Bush differential analyzer" performs integration, and does so entirely by synthesis. It was, however, developed by Vannevar Bush.
• Floppy disk:
  • The sizes are actually measured in metric — 3 1/2 inch, 5 1/4 inch, and 8 inch floppies are built to 90, 133 1/3 (yes, a third of a millimeter), and 200 mm specifications, respectively. Using the imperial measurements would put you within a few millimeters, but on equipment so precise, outside tolerance for all but the 5 1/4 inch.
  • The size of the familiar 1.44 MB floppy is not 1.44 MB nor 1.44 MiB (note the i), i.e. it is neither 1,440,000 nor 1,509,949. The confusion stems from it being 1.44 thousand kibibytes, or 1440x1024 bytes, which is 1,474,560 bytes (which is about 1.41 MiB).
  • While 5 1/4- and 8-inch floppy disks are indeed floppy, 3 1/2-inch floppy disks have a more solid construction. They were occasionally called "stiffy" disks, but the name didn't catch on in most places. Well, the magnetic disc itself is floppy, but it is encased in solid plastic for protection.
  • The whole binary thing gives "kilobyte" and "megabyte", at least in older contexts, Non-Indicative Name status, since they contain, respectively, 2^10 and 2^20 bytes.
  • And, to further confuse things, most modern hard drive sizes are now listed in decimal gigabytes and terabytes, which makes the size 7% and 10% bigger respectively than the binary sizes.
  • Sadly for fans of unit confusion and class action suits against storage manufacturers, the confusion is being cleared up by the adoption of new units kibi, mebi, gibi and tebi, with abbreviations Ki, Mi, Gi, Ti, each of which represents an exact power of 2. Under this definition the floppy had exactly 1.44K KiB.
• Most "MOSFETs", or "metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistors", made in the last few decades have neither metal as their terminal, nor oxide as their insulator. The name comes from the early days, when the best way to get an insulating layer small enough was to oxidize a thin layer of the substrate, but more precise techniques have made this obsolete. Even the "metal," due to the complexities of IC manufacture, is usually a metalloid treated to act like a metal. Some call them "IGFETs", "insulated-gate field effect transistors", for this reason, but this hasn't really caught on.
• The Yellow Cab Company in Washington, DC has its cars painted in a distinctive black and orange two-tone livery.
• Pharmacology just about lives off of this trope. Rifampin, amantadine, cifedipine, digitalis — can you tell what any of those drugs do just by their name alone?
• Cans are often called "tins" (or in the the United States, "tin cans") because they used to be made of tin, now it's usually non-indicative (and, if the tin is labeled as such, an aversion of Exactly What It Says on the Tin.)
  • While cans are usually made of metals other than tin, many are still coated with a thin layer of tin to prevent corrosion which means that the name isn't completely non-indicative.
  • Similarly, tinfoil used to be made of tin, but is now usually made of aluminium.
  • And modern tin roofs are hardly ever tin or even tin-plated. They're usually steel, sometimes copper, zinc, or (again) aluminum.
• Duct tape is great for lots of things, but it stinks for sealing ducts.
• India ink, or Indian ink, was invented in China. The name comes from the fact that materials used to make it were often imported from India.
• Chinese checkers were invented in Germany, and they are not checkers. The name is a marketing term from the U.S.
• The game of halma, which is similar (especially in game mechanics) to but not isomorphic with Chinese Checkers (it's played on a square board instead of a six-pointed star), is sometimes erroneously called "Chinese Checkers" by manufacturers, probably because they believe that to be the "English translation" of halma.
• The glove box is rarely, if ever, used by anyone in modern times for storing gloves, as driving gloves have fallen almost completely out of use.
• Radio Times magazine also has TV times.
• Credit cards, loyalty cards, and so on, are often made of plastic and not card stock.
• Blackboard chalk is made out of plaster of Paris, which, incidentally, wasn't invented in Paris. Many chalkboards are colored green but are still informally called "blackboards."
• Rice paper is made out of tree pith.
• RAID drives. RAID originally stood for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks", with the "I" now standing for "Independent", but since the point of a RAID array is fault tolerance, RAID drives are more expensive than ordinary hard drives of the same capacity as they are manufactured to higher standards.
• An airplane's "black box" (the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder designed to theoretically survive any crash so as to provide info about the accident to investigators) isn't black — per regulations, it's bright orange to make it easier to spot in the wreckage of a crash.
• There is a medical condition known as vaginismus, where the pelvic muscles clench up, when penetration is attempted, making intercourse, use of tampons and menstrual cups, and gynecological exams painful. One method of treatment (sometimes in conjunction with therapy and/or medication) is the use of what are termed "dilators". These are basically dildos, ranging from the size of a finger to that of an average penis. The patient is supposed to progress from small to large, in order to get used to the sensation of being penetrated (so that they can have sexual intercourse and medical examinations normally). But they don't actually dilate anything, at least not permanently; the vagina temporarily expands to accommodate penetration and childbirth; it doesn't permanently expand. And the purpose of these devices is not to expand a "too small" vagina, but to train the pelvic muscles to not clench. For this reason, some clinicians refer to them instead as "vaginal trainers".
• Chocolate agar is a growth medium for certain types of bacteria. It contains no chocolate, although it is brown. That's because it contains lysed (damaged and destroyed) red blood cells, usually from an animal such as a sheep.
• Portland cement (the type used in the vast majority of concrete worldwide) wasn't invented in Portland, and neither was it the inventor's name. It was a marketing gimmick — Portland stone (which actually was quarried from Portland, England) was a common building material in England at the time, and the inventors wanted to make it sound like their new product was supplanting the old one.
• At least in American English, "over-the-counter" in regards to medicine means the opposite of its name. The medicines that are handed to you over a pharmacy counter are, for the most part, prescription medicines, which are never called "over-the-counter". That term refers to non-prescription medicines that you pick up from a store shelf, like aspirin.^note There are a very few exceptions. One is pseudoephedrine (brand name Sudafed), which doesn't require a prescription but is something of a controlled substance—it's used to make methamphetamine—and therefore does have to be obtained from the pharmacy counter, so that the store can limit the number of sales to any one person.
• Stun guns. Despite being called "guns", it's a misnomer, as they're usually neither actual firearms (in the sense of shooting ballistic projectiles) nor even "guns" in the Energy Weapon sense by any stretch of the terms. It arguably even becomes more of a misnomer as most stun guns have to be used at point-blank or have to make contact to work. Meanwhile tasers fire two small dart-like electrodes which remain connected to the main unit by conductors and delivers electric current to incapacitate a target, and they need to be reeled in and reset before the taser can be used again.
• The word "helicopter" literally means "spiral wing", in reference to the rotor, except that a rotor isn't a wing and it moves in a circle rather than a spiral.
• Canada's current one-dollar coin is called the loonie, named for the loon that is on the reverse side. Several years later a two-dollar coin was comissioned, which came to be known as the toonie due to its value (two loonies). Despite the name, there is no "loon" on the Toonie; the reverse side depicts a polar bear.
• The "Chinese roasting box" used to assist in cooking animals on a spit, has no known connection with China.
• St Edward's Crown was never worn by St Edward the Confessor, and it was 240 years before it was worn by any Edward (VII). It was named in honour of the king who supposedly first wore the Crown of England, but that crown was melted down during the Commonwealth, and a new one made for Charles II.
• Rawhide shoelaces are not rawhide, but tanned leather. Rawhide is rigid when dry, so real rawhide lace is used where it doesn't need to be tied and untied frequently, such as lashing down drumheads.

Chemicals & Substances

• Nitrogen is sometimes also called Azote, from the Ancient Greek: ἀζωτικός "no life", as pure N₂ is an asphyxiant gas; this name is used particularly in languages as French, Italian, Russian, Romanian, Portuguese and Turkish, and appears in the English names of some nitrogen compounds such as hydrazine, azides and azo compounds. However, nitrogen is one of the key components of amino acids and nucleic acids; that is, the exact opposite of "no life". The fact that pure N₂ is asphyxiant is due to the lack of oxygen and not the presence of nitrogen, as it is actually an inert gas — to the point that plants, even though they "breathe" carbon dioxide and extract oxygen from it, can't use atmospheric nitrogen and must rely on lightning sundering the molecules or special soil bacteria that perform a process called nitrogen fixation.^note This same asphyxiant/inert gas property has made pure N₂ of interest to certain American states looking for a new way to execute persons sentenced to death now that the drugs needed for the "traditional" lethal-injection protocol have become hard to find. The first execution in the world by N₂ asphyxiation was carried out by Alabama in January 2024.
• Oxygen is derived from a term meaning "acid-creating", even though it is in fact hydrogen that characterizes acids.
• Periodic acid has nothing to do with the periodic table of chemical elements. Its name comes from per- (a common prefix in the names of chemical compounds, such as hydrogen peroxide which is used to bleach hair), and the element iodine, which it contains. It's pronounced "per-eye-odic", with a long I sound.
• Phosgene does not contain any phosphorus.
• Theobromine does not contain any bromine. This may be for the best, as theobromine is what gives chocolate and coffee their characteristic bitterness while bromine itself is toxic to humans in higher-than-trace quantities.
  • This is a "false friends" (words that are spelled similarly but do not come from the same origin) situation. The "bromine" in theobromine comes from "broma", which means "food", and "theobromine" means "food of the gods". The "bromine" in bromine comes from "bromos", which means "stink".
• Many chemical elements have names which do not necessarily apply to the chemicals themselves. "Rubidium" comes from a Latin word meaning "red", and "caesium" from the Latin for "blue", "thallium" means "green", and "indium" comes from "indigo", even though they are all silver- or gold-coloured metals, with mostly white compounds.^note  It's mostly the color of their characteristic spectral lines, google Fraunhofer.
• Chemically speaking, a "salt" along with water is a byproduct of an acid and base neutralizing. They don't even necessarily taste "salty", but have a wide range of flavors.
  • Tangential to this, "salt substitute" often is salt — potassium chloride, rather than sodium, but still chemically a kind of salt.
• Rare-earth elements aren't exactly rare, with one of them, cerium, being more abundant than copper. Their name comes from the fact they aren't found in decent enough concentrations to be economically exploitable. And "earth" is an obsolete name for oxides (in which form they were detected first).
• Phosphorus does not glow via phosphorescence, it glows via chemiluminescence. This is a case of Science Marches On: the word "phosphorescence" used to be used to describe any substance which glowed in the dark, because it was not understood that different processes can cause different substances to glow.
• Many compounds with "sulphide" (or "sulfide") in their names don't actually contain any sulphide ions.
• The word "atom" is derived from the Ancient Greek "atomos", meaning "indivisible". It was part of a philosophical theory positing that everything that exists is ultimately nothing more than collections of these fundamental units interacting while suspended in an otherwise empty "void". When experimental evidence indicated the existence of such compositional particles in the 1800s, they were dubbed atoms as they matched this theory. But in the 20th century, it became apparent that not only are atoms themselves mere constructs of arranged smaller units, but they can indeed be divided.
• Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity with zero resistance. As far as we know, they only operate under very cold conditions; superconductors that operate at everyday temperatures are not outlawed by the rules of science but we have never discovered any. The superconductors we currently know are grouped into two categories: low-temperature superconductors, which operate only within a few degrees of absolute zero, the lowest temperature possible; and high-temperature, which operate at between about 70 and 140 degrees higher, which is still extremely cold by normal standards. The hypothetical materials which are superconducting at room temperature are called room-temperature superconductors; this means that high-temperature superconductors actually operate at a lower temperature than room-temperature ones.
• The mustard gas used extensively during World War I was neither mustard, nor a gas. Sulfur mustard, as it was also commonly called, was a sulfur-based blistering agent that was named for its yellow-brown color and odor that was vaguely reminiscent of mustard and garlic. It also wasn't a gas, it was a liquid that could be dispersed as a fine mist.
• Helium is named for Helios, the Greek god of the Sun, due to the element first being discovered as a line in the Sun's emission spectrum. Despite this name, the Sun is only about 25% helium by mass. The vast majority of the Sun is instead composed of hydrogen, which itself means "water creator".
• In 1898, Marie Curie discovered radium. For the next few decades, the word "radium" became a buzzword, being inserted into the names of various commercial goods that contain no radium and, in today's perspective, have absolutely no business containing radium, from carpentry tools to condoms.
• Lemon Oil is mineral oil with a lemon or citrus scent added. It contains no lemons.

Law Enforcement

• It's not uncommon in police departments for a detective to be assigned to cases beyond matters that their job title would suggest. In some departments, "detective" is simply a rank above patrolman, and doesn't automatically refer to an officer that does what the average person thinks of as "detective work".
• That season 3 subplot of The Wire where Bunk Moreland is saddled with tracking down Kenneth Dozerman's stolen police gun isn't far from reality. As shown in David Simon's book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, its TV series adaptation, and The Wire, the Baltimore Police Department's Homicide Unit does investigate murders and any other unexplained deaths that take place within Baltimore. But that's not all they do: they are also responsible for investigating all police-related shootings, and, because the homicide unit is generally regarded as containing the best detectives on the police force, they are often given high-profile cases which are not necessarily homicides.
• In most police departments, the Narcotics Division is responsible for policing the use and distribution of all illegal drugs, even though the term "narcotic" specifically refers to a substance with relaxing or sleep-inducing properties (it has the same root word as "narcolepsy"). Several narcotics are legal drugs that can be bought in a pharmacy (like sleeping pills), but there are plenty of illegal drugs that are not narcotics (like cocaine and crystal meth).

Living Things — Animals

• The guinea pig is not a pig (it's a rodent) and it's not from Guinea (it's from South America).
  • The guinea pig bears a porcine name in many European languages, Chinese and Russian — the German name (from which several other languages derived their name) is Meerschweinchen ("sea piglet"), Russian similarly morskaya svinka ("sea piggy")^note not to be confused with morskaya svin'ya, "sea pig", the Russian name for porpoise, the French sometimes call it cochon d'Inde ("Indian pig"), Italians similarly call it porcellino d'India ("Indian piglet"), a Chinese name is hélánzhū ("Holland pigs")... apparently, guinea pigs came from everywhere but South America. English guinea pig fanciers, especially breeders, also use the name cavy, a common name for rodents in the Caviidae family (guinea pigs, wild cavies and capybaras), but outside of those circles no one knows what it means.
  • The Spanish term "conejillo de Indias" ("little rabbit of the Indies") is also iffy. Although the animal did originate in the Western Indies (which is what the Americas were called at the time), it's not particularly closely related to rabbits.
    • And even in South America, "Indian pig" appears in both Spanish and Portuguese. (The name comes from both them being raised as foodstock like pigs, and coming from the Western Indies.)
    • All of this goes to explain Frank Sidebottom's claim that they are worth £1.05. In other words, one pound and one shilling, or, in other words, a Guinea. Well, it's a sort of explanation.
    • Also, they have a similar body shape (albeit with crouched rodent legs), and kind of sound like high-pitched pigs.
  • The German term Meerschweinchen, "little sea pig" or "sea piglet", makes marginally more sense if you realize the German for capybara is Meerschwein— so Meerschweinchen could also be translated as "little capybara", which is a reasonable description for wild guinea pigs. Whether capybara deserve to be called "sea pigs" is itself another example of this trope, but there you go!
• As with the guinea pig, the muskrat isn't a rat at all — its nearest relatives are lemmings and voles.
  • Neither are moonrats, which aren't even rodents — their closest relatives are hedgehogs (Which, while we're on the subject, aren't hogs and have no particular affinity for hedges).
  • Field mice are not mice either. They're more accurately called the meadow vole.

• Antlion, mantisfly, dragonfly and mantis shrimp: There's no ant, lion, mantis, fly, dragon or shrimp in any of these.
  • The ant in antlion makes sense because it feeds on ants. It is the lion part that really doesn't make sense because it doesn't look like a lion and doesn't even hunt like one, it catches ants by waiting at the bottom of a pit trap. A better name for it might be anttrap. It is also called the doodlebug in some places because of the strange markings it leaves in sand.
  • Rule of thumb for insects with common names of the form "fly": If the name is written as two words, like "house fly", it's a fly (i.e. a member of the order Diptera). If it's written as one word, like "butterfly", it's not a fly.
• Hippopotamus means "river horse" but horses are in the order Perissodactyla (making them closely related to rhinos, ironically), while the hippo is in the order Artiodactyla—its closest living relatives are the whales. The term coming from ancient Greek makes this Older Than Feudalism.
  • Quoth P.J. O'Rourke: "Hippopotamus does not mean river horse but rather 'river first husband'."
  • The word "hippo" therefore literally means "horse".
  • In Afrikaans, it is seekoei, "sea cow" — wrong in both family and water body inhabited.
• These are -fish which are all invertebrate and thus not possibly fish.
  • Crayfish: A crustacean. The name evolved from French écrevisse.
  • Starfish: An echinoderm.
  • Silverfish: A dark gray creepy looking primitive insect. Particularly egregious in that, unlike most examples, it's not even aquatic! Allegedly, they're named for the fluidity of their movements making it look like they're swimming, even on land.
  • Cuttlefish: A cephalopod.
  • Jellyfish: A member of the phylum Cnidaria. Not made of gelatin either (the main structural component in its body is collagen). It is squishy like jelly... but don't touch it. Likewise, the box jellyfish is not a true jellyfish.
  • Shellfish: generic term for mollusks with a shell.
    • More recent terminology has most of these things renamed from "(X)fish" to "Sea (X)", so Starfish becomes Seastar, Jellyfish becomes Sea Jelly, etc. However, the "(X)fish" comes from the fact that the word "fish" comes from a noun meaning "an animal that lives in water" and all these names were actually quite indicative because they do live in water. Except for silverfish, but that's another kettle of fish entirely.
    • Funnily enough, sea horses and sea dragons are fish—albeit extremely weird-looking ones.
  • The sandfish, although a vertebrate, is a desert-dwelling lizard.
• Velvet worms aren't worms, and also aren't made of velvet (they are covered in a velvety coat of hair, though).
• Birds:
  • The scientific name of the greater bird-of-paradise is Paradisaea apoda, with "apoda" meaning "legless". It has legs. The name stems because early trade-skins to reach Europe were prepared without wings or feet by the indigenous New Guinean people; this led to the misconception that these birds were beautiful visitors from paradise that were kept aloft by their plumes and never touched the earth until death.
  • The titmouse is a bird and not a type of rodent.
  • The Java sparrow is not actually a sparrow, but an estrildid finch (family Estrildidae), while true Old World sparrows are in the family Passeridae and true New World sparrows are placed in the family Emberizidae with juncos, towhees, and Old World buntings, with New World buntings being in the cardinal family (Cardinalidae).
  • The bald eagle is not at all bald, barring a disease or parasites causing it to lose feathers. The name actually comes from an older homograph that meant "white-headed."
  • The American kestrel and the merlin, both falcons (family Falconidae, both in the genus Falco), were originally called sparrowhawks and pigeonhawks by older sources. The change in name was because they are not hawks (family Accipteridae), either by the Old World definition (genus Accpiter) or the New World definition (genus Buteo).
  • The mourning collared dove (Streptopelia decipiens) is not too closely related to the American bird called the mourning dove (even though it used to be called the African mourning dove), which has the scientific name of Zenaida macroura and is more closely related to the white-winged dove (Zenaida asiatica) and the species of the Zenaida genus simply called the zenaida dove (Zenaida aurita). However, at least they are both in the dove and pigeon family (Columbidae). Neither species mourns, either.
  • In English, the turkey was originally named after Turkey (the country). The bird is originally from North America (where wild populations are still quite common), but when the English got a hold of it, they called it the "Turkey fowl" (later shortened to "Turkey") because it was thought similar to the Guinea fowl: a bird imported to Europe from Africa via the Ottoman Empire, hence popularly called "turkey" before the North American bird was!
    • In French, it was originally called Poulet d'Inde ("Indian chicken"), which eventually morphed into modern "Dinde", which caught on in a few places (e.g. Poland and Turkey). The Greeks, oddly, call it gallopoúla, meaning "French chicken".
    • The Dutch named the bird kalkoen, named after the Indian city of Calicut (modern day Kozhikode). The Dutch name was later adapted in Danish, Estonian, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish.
    • Arabic presents a rather interesting one, as it's called Dajāj Rūmī: "Byzantine Chicken"^note And variants; notably, Egyptian Arabic (the dialect with the most speakers) calls it Dīk Rūmī, with dīk (pronounced "deek") meaning "rooster."—except not. Rūm (also spelled Roum) is an old Arabic term for the part of the Byzantine Empire lying in Anatolia; it is derived from "Rome," as the Byzantine Greeks who lived there called themselves "Roman." So Dajaj Roumi refers to Greeks calling themselves Roman and living in what is now Turkey. About a bird from the Americas.
    • Unless you're in Morocco, where, thanks to French influence, it's dinde again (except that they pronounce it "dindi").
    • The Chinese avoid misidentifying the country, but come up with a pretty weird one: huǒjī, meaning "fire chicken". This is because of the bird's head and neck being mostly red, with some blue — rather like fire. Another (more obscure) Chinese name for the bird is "tushouji" (吐绶鸡), "chicken which displays a ribbon", a reference to its snood.
    • The Vietnamese call the turkey "Western chicken".
    • In Portuguese, they got close, but no cigar: they call it Peru, because the colonizers thought the bird came from the eponymous country (neighbor to its then-colony, Brazil). Although the bird is native to the Americas, it is from North America: the birds had been brought to Peru from Mexico (either through pre-Columbian trade with Mesoamerican civilizations like the Aztecs and the Maya^note Such trade definitely existed; maize had been introduced to South America this way. or by the Spaniards).
    • In Turkey itself, it is called Hindi, "the Indian", or "the American bird".
    • And in Scots Gaelic it'a a "cearc-Frangaich" (French chicken).
  • Puffinus puffinus is the scientific name for the Manx shearwater bird.
  • Vultur gryphus is the Andean condor, not the griffon vulture (Gyps fulvus).
  • Olive warblers aren't olive-colored, nor are they warblers. The warbler part was a case of Science Marches On, since they were originally thought to be warblers, but the olive part really has no excuse.
  • Plantain-eaters mostly eat figs.
  • Australian Brush Turkeys are not related to domestic turkeys.
  • The long-eared owl does not have long ears and the great horned owl does not have horns. In both cases, the so-called ears or horns are just tufts of feathers on top of the bird's head.
• The Congo worm is an aquatic salamander with tiny, ineffectual legs from rivers and marshes of the Southeastern United States.
  • The slow worm is a European legless lizard. It's not particularly slow, either.
    • The slowworm is also called a blindworm or a deaf adder, despite it being neither blind, deaf, nor an adder.
• Horseshoe crab: It's not quite a crab but more closely related to arachnids, and only horseshoe-shaped if you stretch the definition a good bit.
  • Hermit crabs are also not true crabs, nor are coconut crabs, the latter of which which are actually biologically more like giant hermit crabs that, as adults, literally outgrow the need for abandoned shells. Despite looking a lot like it, king crabs are also not true crabs and are more closely related to hermit crabs.
• In the human body, the small intestine is much longer than the large intestine. The names come from their width, not their length (to the point in many languages their names are actually "thin" and "thick" intestine).
• The funny bone is not particularly amusing, and is technically not even a bone, as it's the idiomatic name for the ulnar nerve located in the elbow. It does cause a funny (as in strange) sensation when you hit it, though. It's most likely called that what with being at the joint of the ulna and humerus.
• Sea cucumbers are animals, not squash.
• The Australian Shepherd dog breed is actually American. The Bombay cat breeds are a similar case, with one being American (again) and the other being British.
• The Norway rat originated somewhere in China. A double example, as its Non-Indicative Name was bestowed by someone who mistook Danish ships, on which he thought these rodents had stowed away and spread throughout Europe, for Norwegian ones. They are also called brown rats, though they aren't always brown (especially the domestic varieties).
• Both the black and the white rhinoceroses are gray. It's not really known where the term came from, but it's suggested that white rhinos got their name from a mis-translation of the Dutch word "wijd" meaning "wide" (referring to the shape of its mouth). Black rhinos are so named to differentiate them from the white rhinos.
• Most anteaters eat nothing but termites. They will eat ants, it's just that termites are easier to find.
  • In Finnish, the word for anteater is muurahaiskarhu, which means "ant bear". The creature is obviously neither an ant nor a bear.
• Aardvark literally means earth-pig, but the animal looks more like an anteater and is related to neither, having split from its closest living relatives (elephant shrews, golden moles, etc.) around 20 million years ago. This gets compounded by the common S.A. English term ant-bear for the same animal.
• The "aardwolf" is actually a hyena.
• The hagfish, aka the "slime eel", is a jawless chordate, meaning it's less closely related to genuine eels than you are.
• Electric eels are a species of knifefish, making them more closely related to catfishes than to true eels.
• The cane toad is occasionally referred to as the marine toad and has the scientific name Rhinella marina^note some authorities still use the older Bufo marinus, but when this species reaches adulthood it only goes into the water during the mating season.
• The Danish language loves to give most marsupials names of completely non-related mammals that they may something be similar to and sometimes not are, coupled with "marsupial". Examples are "marsupial rat" (opossum), "marsupial mouse" (several small (carnivorous!) dasyurids like dibblers and kowaris), "marsupial marten" (quoll), "marsupial anteater" (numbat), "marsupial badger" (bilby/bandicoot), "marsupial fox" (brushtail possum), "marsupial squirrel" (most species of possums) and "marsupial flying squirrel" (sugar glider).
  • In English, quolls have also been referred to as "spotted marten", "spotted opossum" (although opossums aren't even dasyurids), "native cats" and "tiger cats" (although they resemble cats only in size and personality, and look more like very large rats with polka dots). The name "quoll" is from one of the Aboriginal languages, and was reintroduced in the 1960s.
  • Similarly, in Chinese, the word for kangaroo, dài shǔ, literally translates as "sack rat" or "bag rat", in reference to the (female's) pouch, and an alleged rodent-like face.
  • English also sometimes calls small dasyurids marsupial mice or shrews. There's also marsupial moles and the extinct Tasmanian tiger or Tasmanian wolf (thylacine) and marsupial lion.
• The feathered dinosaur or early bird Protarchaeopteryx (“before Archaeopteryx”) is 25 million years younger than Archaeopteryx.
• Most animals with "crabeater" in their name only consume crabs occasionally or hardly at all.
  • Crabeater macaques eat mostly fruits and seeds.
  • Crabeater seals eat krill.
• The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) is smaller than the African elephant (genus Loxodonta).
  • The African elephant now has two separate species. The Asian elephant is larger than the African forest elephant (L. cyclotis) but smaller than the African bush elephant (L. africana).
• Half of any population of ladybugs or damselflies will be male.
  • In England, 'ladybugs' are called 'ladybirds'. They are not birds, and only half of them are female.
  • In some Spanish-speaking countries, ladybugs are called "vaquitas de San Antonio" or "vaquitas de San Antón", Saint Anthony cow even though ladybugs are clearly not related to cows or any saint, let alone Saint Anthony. They got their name as the ladybug's breeding season happens during Saint Anthony-related celebrations (this, coupled with their voracious appetite for less-desired insects, gave them a reputation of bringing good luck), whereas the 'cow' part comes from their spotted pattern.
• Bats:
  • The equivalent for "bat" in French (chauve souris) can be literally translated as "bald mouse". Bats and mice aren't related, except for being two boreoeutherian mammals (to give you an idea, humans are more closely related to mice than either is to bats).^note Humans and mice are members of the clade Euarchontoglires, consisting of the primates and their close relatives (the Euarchonta) and Glires, i.e. rodents and leporids (leporid=rabbits and friends). Nor are bats bald.
  • The word for "bat" in many languages basically means "flying mouse" (Fledermaus in German, vleermuis in Dutch, letuchaya mysh in Russian, and even the archaic English word flittermouse). Which lend themselves to some odd translations for Batman movies (e.g. Batman's "flying mouse car").
• "Bombay duck" inhabit the waters near Bombay. So what's the problem? They live in the sea, not on it, because they are a kind of fish.
• Ultrasaurus, while still large compared to modern land animals, was actually rather small for a sauropod dinosaur.
  • For that matter, sauropods ("lizard-feet") don't have lizard-like feet at all. Neither are the feet of ornithopods ("bird-feet") particularly bird-like — actually, the most defining feature of ornithopod dinosaurs wasn't their feet, but their beaks. To make things even more confusing, not only do the theropods ("beast-feet") not only have birdlike feet, they actually include include all birds (birds are descended from maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs).
  • Similarly, ornithischian (bird-hipped) dinosaurs were not the ancestors of birds, which in fact are descended from saurischian (lizard-hipped) dinosaurs. In fairness, the ornithischians' hips really were birdlike, and the similarity is the result of convergent evolution; indeed, birdlike hips evolved among dinosaurs not once, not twice, not three times, but four times.
    • However, the discovery in 2017 of a dinosaur which shows both Theropod and Ornitischian traits made experts to reclassify dinosaurs into Saurischians, which includes Sauropods and Herrerasaurs, and Ornithoscelida (bird leg), which includes Theropods and Ornitischians. That means birds are indeed more closely related to Ornitischians than they are to Saurischians.
• Scientific names of fossil organisms can become non-indicative artifact titles if Science Marches On.
  • The suffix -saurus comes from the Greek word for "lizard", but many dinosaurs and other forms of prehistoric life unrelated to lizards have that suffix in their name. A famous example is Basilosaurus ("king lizard"), which turned out not to be not even a reptile, but a whale (if reconstructions are accurate, it looked like a combination of whale and sea serpent). It's also unrelated to "thesaurus" even though both are Greek words.
  • Pentaceratops ("five-horned face") in reality only had three horns. The other two are actually its large epijugals (those bumps on the side of its head, at the base of the frill) which in older pictures were made to look like genuine pointy horns, but most ceratopsids have these spikes.
  • Oviraptor, which means "egg thief", was first discovered as a skull laying atop a nest of what were at the time believed to have been Protoceratops eggs back in the 1920s. Its large beak was thus interpreted as a tool used for cracking open eggs, and from there the assumption was made that Oviraptor mostly ate the eggs of other dinosaurs. Its specific name, philoceratops, which means "lover of ceratopsians" also plays into this theory. But it was later discovered that the eggs in question were Oviraptor eggs, and the adult dinosaur likely died while incubating them. While there is nothing to indicate that Oviraptor didn't eat eggs, the theory that they were a cornerstone of its diet and behavior has since been discredited. One theory is that they may have subsisted on a diet of shellfish, and a mostly intact skeleton was discovered to have the remains of a small lizard where its stomach would most likely be.
  • Dromaeosaurus, which gives its name to the family of dinosaurs closely related to birds with sickle claws, means "running lizard", but other than being as far from a lizard as you can get and more closely related to birds, weren't particularly fast animals, despite what Jurassic Park and pop-culture in general make you believe. Experts now believe they were likely ambush predators and therefore didn't do a lot of running.
  • Likewise, one of the most famous dromaeosaurs is named Velociraptor, which means "speedy thief", but wasn't really one of the speediest dinosaurs.
  • Parasaurolophus means "near crested-lizard" in reference to Saurolophus because when it was first discovered, the two were considered superficially similar because of their "horn-like" crests (more specifically, the former's crest looks like a much longer and more curved backwards crest of the latter). However, Saurolophus was more closely related to crestless hadrosaurs like Edmontosaurus, while Parasaurolophus was more closely related to hollow-crested ones like Lambeosaurus, therefore it was a lambeosaurine instead of saurolophine.
  • Archaeopithecus (“ancient ape”) is a hoofed mammal.
  • Micropachycephalosaurus turned out to be a basal ceratopsian.
  • Therizinosaurus cheloniformis is a large theropod dinosaur species whose scientific name translates to the rather confusing "scythe lizard turtle-formed". The specific name comes from the early theory that the dinosaur's huge claws were those of a gigantic turtle-like reptile before later fossil evidence placed it in Dinosauria.
  • Sinosaurus triassicus is a Jurassic dinosaur.
  • Gallimimus ("chicken mimic") follows the Theme Naming of most ornithomimosaurs ("bird mimic lizards") of being named after a bird, but why exactly "chicken" when it didn't look at all like one (its family is popularly called the ostrich-dinosaurs after all) is anybody's guess.
  • Megaraptor is the type genus of the megaraptorans, and it was named so because the holotype was a single huge claw that resembled the famous toe-claw of dromaeosaurs, so it was initially interpreted as the largest of all raptors, but later discoveries revealed that was an entirely different type of theropod who sported a huge killing claw on its hand instead of foot.
  • Similarly, Hyaenodon (meaning “hyena tooth”) is a genus that includes a large number of Eocene-Oligocene species (ranging from the weasel-sized H. microdon to the tiger-sized H. gigas), and is also the type genus of its own family, the hyaenodonts''. But other than being mammalian predators, they are in no way related to hyenas, who are carnivorans (most closely related to mongooses and viverrids, and more distantly cats), while hyaenodonts are creodonts (whose placement in the placental mammal family tree is highly debated).
  • Crocodilians are part of the group "Pseudosuchia", meaning "false crocodiles", because the group originally only included a bunch of prehistoric crocodile-like animals that were believed to be the result of convergent evolution. It wasn't until much later that crocodilians were found to be descended from such animals (placed within the group "Eusuchia", meaning "true crocodiles"), making the confusing situation where the pseudosuchians include the eusuchians.
• As explained by Russell Coight, "As their name implies, saltwater crocs are found in salt water, but they are also found in freshwater, which is not what their name implies. It just goes to show, they're not to be trusted."
• Koalas are nicknamed "Australian sloths" because of their behaviour, but they are completely unrelated to sloths. (Or, well, no more related to sloths than any other marsupial is related to any other placental mammal—i.e. koalas are as related to sloths as they are to humans—not very.)
• Black mambas are gray. The inside of a black mamba's mouth is black, although the rest of the snake isn't.
• A firefly. Not only does it not actually emit fire, it's not even a fly. It's actually a winged beetle that produces a cold light due to a type of chemical reaction, now believed in order to attract mates.
• Two-toed sloths are better termed "two-fingered sloths" since they have three toes on each hind foot.
• Great white sharks are mostly gray, but they do have a white underside.
• Spiders:
  • The Goliath Birdeater was only once observed to eat a bird, and many other tarantula species with the name "birdeater" have never been observed eating birds. To top it off, most of the "birdeater" species of tarantula aren't any more closely related to each other than any other species of tarantula; it's just a fancy way of saying they get really big.
  • Many species of tarantula are named after minor aspects of their coloration which some don't even retain into adulthood. For example the Salmon Pink Birdeater would be better described as the "jet black with some salmon pink highlighters spider that does not eat birds."
  • None of the tarantula species that actually do eat birds have birdeater in their name as they are rather average in size as far as tarantulas go.
  • Even the name "tarantula" is misleading. The first spider to be called a "tarantula" was Lycosa tarantula, also known as the "tarantula wolf spider", which was named after the Italian town of Taranto. It was then applied to any large, unknown species of ground-dwelling spider, which naturally applied to many of the spiders found in the remote corners of the New World. Eventually, this was narrowed down to the infraorder Mygalomorphae and further down to the family Theraphosidae. Not only is their namesake thousands of miles away across the Atlantic ocean, but wolf spiders and tarantulas have only the barest resemblance to each other.
  • Speaking of wolf spiders, the no-eyed big-eyed wolf spider can hardly be said to have big eyes. It is a relative of other big-eyed wolf spiders, and so if it did have eyes, they would probably be big. But it doesn't.
• Tarantula hawks are not hawks or even birds, they are wasps. The name is intended to be more poetic.
• Cockroaches are insects that have nothing to do with cocks or roaches. The name comes from Spanish cucaracha. Likewise, the German cockroach comes from Africa or Asia (which one is uncertain) rather than Europe.
• Some have fewer, some have more, but no centipede actually has 100 legs. Similarly, almost all millipedes have less than 1000 legs and for most of them it is by a wide margin. (The only currently known species that can have more than 1000 legs wasn't discovered until 2020 and the previous record holder only has up to 750 legs). Some etymologists have suggested their names weren't literal, but rather they just have a lot, which would make sense since who would go around actually counting one? For that matter, taking into account the prefixes centi- and milli- having taken on different meanings under the metric system, something has to have gone very wrong for a centipede to have 1/100 of a leg or a millipede to have 1/1000 of a leg.
• Jackrabbits are not actually rabbits; they are a species of hare. (Derived from this is "Jack Mormon", for someone who is Mormon only in name.)
• Treeshrews aren't shrews (they're more closely related to primates) and are mostly terrestrial. Elephant shrews aren't shrews, either, but they are at least related to elephants.
• Fossa fossana is the Malagasy civet, not the fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox).
• The extinct Smilodon is often called "saber-tooth tiger", but they were as much related to tigers as today's domestic cats.
• Vampyroteuthis infernalis, better known as the vampire squid, is not a squid nor an octopus. It is in fact the only surviving species of the cephalopod order Vampyromorphida. They also do not suck blood, instead eating bits of organic matter and small invertebrates.
• The paper nautilus is an octopus.
• The Spanish fly (Lytta vesicatoria) is a beetle, not a fly.
• Glass snakes and slow worms are not snakes and worms, respectively. They are both types of lizards with reduced or absent limbs.
• Varanosaurus (literally "monitor lizard lizard") was more closely related to mammals than to lizards.
• Megaloceros, the Irish elk, is actually more closely related to fallow deer than to either species known as elk.^note In British English and many European languages, "elk" refers to Alces alces, known in North America as the "moose". The North American "elk" is Cervus canadensis. Also, it lived throughout Eurasia rather than just Ireland. For these reasons, it's also called the giant deer.
• Giant pandas and red pandas, also called lesser pandas, are not closely related, although they were at one time believed to be as they have vaguely similar cute faces and bodies, both eat bamboo, live in the same habitat, and both have a protruding bone on their wrists that they use like thumbs, which none of their relatives have. Giant pandas belong to the bear family, while red pandas belong to their own family that is in the same super family as weasels, raccoons, and skunks. Also worth noting is that the red panda was actually the first animal to be called a panda rather than the more well known giant panda. The red panda is also sometimes called the red bear-cat or red cat-bear, and its scientific name, Ailurus fulgens, means "Shining Cat", and the Chinese name for the giant panda means "bear cat", but neither of them are related to cats either.
• A water bear is not an aquatic ursine mammal, but another name for a tardigrade, a water-dwelling, eight-legged, segmented micro-animal. They're also known as moss piglets, which is also non-indicative, as they're not related to pigs either, and they probably don't live in moss.
• Waterscorpions are not scorpions, they're insects, though they do superficially resemble scorpions. Their proper name is nepidae and they're also called needle bugs or water stick insects.
• The long-extinct sea scorpions, or eurypterids. Not only were they not scorpions, but there were plenty of freshwater species; in fact, after a few mass extinctions claimed a swath of them, all surviving sea scorpions were found in rivers and lakes.
• Manatees are also known as "sea cows" — even if the most marine they get is coastal — or in Portuguese, "bullfish", fitting the "-fish" even if it's a mammal. They also aren't that closely related to cows, instead being the closest living relatives of elephants. The marine mammals most closely related to cows are whales. That's also true of the order name Sirenia, as it was mistaken for a mermaid.
• Black bears aren't always black. They come in brown, red, blond, blue, and even white, too.
• Red foxes aren't always red. The silver fox is a variety of red fox that is neither red nor silver. It actually is mostly black with some white blended in.
• There also are several canines that have fox in their name that are not actually foxes. This includes the crab-eating fox, the island fox, the grey fox, all of the South American foxes^note  hoary fox, Darwin's fox, South American grey fox, pampas fox, culpeo or Andean fox, and sechuran fox , and the bat-eared fox, although the bat-eared fox is very closely related to true foxes. ^note It is slightly less related to true foxes than the raccoon dog, but far more than any of the other not-foxes.
• Flying foxes are actually large fruit bats. They get their name because their heads resemble that of a fox's, including an elongated muzzle and triangular ears.
• The bala shark is a minnow, not a shark.
• Sockeye salmon do not wear socks. When engaged in a salmon run, salmon (having no legs) don't "run", they rush.
• Fainting goats are goats with a disorder that causes them to fall over when they are startled. They aren't actually fainting as they aren't losing consciousness, but are just suffering brief paralysis.
• The geoduck (pronounced "gooey duck"), also called the mud duck, isn't a duck. It is a species of clam. A better name for it is king clam or elephant-trunk clam (the "trunk" is actually a siphon).
• You'll sometimes hear hyenas called "hyena dogs". Hyenas are actually more closely related to cats.
• The Pharaoh Hound has nothing to do with Ancient Egypt. Its name was the "Maltese Rabbit Dog" until the late 1960s. A British fan of the breed renamed it a more "romantic" sounding name as he thought the original name didn't fit the breed's elegance enough. As their original name implies, the breed originates from the Malta region and is traditionally used for hunting rabbits. The new name comes from images of Pharaoh Hound-like dogs on Ancient Egyptian carvings and paintings. It was assumed that these were Pharaoh Hounds due to their similarities and due to trades between the region, however there is no evidence of the fact besides "These dogs look like those dogs."
• The English Shepherd is actually an American breed. It gets its name because it's descended from English dogs.
• In Spanish, house flies are called "moscas". This alone would not cause issues... except for the fact other flies have names that sound like they are all of the same species, but it's not the case: mosquitoes have the same name as in English, while drain flies are called "mosquitas". In terms of language, "mosquito" and "mosquita" are male and female diminutives, respectively, for "mosca", but they are actually three different species, not baby house flies.
• In Spanish, the mouse is called "ratón", the word being derived from "rata" (rat) and the augmentative suffix "-ón". Not only are they different species, mice are also smaller than rats.
• King cobras are not actually true cobras, and have their own genus (Ophiophagus) that is different from that of true cobras (Naja). The stripe on their neck is a chevron instead of the double- or single-eye shape of most true cobras, their hood is narrower and longer compared to true cobras, and the arrangement of scales on the top of their head is different from true cobras. In fact, despite sharing the same South Asian habitat as the true cobras, which happen to be their favorite food^note  hence their genus name, which literally means "snake-eater", DNA evidence has shown king cobras to be more closely related to African mambas than they are to cobras.
• Fur seals are actually sea lions, albeit with denser underfur. Sea lions themselves are not actually aquatic lions, but closely related to seals and walruses. In fact, it would be more accurate to call them "sea bears" as they're more closely related to them than lions.
• The tropical weasel Mustela africana lives in South America.
• Sea spiders aren't really spiders, although they do closely resemble spiders. They're more closely related to crustaceans than they are to arachnids.
• Sea hares aren't hares, they are sea slugs. They get the name from the round shape of their bodies and the long rhinophores (chemosensory organs) on their heads giving them a resemblance to hares or rabbits.
• Mountain chickens are frogs that live in the wetlands of Dominica and Montserrat. The chicken part comes from how they supposedly Taste Like Chicken, although the "mountain" part is unclear.
• Flying squirrels can't actually fly, only glide. Same for “flying frogs”, “flying geckos” and “flying snakes.”
• Blue whales, well-known for being the largest animals to ever exist, have the scientific name Balaenoptera musculus. "Musculus" is a diminutive form of "mouse". This was likely done intentionally as a joke.
• True bugs are hemipteran insects, which excludes ladybugs (a species of beetle), pillbugs (not even insects, but isopods), mudbugs, Balmain bugs and Moreton Bay bugs (decapods related to lobsters, which are also not insects), and Dudley bugs (also not an insect, but a species of trilobite also called the Dudley locust, which is every bit as inaccurate and arguably even more misleading). Conversely, lanternflies actually are bugs, not flies.
• Woodlice aren't lice; in fact they aren't even insects at all. They're isopods^note an order of crustaceans that learned to walk and live on land.
• Groundhogs are also called "woodchucks", but they don't chew or feed on wood. It stems from "wuchak", an Algonquian name for the animal. There is a popular tongue-twister which lampshades this trope:
  How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
• Lake herrings are not herring, but instead are more closely related to salmon.
• Despite what urban legends and old wives' tales may say, earwigs have nothing to do with ears (though they do like dark places and thus can potentially mistake someone's exposed ear canal for a comfy refuge, such instances are extremely rare and accidental on the insect's part). Particularly interesting is the fact that their name has some association with ears in not one but many languages, particularly around Europe — perce-oreille ("ear-piercer") in French, uhovertka ("ear-folder") in Russian, ohrwurm ("ear worm") in German, etc.
• Subverted by the killer whale (aka orca), which is actually a species of dolphin. But then dolphins themselves are actually a type of whale, so it works. They were originally known as "whale killers"—some groups of orca do specialize in hunting marine mammals, including whales—but the name got reversed over time.
• Woolly bears aren't bears, or even vertebrates. They're the caterpillars of the Isabella tiger moth. They aren't exactly woolly, either, since their hair is straight, though they are at least very hairy.
• The naked mole rat, despite its name, is not naked, a mole, nor a rat.
• Russian Blue cats are slate-grey, although some at least have a blueish tint.
• The animal known as the fisher, a member of the weasel family closely related to martens, is not known for fishing. The name is actually based on "Fitchet", an archaic word for the pelt of European polecat.
• The Paris peacock is a butterfly from South and Southeast Asia.
• The monito del monte's name is Spanish for "little monkey of the mountain". It can climb and jump through the trees like a monkey, but it's actually a marsupial.
• Binturongs are also known as bearcats. No, they are not related to bears (Ursidae) or cats (Felidae). They're in the Viverridae family along with civets.
• The intimidating name of Gigantiops destructor belongs to... a species of totally harmless not-particularly-larger-than-usual ant. (The "gigantiops" actually refers to its large eyes.)

Living Things — Other

• Very few things referred to as berries actually are, and a few things that aren't called berries should be. Strawberry, blackberry, boysenberry, mulberry and raspberry are not (botanically) even "false" berries. True berries include, as well as gooseberries and elderberries, tomatoes, grapes, eggplant, watermelon, and pomegranates. This one came up in QI, and people will probably agree with Alan Davies that it's the scientists who are wrong, and the rest of them are right. It also came up in The Unbelievable Truth, where David Mitchell said that the botanists needed a technical term for something, and decided to use a word everyone else was already using to mean something different.
• The eggplant itself is not really a plant of "eggs".
  • The first varieties of eggplants introduced in the United States were of a bright white variety shaped like an enormous lightbulb, thus suggestive of an egg. (Some of these, or very similar ones, do still exist. One, aptly named "Easter Egg," even produces fruit about the size (and shape, and color) of an actual chicken egg!) However, when the purple varieties were introduced, those became so popular that the white eggplants fell into obscurity, becoming only a farmer's market and seed catalog novelty.
  • Eggplants are called "aubergines" in much of the English-speaking world, and the most popular varietals are that colour — though not all of them are. The name comes ultimately from Arabic "al" (the) plus baigan, the name of the vegetable in most of South and West Asia.
• Ringworm is not only not a worm but not an animal. It's actually a fungus. Skin infections caused by it, however, do have a vaguely ring-shaped area of swollen skin on the edge of the infected skin.
• Another notorious misnomer from Columbus is naming the capsicum (chili, bell pepper) genus "pepper", having nothing to do with the Piper family (black and white pepper).
  • The Spanish word for many species belonging to the Capsicum genus (among many others from "chile" to "ají" or "guindilla" for the different species of plants and varieties of the language) is "pimiento", and "pimienta" for the ones in the Piper genus.
  • Supposedly it's the result of another attempted mistake cover-up by Columbus, since nearly the whole point of his expedition was to bring back Piper peppers. In fairness to Columbus, however, small chilis do look a bit similar to long pepper, which was popular in Europe at that time.
• Sweet potatoes are only distantly related to the common potato, and have even less genetic relation to yams (the latter being more closely related to asparagus, onions and garlic than to anything that could reasonably be called a potato), despite the terms being synonymous in the US.
• Spanish moss is neither Spanish nor a moss, but a bromeliad related to pineapples.
• Cyanobacteria used to be called "blue-green algae", but because their cells are bacteria-like in anatomy, they are obviously no longer called "algae".
  • Fat choy, literally "hair vegetable" and a "key protected plant" in China, is not a plant but a type of cyanobacteria. It is the only type of bacteria to be on that protected list, that also includes two types of fungi, which are also not plants.
  • Similarly, archaebacteria are no longer considered bacteria. Which makes the name brilliant.
  • Originally, archaebacteria were thought to be bacteria because they had bacteria-like cells. Genetically, though, they are more related to eukaryotes (i.e., people, mushrooms, trees and amoeba), than they are to true, or "eubacteria".
• Slime molds are not a kind of mold. They're no longer even classified as fungi at all, but are scattered across several other groups of eukaryotes.
• Peanuts are not really "nuts". Unlike almonds, pecans, walnuts, hazelnuts, macadamias, Brazil nuts, and other tree nuts, peanuts are legumes that grow in pods that contain several seeds. The pods of beans are soft and split as the seeds get bigger. This is in contrast to nut seeds which have hard outer shells and grow singly. Also, unlike nuts, which generally grow from trees, the peanut plant is an herbaceous annual. Also, from The Other Wiki: "The word pea describes the edible seeds of many other legumes in the Fabaceae family, and in that sense, a peanut is a kind of pea."
  • This explains why some packages containing peanuts are labeled "May contain nuts." In fact, they're required to list peanuts and nuts separately, but things with peanuts often get that label, because they're usually packaged in a factory that also processes nuts, and for people with nut allergies, even a trace of cross-contamination can be dangerous.
  • Cats Don't Dance has Woolie talk about how the peanut is neither pea nor nut, and briefly suggests the name "pea legume" before dropping the matter.
  • Another name for them is "goober peas", which is the closest to having it right.
  • A coconut is not a nut either, but if somebody has a allergy to nuts and nut oils, they will also be allergic to peanuts and coconuts. Even though we've just explained why this shouldn't work.
• Pineapples are not the fruit of pines. The closest thing are pine cones^note Botanically, conifer cones aren't "fruit" because they don't grow from flowers — conifers having evolved before the first flowering plants did — but they're an analogous structure, which used to be called pine apples and lent their name to the tropical fruit due to the superficial similarity. Neither pineapples nor pine apples are apples, either; "apple" used to refer to any type of fruit (ref. the equally non-indicative French name for potatoes, pomme de terre/dirt apple ^note which, for that matter, aren't even fruit anyways...now hush).
  • Pomegranates are also not apples, and neither are they grenades—although frankly, the "grenade" bit is because early grenades looked rather like pomegranates (the name comes from the Latin pomum^note Apple and granatum^note "Seeded").
  • They are superficially similar enough to both that the name is understandable.
• Grapefruit. Well... it's orange, sour, and the size of a cannonball. At least on the tree, they grow in bunches that resemble bunches of grapes.
  • They are at least fruits, although how this is supposed to distinguish them from grapes is anybody's guess.
• Poison ivy is not ivy, poison oak is not oak, and poison sumac is not (ordinary) sumac (but see below). All three are more closely related to one another (and to mangoes and cashews) than any are to what they are named after—except for sumac, which is so closely related to all three of them that botanists argue about whether they should all be considered species of sumac or a separate genus of their own. (Either way, poison sumac is not the same as the kinds of sumac used as a tart spice in Middle Eastern cooking.) Furthermore, the plants are not actually poisonous — the compound they contain, urushiol, is rather an allergen, which causes the body's own defenses to react, but generally cause no lasting harm like an actual poison.
• The name "Rose of Sharon" has been applied to several species of crocus, tulip, lily, and hibiscus; it's basically every type of flower except a rose. That said, it is most commonly applied to hibiscus, which is the most closely related of these plants to the rose family (inasmuch as it is a rosid dicot rather than a monocot) and bears at least a superficial resemblance (inasmuch as its flowers have five petals—petals in multiples of five being the hallmark of the rose family).
• French marigolds are not from France, or anywhere near there. African marigolds, similarly, have nothing to do with Africa. Both of these marigold varieties are native to the Americas.
• Horse chestnut is not closely related to chestnut (it's far closer to maple that to true chestnut), nor it has anything to do with horses (except that the name possibly comes from the Old English use of "horse" to mean "coarse").
• The century plant blooms every five to ten years in favorable climates, and at least every sixty years even in poor conditions.
• The spurge-laurel, which is neither a spurge nor a laurel.
• The Jerusalem cherry has nothing to do with Jerusalem, or any part of the Middle East, for that matter. It is native to Peru. It is also not related to cherries; it's more closely related to the cherry tomato. (Although unlike the tomato, the Jerusalem cherry's fruits are mildly poisonous.)
• The bacterium Haemophilus influenzae does not cause the disease influenza. The bacterium was originally isolated from an influenza patient and the illness was mistakenly attributed to it (influenza is actually a viral disease).
• Banana trees aren't actually trees. They are herbaceous plants, since their "trunks" contain no woody tissue.
• The strawberry tree isn't related to strawberries. Another name for the strawberry tree is the cane apple, but it is not related to apples either. It also isn't even technically a tree, it is a shrub. The fruit of a strawberry tree only looks like strawberries from really far away because they are both small and red, but are otherwise nothing alike. Another alternate name for the plant, "arbutus" (from the Latin word for it) avoids these issues but is little known in the English-speaking world (except in Maryland, but only because they named a town that for some reason).
• The Osage orange (also known as the horse apple) isn't an orange at all. Nor is it an apple. Nor is its fruit orange colored, or apple-like, or particularly attractive to horses. It's in the mulberry family... and unlike either apples or oranges, is not edible, as it is mildly toxic and not very tasty.
• Mycobacterium is a genus of bacteria which includes the bacteria which cause leprosy and tuberculosis. However, it doesn't have much to do with fungi, even though the prefix 'myco-' means fungus. The name comes from how mycobacteria tend to grow on the surface of cultures in a fashion similar to mold.
  • This also applies to mycolic acid, which also has no biological link to fungi. Instead it is one of the main components of the cell walls of mycobacteria and is one of the reasons they are so resistant to antibiotics.
• The fruit known as the wolf apple has no relation to apples and is more similar to a tomato. It gets the wolf in its name because maned wolves (which are not true wolves) love them.
• Buckwheat isn't a cultivar of wheat, or even distantly related to wheat or other grains, other than that they're both flowering plants. Taxonomically, it's more related to roses, and even more closely related to rhubarb.
• A large specimen of Norfolk Island pine can sorta look like a pine tree from a distance, but up close you can see that it's only a very distantly-related conifer (belonging to a whole different family, in fact).
• The flowering maple isn't a maple; it belongs to an entirely different order of plants. As an aside, its common name implies that other maples (i.e., the real ones) don't flower — they do, their flowers are just smaller.
• Many varieties of plants that have "red" in the name (ex. red onions, red cabbage) look 100% purple.
• Lily pads are not in the Lilium family. Nor are Lilies-of-the-valley.
• The artichoke has a lot of Chinese names, including "French lily", "lotus lily", or in Hong Kong, "elegant branch bamboo". It is not a lily, lotus, or bamboo (the last one is a transliteration that imitates the sound, not meaning, of English "artichoke"), and probably originated in Italy which is still the largest producer (France at less than 3%).
• Likewise, "lucky bamboo" isn't bamboo or any other kind of grass, but a species of dragon tree. Another dragon tree species is commonly called the "corn plant"; needless to say, you won't get any tasty ears of corn from it.
• There are actually more species of tree commonly called cedars that are not cedars than ones that are. The name may stem from the fact that their wood has a similar odor and finds similar uses in the lumber and woodworking industries.
• Carolina jasmine is not related to true jasmines. In fact, it's very poisonous, unlike true jasmines.
• The plant genus Nasturtium includes watercress, not the flowers commonly called nasturtiums (the latter get their name from the fact that both plants produce similar secretions).

People

• Farid al-Atrash was a composer, virtuoso oud player, and top-notch singer, and was one of the biggest names in Arab music in general and Egyptian music in particular for much of the 20th century. His sister Amal (better known by her stage name Asmahan) was also a noted singer and actress. Their last name means "the Deaf".
• The name "Pennsylvania Dutch" (descended from German, not Dutch immigrants) and nicknames like "Dutch Schultz" (of German-Jewish descent) are actually subversions of this trope. The English word "Dutch" was taken from the German word for "German" ("Deutsch" in Modern High German, "Dütsch" or "Düütsch" in Modern Low German), which in itself is derived from the Germanic word for "people" also present in names like Theodoric, Detlef and Dieter). In the Middle Ages and early modern times, the English word "Dutch" referred to all kinds of German-speakers from the Holy Roman Empire, and one even distinguished between "High Dutch" (High German) and "Low Dutch" (Low German and the dialect that later became what is now called the Dutch language—so called because the regions where they're spoken sit at lower elevations than the mountainous, High German-speaking regions of southern Germany). Later on, "Dutch" came to be narrowed down to the Dutch living closest to Britain, i. e. the inhabitants of the Low Countries, the northern provinces of which formed a nation of their own as the United Provinces of the Netherlands and officially left the Holy Roman Empire in 1648. So it is actually the current primary meaning of Modern English "Dutch" (pertaining to the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the West Germanic language spoken there and in Belgium) which is non-indicative. In Dutch the word Duits means "German", and the Dutch refer to themselves as simply Nederlanders, which means... well, take a guess.
• If an Amish person calls somebody "English", they mean "non-Amish". It's a holdover from Colonial times, when most of their neighbors were English, but the way it's used today intends no assumptions about the subject's ethnicity or nationality. Even if you're, say, Chinese, the Amish will still call you "English".
• "Petite models" are between 5'6" and 5'8" — not only quite a bit taller than the usual definition of "petite", but above average in most countries (the average American woman is between 5'4" and 5'5"). They are only petite in comparison to standard runway models, who are generally around 6 feet tall.
• "Plus size" models usually wear US clothing sizes 8 to 12. Most clothing manufacturers start plus sizes at size 14.
• Stand-up comedian Larry the Cable Guy won't fix your cable box... and his real first name isn't Larry. In fact "Larry the Cable Guy" is more or less a character played by comedian Dan Whitney that has completely taken over his stand-up act. His middle name is Lawrence though.
• The surname Jewison has nothing to do with Jewish ancestry. It's an English name that apparently derives from the medieval female given name Juetta. Norman Jewison comes from Canadian Protestant ancestry (though he did direct the film version of Fiddler on the Roof).
  • Similarly, the Chinese surname Jew (or, more precisely, the various Chinese names that have been transliterated into English as "Jew").
• The surname Ashkenazi is a Sephardi Jewish name.
• Joe the Plumber, who became an unexpected figure in the 2008 US presidential election (after asking a loaded question about taxes to Barack Obama, then getting used by John McCain's campaign as a symbol of Middle America), wasn't a licensed plumber. He was a plumber's assistant who operated under his employer's license, which was legal in his home state of Ohio. Also, his first name wasn't Joe: his full name was Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, and he bounced between calling himself Joe and Sam (he used the name Sam Wurzelbacher for his unsuccessful run for Congress in 2012).
• "Caucasian", in common parlance, is usually used as a euphemism for "white" people of European descent rather than someone from The Caucasus (e.g. Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Chechens, Georgians etc.). Ironically, people who actually do come from the Caucasus are often not called Caucasian at all, since many of them have distinctively ethnic, "brownish" look compared to the Russians, their northern neighbors who have been dominating them since the 19th century. Considering that the Caucasus region borders The Middle East, this actually makes sense.
• Dutch DJ Afrojack is not named Jack, nor does he have an afro.
• There are two kinds of Indians. People from India, and the natives of the American continents. This is largely attributed to Christopher Columbus mistakenly thinking he landed in India through what he thought was an undiscovered sea passage, when he had in fact landed in what we now know as the Caribbean.
  • In modern-day US, the indigenous Americans are usually called "Native Americans" both to keep from offending anybody and to end the confusion, but "American Indian" is still often encountered. For example, the government agency in charge of maintaining relationships with Native American tribes to administer federal law is still called the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In Canada, they are called the "First Nations".
  • Speaking of, "West Indians" are from the West Indies, a series of islands in the Caribbean sea, not the western part of India. In modern-day, it's mainly used to refer to people from the former British West Indies, hence the West Indies cricket team. There is also the historical term "East Indian". It referred to people from Southeast Asia, which was called the "East Indies" during the early modern period (e.g. Spanish East Indies, the Dutch East Indies). However, it's much less used today compared to "West Indian" for a variety of reasons.^note Most Southeast Asians are descended from the same people who lived in the region thousands of years ago, while West Indians are mostly descended from Old World settlers during the early modern period. Despite being located in the Indian cultural sphere, Southeast Asians do not appreciate being conflated with Indians, to put it mildly.
  • It doesn't help that literal Indians, as in people who came from the Indian subcontinent, have been living in the Americas far longer than people expect, and comprise only part of the people blanket-labelled as "West Indian" today. Indians were settled in large numbers in the 19th century by the British in the West Indies to work as laborers, and their descendants are still a huge population bloc in the region, making up the plurality of the population in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago.
• The Nez Perce Indians take their name from a French phrase meaning "pierced nose", but they have never traditionally pierced their noses for ornamentation. They got the name because Lewis and Clark's interpreter confused them with a different tribe (likely the Chinook tribe) that did pierce their noses.
• Played straight by half of pretty much everyone. Almost every name — first, middle, and last — is derived from words native to that area or the area the family comes from. Some are obvious (Faith, Summer, etc.) and others require some digging (Tristan = "sadness"/"rioting"). How applicable a particular name is varies from person to person.
• In 1958, Robert Lane and his wife, African-Americans living in a housing project in Harlem, decided to name their newborn son Winner. Three years later, they had their seventh and last child, also a son, and he decided to give him the name Loser. Fast forward 40-plus years. One of the two earned a scholarship to a prep school, graduated from a well-regarded college, and became a distinguished NYC cop. The other's main claim to fame is a very long criminal record, with more than 30 arrests and likely quite a few convictions. As you might guess from its listing in this trope, the cop is Loser (more often "Lou") and the criminal is Winner.
• While she's a prolific actress, Kim Director has no directorial credits.
• Despite having the whitest name known to man, actor Whitman Mayo was black. That is indeed his real name, and was not a pseudonym taken from a mayonnaise jar label, nor is his family associated with the manufacture or distribution of condiments.
• Thomas Lanier Williams was a Mississippi native. He adopted "Tennessee Williams" as his Pen Name in tribute to his father, who was originally from Tennessee.
• Late Medieval martial artist Ott Jud ("Ott the Jew") was a Christian, though of Jewish descent.
• Infamous Murder, Inc. contract killer "Pittsburgh Phil" was based out of New York City, and his real name was Harry.
• The Mauryan emperor Ashoka the Great had a name that meant "the one who will never mourn". But he famously ended up mourning for all the death, suffering and destruction he caused during his conquests, and ended up making efforts to avoid needless bloodshed.
• Liz Parrish is the CEO of a medical research company focusing on slowing or reversing human aging, and is semi-famous for testing one promising technique on herself.
• There’s a famous book in Latin by a 16th-century German writer named Georg Bauer; because it was published in Latin, he Latinized his name to "Georgius Agricola", since "Bauer" and "Agricola" are German and Latin for "Farmer", respectively. Also, his given name comes from the Greek "Georgios", which also means "Farmer". So yes, his name is "Farmer Farmer". Naturally, his book is... the seminal treatise on mining, De re metallica ("On Metals").
• National Football League executive Tex Schramm was born and raised in... California. Why was he called Tex? Because his full name was Texas Earnest Schramm Jr.—he was named after his father. But it proved to be a Prophetic Name because he went on to spend 29 years as the general manager of the Dallas Cowboys.
• Many a multi-ethnic name. Cameron Diaz said she grew up being questioned as for why she looked like a Nordic blonde yet had a Latino surname. When table tennis player Bruna Yumi Takahashi went to the Olympic Games in Tokyo, she said that from the airport immigration on it was a parade of the locals doing a Double Take, looking back and forth between a credential with very Japanese surnames, and a face that couldn't look less Nipponic.
• Tocharians, an extinct Indo-European people in Xinjiang whose languages famously defied the then-contemporary notion of a phylogenetic centum-satem division, were named after a misidentification. When they were first discovered, historians mistakenly equated them with the Tocharoi, a people mentioned by Ancient Greek geographers as hailing from a region in northern Afghanistan, over a thousand kilometers away. It's now generally agreed that the Tocharians arose independently in Xinjiang instead of originating from somewhere else, while the actual Tocharoi were an Iranian people better known as the Bactrians, who did come from northern Afghanistan and settle Xinjiang as part of the expansion of the Kushan Empire, through which Buddhism spread to East Asia. However, the name has stuck in literature since (alternatives such as Agnean-Kuchean, named after their actual endonyms, have not gained widespread traction).
• Alberto Fujimori, longtime president of Peru, was nicknamed El Chino, despite being of Japanese, not Chinese, descent ("chino" is a common Latin American slang term for East Asians, regardless of country).
• French rugby player Uini Atonio (first name pronounced "weenie")^note While he's naturalized French and has played for the national team, he was born in New Zealand to Samoan parents. is absolutely enormous, standing at 1.97 m (6 feet 5 inches) tall and weighing in at 162 kg (357 lb), making him one of the heaviest ever to play the game at international level.

Places

• The Danville, California family restaurant Pete's Brass Rail and Car Wash. As the menu says, "There is no brass rail, there is no car wash, and who the hell is Pete?"
• A pizza place in Columbus, Ohio is called Catfish Biff's, "We ain't got no fish!"
• The infamous Café Mountain in Nagoya, Japan, despite hailing from a country full of mountains, is not located anywhere remotely near any of them.
• Kabuki-chō, the famous red-light district in Tokyo, Japan, was named because a kabuki theater was planned to be built within the city as its main attraction. The theater was never built, but the name stuck.
• The NASCAR track known as the Charlotte Motor Speedway is located in the city of Concord, North Carolina, which is not even in the same county as Charlotte. It is, however, just across the county line from Mecklenburg County, the county that contains Charlotte. Not only that, but the Charlotte city limits are only a few miles away.
• The Milwaukee Mile is neither located in the city of Milwaukee (although West Allis, where the track is actually located, is still in Milwaukee County) nor is it a true mile.
• Indianapolis Motor Speedway is not located in Indianapolis, Indiana proper, but an enclave within the city known as Speedway. Given that the city of Speedway is surrounded by the city of Indianapolis, this example splits hairs somewhat, but still.
• Many pro sports teams are not based in the cities they represent, but bordering suburbs.
  • The NFL has several examples.
    • The Washington Commanders currently play at FedExField in Landover, Maryland, and have their offices and practice facilities in Ashburn, Virginia.
    • The New York Giants and New York Jets don't play in New York City OR New York State (unless they're playing the Buffalo Bills on the road); their shared home ground at MetLife Stadium (and the former site of its predecessor, Giants Stadium) is in East Rutherford, New Jersey (this has led combative New Jersey governor Chris Christie to refer to the Jets as the "Jersey Jets" on at least one occasion). Both teams now have their offices and practice facilities in Jersey as well. Both did originate in New York City, however,^note the Giants played at the Polo Grounds through 1955 and Yankee Stadium through 1972, though with the Yankees closing the stadium for a lengthy renovation following the 1973 baseball season, the Giants played two years at the Yale Bowl in Connecticut, and the 1975 season at Shea Stadium, before their new home was ready; the Jets, originating in the AFL as the Titans of New York, played their first four seasons at the Polo Grounds before moving to Shea in 1964, and left when they couldn't come to terms for a new lease following the 1983 season making their names Artifact Titles.
    • The Buffalo Bills play in the suburb of Orchard Park.
    • The Miami Dolphins do play in a city with the word "Miami", but it's Miami Gardens.^note To be fair, both Miami Gardens and the city of Miami proper are located in Miami-Dade County (which Miami is the county seat of), and most locals tend to use "Dade County" and "Miami" interchangeably, to the point where the county itself officially changed its name in 1997 from "Dade County" to "Miami-Dade County". In addition, up until Miami Gardens was established in 2003, it was in unincorporated land, which prompted the Dolphins' stadium to use a Miami postal address
    • With the opening of Levi's Stadium, the San Francisco 49ers now play in Santa Clara, which is closer to San Jose than it is to San Francisco. The Niners built the stadium next door to their HQ.
    • The Dallas Cowboys haven't played in the Big D itself ever since they left the Cotton Bowl in 1971 (Texas Stadium was in Irving, the current one is Arlington)^note Not to mention, Arlington, Texas, is not even in Dallas County (where both Dallas proper and Irving are located). Instead, Arlington is Tarrant County (of which Fort Worth is the county seat). They also don't have their HQ in the Big D either; they had that in Irving during the existence of Texas Stadium, and moved it to Frisco (the team's HQ is in Collin County) a few years after their current stadium opened.
    • Neither the Los Angeles Chargers nor the Los Angeles Rams play in the city of Los Angeles; they have shared SoFi Stadium in the suburb of Inglewood since 2020 (though it's still in Los Angeles County). It wasn't the first time each team played outside its namesake city—the Rams played in Anaheim from 1980 to 1994, while the Chargers played in Carson from 2017 to 2019.^note Both teams played under their city names when in other cities—the Rams in Cleveland from 1936–1945 and St. Louis from 1995–2015, and the Chargers in San Diego from 1961–2016. The Rams had previously played in L.A. proper from 1946–1979. Both teams also have their HQ outside the city, with the Rams in Agoura Hills and the Chargers in Orange County, specifically Costa Mesa.
    • The Las Vegas Raiders don't play within the Las Vegas city limits; Allegiant Stadium is in the adjacent unincorporated community of Paradise. This example splits hairs, since all locations in Paradise have a Las Vegas mailing address, and most locals call the entire built-up area "Las Vegas" regardless of city boundaries. The team's HQ is in another suburb which is a separate city, Henderson.
  • The NBA lost its most recent example of this trope when the Detroit Pistons moved in 2017 from The Palace of Auburn Hills in the city's far northwest suburbs to Little Caesars Arena in Midtown Detroit. However, the Los Angeles Clippers will move to the new Intuit Dome in Inglewood for the 2024–25 season.
    • The NBA's sister league, the WNBA, has two or three, depending on whether you care to split hairs. There's no doubt about the Atlanta Dream, who moved from downtown Atlanta to suburban College Park after the 2019 season, or the Dallas Wings, who have played in Arlington since their arrival from Tulsa in 2016. The hair-splitting comes with the Las Vegas Aces, which like the NFL's Raiders play in the community of Paradise. However, the Wings are now set to move to an arena at Dallas' downtown convention center in 2026.
    • Also in the W, the New York Liberty have zig-zagged this trope. When they and the league began play in 1997, the Liberty, which was owned by the parent company of the New York Knicks, shared Madison Square Garden in Midtown Manhattan with the Knicks. After the 2017 season, the Liberty's home games were moved to Westchester County, directly to the north of NYC (though still in New York State), while the Liberty was put up for sale. Early in 2019, the Liberty was bought by Joseph Tsai, then owner of 49% of the Brooklyn Nets, who kept the team in Westchester but moved two home games to the Nets' home of Barclays Center. After the 2019 WNBA season, Tsai became sole owner of the Nets and moved the Liberty to Brooklyn full-time.
  • Major League Soccer has nearly as many examples as the NFL.
    • Chicago Fire FC zigzags the trope. They started in Chicago proper at Soldier Field, played a couple of seasons in suburban Naperville while Soldier Field was under reconstruction, moved back when the reconstruction was complete, only to move into their own stadium in the adjacent suburb of Bridgeview a few years later. Most recently, they moved back to Soldier Field as the Bridgeview stadium was ultimately seen as a lousy location.
    • The New York Red Bulls, like the Giants and Jets, play in New Jersey, but have their own home stadium in Harrison.
    • The Philadelphia Union play in Chester, Pennsylvania.
    • FC Dallas plays in Frisco, which isn't even in Dallas County; the team's stadium and HQ are in Collin County.
    • The LA Galaxy play in Carson, though it's at least in LA County.
    • Real Salt Lake play in Sandy (although "Salt Lake" could just as easily refer to Salt Lake County or the Great Salt Lake as well as Salt Lake City).
  • The National Women's Soccer League, the Distaff Counterpart to MLS (although the two leagues are independent of one another), has two examples, one present and one past. Two other teams play with this trope.
    • The Chicago Red Stars have never played in the Windy City. They currently play in the Bridgeview stadium that the Fire left behind.
    • The Washington Spirit started out playing in Germantown, Maryland. When D.C. United opened its new Audi Field in the District proper in 2018, the Spirit started cooperating with that club and moved a small number of home matches to that venue. In 2021 and 2022, it played the majority of its home games at Audi Field, with the remainder at United's training facility in Virginia, before moving all home games to Audi Field in 2023.
    • Played with by NJ/NY Gotham FC since changing its name from Sky Blue FC in 2021. While the team represents the whole NYC metro, it has always played its home games in New Jersey (and deliberately put "NJ" first in its new name). It currently shares the New York Red Bulls' stadium.^note While Gotham played a single game at the Philadelphia Union's stadium in both 2021 and 2022, it can be justified as an attempt to build a South Jersey fanbase.
    • Played with in a different way by Angel City FC, a Los Angeles team that started play in 2022. In its first season, it played regular-season games at Banc of California Stadium (since renamed BMO Stadium) in LA proper, but played home games in the Challenge Cup (the NWSL's loose parallel to England's EFL Cup) at Titan Stadium on the campus of Cal State Fullerton in Orange County. That lasted only one season; Angel City moved its Challenge Cup games to BMO Stadium in 2023.
  • Finally averted by the team now known as the Arizona Coyotes in the 2014 offseason. They had been playing as the Phoenix Coyotes in the suburb of Glendale since December 2003. (The Coyotes had played in Phoenix from 1996, when they arrived from Winnipeg, until moving to Glendale. They moved to Tempe in 2022, using a new hockey arena at Arizona State University as home ice while attempting to build a new arena of their own.)
  • Much like their aforementioned neighbors, the Raiders and the Aces, the Vegas Golden Knights don't actually play within the city limits of Las Vegas, but rather in Paradise (the community).
  • Zig-zagged by the Cleveland Cavaliers. They originally played in the Cleveland Arena until it was torn down in 1974, then they played in Richfield, almost an hour south, for 20 years. However, Gund Arena (now Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse) was built in downtown Cleveland in 1994, and the Cavs have been playing in Cleveland proper ever since.
  • In a similar fashion, both the NBA's Washington Wizards^note Who were, during this time, known as the Capital (and then Washington) Bullets before changing their name to the Wizards in 1997 and the NHL's Washington Capitals, from the 1970s to 1997, played in the Capital Centre, which was not located in Washington, D.C. proper, but the aforementioned suburb of Landover, Maryland. This changed when both teams moved into the then-named MCI Center (now known as Capital One Arena) in D.C. proper in 1997.
  • Also zig-zagged by the San Jose Earthquakes of MLS. They started out playing at Spartan Stadium (now CEFCU Stadium) on the campus of San Jose State University. After the 2005 season, the team left for Houston (becoming the Dynamo), but left their history behind for a new ownership group that emerged in 2007. When the Quakes resumed play in 2008, they played most of their home games in Santa Clara, with occasional big games in other Bay Area cities, but none in San Jose proper. Finally, in 2015, they returned to their namesake city with the opening of what's now known as PayPal Park.
  • The Atlanta Braves' 2017 move to the Cobb County venue now known as Truist Park played with the trope. While the Braves no longer play in the city proper, the new stadium still has an Atlanta address.^note Not due to any shenanigans by the Braves; it's simply that the area surrounding the stadium is next to the city of Atlanta and has always been served by an Atlanta post office.
  • Inglewood was home to the Los Angeles Lakers and Kings (at The Forum), and as noted above is now home to the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers. If things go according to current plans, the Los Angeles Clippers will start play in Inglewood's new Intuit Dome in 2024.
  • The Los Angeles Angels in MLB have long been dogged by this trope, as they actually don't play in Los Angeles, but in Anaheim (which is about 25-30 miles from Los Angeles proper, and also in Orange County). While the Angels were established in (and were named after) the city of Los Angeles^note Spanish for "The Angels" proper in 1961, they moved into Anaheim five years later, and have played in Anaheim ever since. Throughout their history, the Angels have frequently branded themselves as either California or Anaheim-based teams to avert this trope, before re-adopting the name "Los Angeles Angels" in 2005 to build a larger fanbase across the Greater Los Angeles market.
• The American Civil War:
  • Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, which many people take as meaning they held the surrender meeting in a courthouse. In fact, that was just the name of the town (really not much more than a hamlet, though it did have a courthouse at that time), and the ceremony was held in a civilian dwelling.
  • The Battle of Chancellorsville was actually fought in a forest. Notable because another battle was later fought on the same ground and is known as the Battle of the Wilderness.
• Historians are uncertain exactly where the Battle of Bosworth — which ended the War of the Roses and saw The House of Tudor installed upon the throne of England — was fought, but the one thing they all agree on is that it wasn't very near the town of Market Bosworth.
• The town of North Pole, Alaska is some 1,700 mi (2,700 km) away from the actual Geographic North Pole, which, like the Magnetic North Pole, is in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. North Pole, a suburb of Fairbanks, is not only nowhere near the Arctic Ocean, it's a ways south of the Arctic Circle as well. At least it has more justification for that name than do North Pole, New York or North Pole, Western Australia.
• The Holy Roman Empire was an agglomeration of semi-independent duchies, principalities, marches, counties, baronies and city-states, plus a kingdom or two, in Germany and Central Europe with Rome under its protection. To borrow a quote from Voltaire (or Linda Richman), it was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.
• The Byzantine Empire was actually called the Roman Empire during its existence, which lasted over 650 years after losing Rome for the last time. "Byzantine Empire" is a modern invention to avoid confusion with the Western Roman Empire. This gets evident when you consider how they were seen by their Muslim neighbors. The historical Seljuk Sultanate of Rum was so named because it sat atop the former lands of the Eastern Roman Empire ("Rum" is the Arabic transliteration of "Rome"). The "Rome" that is mentioned a lot in The Qur'an refers to the Byzantines, which makes sense when you realize that by the time the Qur'an was written (early 7th century), the Roman Empire as people know it had long disappeared.
• The modern-day nation of Macedonia has little to no continuity with the more historically famous kingdom ruled by Alexander the Great—most land of that kingdom, including its former capital cities, is now owned by Greece. It is part of the general region, though. As The Onion's Our Dumb World joked, this makes it a very disappointing place for tourists. This created some diplomatic issues with Greece, which saw Macedonia's choice of name as it trying to make a claim on the Macedonian land it currently owns—this was eventually resolved by simply renaming the country to North Macedonia.
• 7-Eleven's name originally referred to them being open between 7 AM to 11 PM, but now most locations are open 24/7, so it's become an Artifact Title.
• A demilitarized zone is supposed to not allow military activity. The Korean Demilitarized Zone (between North and South Korea) is the most heavily militarized border in the world.
• The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is not democratic, it's not ruled by the people, it's not a republic^note Officially it's a republic in the original sense of the term: not being a monarchy. But it's a dictatorship in which leadership succession is hereditary, meaning it's really just a kingdom that doesn't call itself a kingdom. and it doesn't even cover the whole of the Korean Peninsula, making the name a quadruple whammy.
• The University of Texas at Dallas is not actually in Dallas (save for a couple of buildings), but is instead mostly located in a suburb of Dallas, Richardson.
• The University of Dallas, a small Catholic liberal arts institution, is in Irving. It is a mile or so from the site of the old Texas Stadium, where the "Dallas" Cowboys used to play.
• The State University of New York at Buffalo is mostly not in Buffalo, but rather in the suburb of Amherst (though the entire university does have a Buffalo mailing address).
• Similarly, the State University of New York at Binghamton, which markets itself as Binghamton University, is mostly not in Binghamton, but rather in the suburb of Vestal (though the entire university has a Binghamton mailing address).
• The full legal name of the home of the Fighting Irish is the University of Notre Dame du Lac, with the descriptive phrase translating to "Our Lady of the Lake". The campus actually lies on two small lakes. The Catholic order that runs the university took possession of the site in November 1842, when it was covered with snow; it's believed that the snow and marshy area surrounding the lakes gave the appearance of a single larger lake, hence "du Lac" instead of "des Lacs".
• Grand Canyon University is in Phoenix, which is a four-hour drive from the Grand Canyon. It's something of an Artifact Title, since the school was originally located in Prescott, Arizona. But that's still only about two hours closer to the canyon.
• Played with by a couple of public universities in Michigan. Oakland University has a Rochester mailing address, and the campus is split between Auburn Hills and Rochester Hills. Wayne State University is in Detroit. However, both are named for the counties in which they're located.
• In another Metroplex example, the Pleasant Grove neighborhood in Dallas County is anything but pleasant most of the time. A Mesquite high school teacher once compared a video of the Chinese military firing their automatic weapons to "Pleasant Grove on a Saturday night".
• The (rather fancy) Glaswegian restaurant The Ubiquitous Chip is so called because, for the first thirty years of its existence, it — almost uniquely among Scottish restaurants — didn't sell chips. It now does, but only at lunchtime, and they are described as "hand-cut".
• Wake Forest University is actually not located in the town of Wake Forest, North Carolina, but is in Winston-Salem, which is over 100 miles away. It was located in Wake Forest for its first 122 years but moved in 1956. The university actually predates the town by 46 years and the city was even originally named the Town of Wake Forest College.
• The stadium that was known from 2006 to 2018 as University of Phoenix Stadium, now known as State Farm Stadium, wasn't where the University of Phoenix played sports. As a matter of fact, it is a for-profit college with no intercollegiate athletics program; it just bought the naming rights to where the Arizona Cardinals play. The stadium is also not even in Phoenix, but Glendale.
• The same was true of Cooley Law School Stadium from 2010 to 2020. Law schools do not field official intercollegiate athletics teams (some have unofficial club softball teams, but that's it). Instead, the law school just bought the naming rights to the stadium where the Lansing Lugnuts (a minor-league baseball team) play (it was previously Oldsmobile Park; since Oldsmobile no longer exists, they needed to change the name, and the law school stepped in).^PostscriptAfter the law school's naming rights contract expired, the ballpark became Jackson Field, actually named after an insurance company.
• Many settlements named "new city" are no longer so, particularly if they are located in the Old World.
  • Naples/Napoli, Italy, was founded in the 5th century BCE. Now one of the country's ten oldest cities.
  • Nabeul, Tunisia, founded by Greek colonists in the 5th century BCE.
  • Nablus, Palestine, was founded as "Flavia Neapolis" (new city of Flavius) in 72 CE.
  • Veliky Novgorod, Russia, was founded in the early 9th century on the site of an old Varangian settlement. It was originally just Novgorod, but was prefixed with "Great" (Veliky) because it is historically much more important than the younger but more populated city of Nizhny Novgorod.
  • New City, NY, a suburb located just northwest of New York City, was founded and named in 1798. It was built as a county seat for Rockland County, which was being split off from Orange County to the north.
• Pont Neuf ("brand-new bridge") in Paris is the oldest bridge of the city.
• New College is actually the oldest extant college in Oxford University.
• Tokyo Disney Resort is not located in Tokyo proper; it is located in Chiba, just east of Tokyo. The Tokyo Game Show is held at the Makuhari Messe, also in Chiba.
• Disneyland Paris isn't located in Paris but in a suburb 20 miles to the east of the city. It was originally named Euro Disney, which is accurate as the park is in Europe.
• Paris La Défense Arena, a domed stadium that opened in 2017 as the new home of the rugby club Racing 92. It's not located within either of its geographic identifiers—whether Paris, or the La Défense business district. (The stadium is in a part of the suburb of Nanterre that lies just outside the La Défense boundary.) The name actually came from a sponsorship deal with "Paris La Défense", the company that manages the business district.
• The Seibu (西武, 西 meaning "west") department store is on the east side of Ikebukuro station. The Tobu (東武, 東 meaning "east") department store is on the west side.
• Rhode Island is part of the mainland United States. Originally, Rhode Island referred only to the largest island in Narragansett Bay, on which the city of Newport was founded. The mainland settlements were known as Providence Plantations. "Rhode Island" is now the official name of both the state and the island; until 2020, the formal name of the state was "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations". However, "Rhode Island" has been the common name of the state for many decades, and the island is generally known as Aquidneck Island. While there are plenty of islands that are part of the state, only three (Aquidneck, Conanicut and Block) actually have towns on them. The rest are either very small or only have a couple of houses on them.
• University buildings may fall into this trope over time. For instance, the Old Horticulture Building at Michigan State University houses... the Department of Romance and Classical Studies ("Romance" as in languages, not other activities). Yes. Horticulture is housed in the Plant and Soil Science Building, which actually is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• The country of Greenland is icy (with some green spots), while neighboring Iceland is green (with some icy spots).
• The Kansas City you're most likely talking about is in Missouri. (There is a Kansas City in Kansas right across the Missouri River, but it's smaller—that's why it's called the Kansas City Shuffle.)
• Orange and Orange County in California in modern times. They used to grow oranges there.
• The Canary Islands are named after dogs (original Latin Insula Canaria or "isles of dogs". Canaria is rooted in "canis". Guess what it means). The name of the bird is derived from the name of the islands.
• There are several English 'forests' where there are few, if any, trees to be seen. Large tracts of Dartmoor Forest in Devon, Macclesfield Forest in Cheshire and the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire are bare open moorland with trees confined to the occasional river valley. In English law a forest was simply an area to which Forest Law applied, in other words a royal hunting ground.
• The Quad Cities straddling the Mississippi River are actually five cities (Moline, East Moline and Rock Island in Illinois; Davenport and Bettendorf in Iowa). "Quad Cities" was originally applied to the Molines, Rock Island and Davenport, but Bettendorf had a growth spurt after World War II, and an attempt to alter the name to "Quint Cities" failed because Quad was already too well-entrenched.
• The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Located in Humlebæk, Denmark. According to its wikipedia article, "The name of the museum derives from the first owner of the property, Alexander Brun, who named the villa after his three wives, all named Louise."
• The small town of Arkport, New York, has no ports to speak of. Its original name was "Ark-port" (with the hyphen), and according to The Other Wiki, it was founded in 1797 as a port on the Canisteo River to ship timber and agricultural products using temporary river boats known at that time as "arks". The name became an artifact in 1825 with the opening of the Erie Canal, which proved to be more economical for long-distance transport than the ark system.
• Yeovil Junction railway station is outside the boundaries of the town of Yeovil, and you cannot change trains there (although you can sometimes get a bus from there to Yeovil's other railway station, Yeovil Pen Mill, which is on a completely separate line). Again, an Artifact Title — before the Beeching cuts, there was more than one railway line regularly serving Yeovil Junction.
• Clapham Junction railway station is about a mile from the nearest part of Clapham—it's actually in Battersea. It was given its name because at the time the station was built, Battersea was regarded as a seedy and run-down area, whilst Clapham was seen as trendy and upmarket (as it was again in the 1980s, when the Duchess of York lived there), so the railway company stretched a geographical point.
• Battersea Power Station and Battersea Dogs (and Cats) Home (and formerly Battersea Park, which hosted the "funfair"). Both of which are in Nine Elms (next door to one another, and quite near the Park), which is a good mile away from Battersea and is a grim industrial area, while Battersea is rather posh. Oh, and Nine Elms doesn't have any elms in it. It used to have elms, but there don't ever appear to have been nine of them. Right, rant over.
• Battersea Funfair was an amusement park, not a funfair. Recently (March 2010) there have appeared in London (UK) adverts for a so-called "travelling theme park", which is a contradiction in terms; the amusement industry definitions are that if it travels it's a fair, whilst if it stays in one place it's a park. (A fairground stays in one place, but the collections of rides it hosts are temporary, hence still fairs.)
• Somewhat similarly to Yeovil Junction, New Jersey Transit's Secaucus Junction station, while actually within the formal boundary of Secaucus, but pretty far away from everything of significance in Secaucus, and also not actually a formal railroad junction: trains can't switch between lines there. That said, it was built with the specific purpose of allowing passengers to change trains, and in fact has no less than eight lines (and potentially as many as eleven, depending on how you define a "line") serving it.
• Despite its name, the majority (55%) of The London Underground tracks aren't actually underground. Some stations even have platforms above street level.
• About 40% of the New York City Subway's tracks are aboveground.
• The Chicago L isn't entirely elevated. Every line has segments of tie-and-ballast running, a few lines have grade crossings, and the Red and Blue Lines run in subways through downtown Chicago (although they have elevated segments outside of downtown).
• On a similar note; the Rotterdam Metro runs mostly above ground, on elevated rails and stations and a significant part of its infrastructure isn't located in Rotterdam. Not that Metro (short for "metropolitan") actually indicates above or below ground.
• And for Hamburg: the train is called U-Bahn (sub-train), its company Hochbahn (high-train) and the actual location... varies, even on the same line.
• The Jewish Autonomous Oblast of Russia. At the time of the establishment of the oblast (1934), 16% of the population was Jewish. In 2010, this number had dwindled down to a whopping 1%, a mere 1,600 people, with only a fifth of those being practicing Jews.
• Coronado, California is also known as Coronado Island, even though technically it's a peninsula.
• Stansbury Island in the Great Salt Lake is only an island when the lake has unusually high water levels. Otherwise it's a peninsula. When water levels get low, the lake's major island, Antelope, also becomes an extension of the mainland.
• The Niagara Peninsula is not actually a peninsula, but rather an isthmus.
• A country ruled (or, more often these days, nominally ruled) by a monarch is always called a "kingdom" even if the monarch is a queen. (However, if the monarch is a prince or princess, the country is a "principality".)
• Almost anyone titled Prince/Duke/etc. of some place that isn't an independent nation probably doesn't even have the nominal authority that the ruler of a typical constitutional monarchy has. For example, the Prince of Wales has no particular authority or responsibilities in Wales beyond what he has across the kingdom as a whole, which officially isn't much but in practice is a pretty impressive amount of fundraising and awareness campaigning for various causes.
• Every now and then, you will find a ring road that's actually a half-ring.
• A common joke in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte is that the borough of Funcionários ("workers") is populated by millionaires, and Milionários ("millionaires") is filled with workers.
• Brazil has the Lagoa dos Patos, "Ducks' Lagoon", which has no ducks, at most swans. Supposedly 'patos' refer to a Native tribe who lived in the region.
• "Upper" and "Lower" is a common subversion of this trope: although seemingly non-indicative, the terminology fits because usually "Upper" and "Lower" regions refer to where they are on a river: "Upper" being upstream and "Lower" being downstream, irrespective of where they are in respect to the cardinal directions (north, south, east, and west). Because water always flows from higher elevation to lower elevation, this generally means that "Upper" regions are geographically "above" the "Lower" ones from an altitude standpoint.
  • The German states of Saxony and Lower Saxony do not border each other, and Saxony is southeast of Lower Saxony, with Saxony-Anhalt located between them and bordering both. Of course, Lower Saxony is downriver of Saxony on the River Elbe.
  • "Upper German", or sometimes "High German", references the mountainous regions of Switzerland, Southern Germany and Austria, while "Lower German" refers to the lowlands of Northern Germany.
  • Upper Canada^note Ontario was upstream of Lower Canada^note Quebec on the St. Lawrence.
  • Upper Egypt is south of Lower Egypt, but this makes perfect sense because the Nile flows from south to north; Lower Egypt is downstream of and thus below Upper Egypt.
• There is a town named North in the center of South Carolina, which itself is generally considered part of the Deep South of the US.^note It was named after the first mayor, John North.
• East Palo Alto, California is not the eastern part of Palo Alto. It's a separate city located due north of Palo Alto.
• The Sea of Galilee referred to in The Bible is actually a freshwater lake that feeds the Jordan River. It's called (the equivalent of) Lake Kinneret in Hebrew and Lake Tiberias in Arabic.
• Metropolis, Illinois is actually a pretty small town.
• There are three towns in New Jersey that have the word "mount" in their names, but are not located in mountainous terrain. Mount Ephraim has no high land whatsoever, Mount Holly is on a plateau if anything, and though Mount Laurel is home to quite a few hills, none of them actually qualify as mountains. Mount Olive and Mount Arlington are on elevated terrain, however, although nothing that can really qualify as a mountain, whereas Mountainside is by the side of the Watchung Mountains. The highest point (called High Point) in all of New Jersey is only 1,802 feet above sea level.
• The borough of National Park, New Jersey, is neither in or near a national park. The nearest national park to the borough is Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, 200 miles away.
• The state of Nevada is named for the Sierra Nevada, which is in California. Also, the name means "snowy" in Spanish (from the original meaning of "snowy mountain range" above). The state's landscape is predominantly desert and semi-arid.
• Wall Street Pizzeria in the Nashville suburb of Franklin, Tennessee is known for its slogan "The best pizza NOT on Wall Street".
• Manhattan College in New York City. It's in the Bronx, having moved from Manhattan in 1922.
• Ninety Mile Beach in New Zealand is in fact fifty-five miles long. This case is justified, as it was measured by men on horseback who failed to account for the sand slowing down their horses, so the trip took the length of time it would to ride ninety miles.
• The town of Herne Bay in England is on the sea^note  Strictly speaking, it's on the outer part of the Thames Estuary, but on a stretch of coastline that is perfectly straight. It was originally a fishing village simply called Herne, but when it was developed as a seaside resort somebody decided that adding the word Bay would make the place sound more interesting. (Slightly justified in that the village of Reculver, a few miles to the east of Herne Bay, is on the western edge of an about-10-miles-long bay, at the eastern edge of which can be seen Birchington, on the outskirts of Margate.)
• Manhattan's proposed Park51 community center, which was dubbed "The Ground Zero Mosque" by many in the American media, is not a mosque, and it's not located at Ground Zero. It's an Islamic Community Center with facilities open to the general public, and it's two blocks away from the original site of the World Trade Center.
• Many Interstate highways are fully contained within a single state, such as Interstate 4 across the middle of Florida from Daytona Beach to Tampa, Interstate 16 across Georgia (connecting Savannah to the inland cities of Macon and Atlanta), or Interstate 96 across Michigan (Detroit to Muskegon). This is also true of the three Interstates in Hawaii, as well as most 3-digit loops and spurs from parent routes. This is justified, however, as these roads are built to "interstate standards" (fairly exacting engineering standards dictating everything from the width of lanes to how much the road can bend to what you can build them out of) and are part of the Interstate Highway System (or more formally, the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways").
• Northwestern University is in Chicago, which most people nowadays don't think of as being Northwestern. It's another example of an Artifact Title. Illinois is part of the former Northwest Territory; when the school was founded in 1851, that region was often called the "Old Northwest" to distinguish it from the recently acquired Pacific Northwest.
• The luxury jewelry store Gearys Beverly Hills is owned by Thomas Blumenthal, grandson of Fred Meyer. It was founded by city councilman H.L. Geary, but was bought by the Meyers in 1953.
• The modern Madison Square Garden is not on Madison Square. Neither was the third MSG, for that matter.
• Airports are known for taking the name of the nearest big city they service, rather than the city they are located in:
  • Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport is a half-aversion: it's in the City of Romulus, which is not Detroit but is still in Wayne County (of which Detroit is the county seat) and part of the Detroit Metropolitan Area.
  • Michigan's MBS Airport, despite the name standing for the "Tri-Cities" of Midland, Bay City, and Saginaw, is in none of the three. It's in Freeland, which is near all three towns.
  • Japan:
    • Narita International Airport was once known as New Tokyo International Airport, despite being a good 60 kilometers east of Tokyo. The current name averts this trope, as it straddles the border between Narita and Shibayama. Nonetheless, it's still used for a lot of flights servicing Tokyo; just get ready for a long bus ride to the metro itself.^note The airport known as just Tokyo International Airport, or Haneda Airport, on the other hand, is within Tokyo's city limits, averting this trope
    • Sendai Airport is located in Natori, 8 km to the south.
    • Odate-Noshiro Airport is neither in Odate nor Noshiro. It's in Kitaakita, which is located midway between them.
    • Shonai Airport is 10 km west of Shonai city.
  • Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport is not in Paris (the city is even a no-fly zone) but in the northeastern suburbs, straddling the lines between three départements, none of which is Paris.
  • Toronto Pearson International Airport is not in Toronto (expect for the tip of one runway) but in the neighbouring city of Mississauga.
  • San Francisco International Airport is not located in SF proper; it's on unincorporated land in San Mateo County^note which, ironically, San Francisco used to be part of before becoming a consolidated city-county in 1856, over 70 years before the airport was even established in 1927 about ten miles south, adjacent to the cities of San Bruno and Millbrae. San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen jokingly called it "San Bruno International Airport".
  • Downplayed with Ninoy Aquino International Airport aka Manila International Airport; on one hand, it's not located in Manila proper, but in Pasay City just south of Manila, but on the other hand it's still within the Metro Manila / National Capital Region area.
  • Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport (formerly known as Barajas Airport); is located in the Barajas district, which was an independent village before Madrid absorbed it in the 50s.
  • Given how tiny Washington, D.C. is, it should surprise nobody that none of the three major airports serving Washington are within the District's limits:
    • The closest, Washington National Airport (to Democrats)/Reagan National (to Republicans) is in Arlington County, Virginia, right across the Potomac from D.C. Interestingly, it would have been in D.C. if the federal government hadn't returned Arlington County (and Alexandria) to Virginia in 1846.
    • Washington Dulles, the region's biggest airport, is in Loudoun County, Virginia, which doesn't even border D.C. The distance has historically made it a massive pain to get between Washington and Dulles; the completion of Phase 2 of the Washington Metro Silver Line in 2022 substantially remedies this situation, although it is still quite a long ride to Capitol Hill.
    • Baltimore-Washington Airport is a double whammy, since it is (obviously) neither in Baltimore nor in Washington, nor even in Baltimore County (which does not include the city of Baltimore), but rather in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.
  • Atlanta's world-famous Hartsfield-Jackson Airport^note As they say in North American aviation circles, it doesn't matter if you're going to Heaven or to Hell, you'll have a two-hour layover in Atlanta on your way there manages to avert this and play it straight; because of the airport's expansion and the weird boundaries of Georgia municipalities, some parts of the airport are in the City of Atlanta, other parts are in Fulton County (the one containing Atlanta) but not in Atlanta, and other parts are in neighboring Clayton County.
  • Cincinnati International Airport is not located in Cincinnati, or even Ohio. It is located in nearby Hebron, Kentucky.^note The official name is Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. Furthermore, its IATA code is CVG, referring to Covington, Kentucky which lies between Cincinnati and Hebron.
  • Pittsburgh International Airport is actually located in the nearby Findlay and Moon townships.
  • St. Louis Lambert International Airport is located about 10 miles northwest of St. Louis in unincorporated St. Louis County (which does not include the City of St. Louis).
  • Similarly, St. Louis Downtown Airport isn't even in the same state. It's across the Mississippi River in Cahokia, Illinois (and it's not in any sort of downtown, either).
  • London Gatwick, Luton, Southend and Stansted Airports are not in London, but in West Sussex (Gatwick), Bedfordshire (Luton) and Essex (both Southend and Stansted). Additionally, while London City Airport is in London, it is not within the City of London, being instead six miles east in the Borough of Newham.
  • Doncaster Sheffield Airport only contains Sheffield as a better guide to its location, as both Barnsley and Rotherham lie between Doncaster and Sheffield.
  • Kuala Lumpur International Airport is 45 km south of the city within the Malaysian state of Selangor.
  • Zigzagged with South Korea's Gimpo International Airport. Before 1963, it really was part of Gimpo, but since then the district it is in was incorporated into Seoul proper.
  • Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) is an interesting case of this trope. While the airport is jointly owned by the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth (who own 64 and 36 percent, respectively, of the airport) AND is located in both Dallas and Tarrant^note Where Fort Worth is located and is the county seat Counties, the airport is actually not located in the city limits of either Dallas or Fort Worth. Rather, DFW is located in four suburbs: Grapevine and Euless (in Tarrant County), and Irving and Coppell (in Dallas County). Because of all this, DFW International Airport was given its own postal address and ZIP code.
  • In a similar fashion, Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport (MSP) is not located in either of Minneapolis OR Saint Paul proper, but in Fort Snelling, an unorganized territory located outside both of the cities.
  • Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is neither located within the city limits of either Seattle OR Tacoma, but rather in the suburb SeaTac (which was established in 1990^note The airport itself was established in 1944 and was named after a nickname for the airport itself).
• A minor example is Stoke Mandeville Hospital, a hospital in England devoted to spinal cord injuries and most notable as the birthplace of the Paralympics. Although named after the village of Stoke Mandeville, it's actually located in the adjacent town of Aylesbury.
• Alligator Rivers is in Northern Australia. It contains many crocodiles, but no alligators for over two thousand miles. They were named when people mistook the crocodiles for alligators and the name stuck.
• Australian chain Just Jeans now sells other kinds of clothing, rather than just selling jeans.
• The Kalahari Desert is actually a savanna.
• The great sea battle between the Royal Navy and Imperial German Navy of 1916 did not occur neither at Jutland (Jylland in Danish) nor at Skagerrak Strait (the German name of the battle). It was waged in the North Sea, albeit close to both the coast of Jutland and mouth of Skagerrak.
• Several of the largest naval battles in human history took place in the Pacific^note "Peaceful" Ocean during World War II, along with numerous smaller battles in WWII and several other wars.
• Salto de Angel, or Angel Falls, world's highest uninterrupted waterfall, with a height of 979 m, is not named because of its angelic beauty and heavenly majesty or other religious reason. The waterfall was discovered (in the sense of being discovered by the non-indigenous) by bush pilot Jimmy Angel who made a forced landing nearby and reported of the waterfall when he returned to the inhabited world.
• There are many, many places in the state of Massachusetts that qualify.
  • The town of Franklin is not in Franklin County, but Norfolk County. In fact, it takes a drive of at least 2 hours and the crossing of anywhere from two to three other counties to get from one to the other.
  • Speaking of Norfolk County, it's south of Suffolk County, and has been ever since 1793, when it split off from Suffolk County (which is now just Boston and three neighboring towns). There was, however, a previous Norfolk County which existed between 1643 to 1679 that was actually to the north of Suffolk County.
• Highways can get a lot of this.
  • Massachusetts Route 28 is a North/South highway. From its starting point on the very tip of Cape Cod (Provincetown) MA-28 North actually heads south, before turning west. Once it gets off Cape Cod it does turn north, though, so this trope doesn't apply for the entire length of the road.
  • Interstate 64 is a major east–west highway running from Wentzville, Missouri (a northwestern exurb of St. Louis) to Chesapeake, Virginia in the Hampton Roads region. For its easternmost 25-odd miles in Virginia, the highway loops around the Hampton Roads area. For decades, this trope caused major confusion on the "Southside", the portion of the metro south of its eponymous body of water. In much of that area, I-64 East actually ran west and vice versa. Since roughly 2004, this trope has been averted; I-64 signage from its intersection with I-264 in Virginia Beach to the eastern terminus in Chesapeake no longer includes a directional indicator. Instead, the highway is signed simply as I-64 and either the inner or outer loop of the Hampton Roads Beltway.^note The Beltway is completed by I-664, which runs from the eastern terminus and crosses Hampton Roads via a bridge–tunnel complex to reconnect with 64.
  • Any highway in the US that uses sequential numbered exits instead of mileage-based exit numbers (where the exit number coincides with the nearest mile marker) can get this if infill exits are opened at a later date.
    • Exits on the Massachusetts Turnpike were originally numbered sequentially from west to east, but exits added later on had letters after their name, so, for example, exit 11 was actually the 12th exit. Averted in January 2021, when the Mass Pike was converted to milepost-based numbering in the same direction; the old exit 11 is now exit 96, and the 11th exit is now exit 94.
    • The Georgia 400, connecting Atlanta to the suburbs of north Fulton County and Forsyth County, still uses sequential-based exit numbers on the controlled access portion between Buckhead and Cumming, unlike the Interstate highways in Georgia, which converted to mileage-based exit numbers in 2000.
  • In California, Interstate 380 is nowhere near its parent route, Interstate 80. To a lesser extent, I-280 doesn't connect with I-80 either, however a short (roughly 1/2 mile) drive from I-280's northern terminus through S.F. city streets will get you onto I-80.
• Some ski resorts' chairlifts can have misleading tower numbers if additional lift towers are added as the result of modifications. For example, the Independence SuperChair at Breckenridge Ski Resort in Colorado was extended in 2008 to incorporate it into a new Peak 7 base area. The lift's loading terminal and first two towers were moved downhill by several hundred feet. Because none of the towers above tower 3 were moved, an additional tower had to be added to bridge the gap from tower 2 to tower 3. Rather than go through and renumber all of the towers, the new tower was numbered '2A'. Thus, tower 23 is actually the 24th tower.
• Keystone Ski Resort's Summit Express lift is so named because it runs to the summit of Dercum Mountain, Keystone's front side. It is not Keystone's highest offloading chairlift altitude-wise, as the chairlifts on North Peak and the Outback offload at higher altitudes.
• Tunnel Mountain, which the town of Banff, Alberta, encircles, doesn't contain any tunnel. It was planned to, but early railway planners discovered an easier route for their lines that didn't require digging one.
• The American South is not made up of the entire southern part of the United States. It typically only refers to the Southeastern region and often does not include the far-southern (but not southernmost) state of Texas (even though Texas did secede with the rest of the Southern states during the American Civil War). Everything west of Texas up to around California is the American Southwest, and Texas is sometimes considered its own cultural/geographic region.
  • The exact boundaries of the South are still much debated. Many still consider Texas to be a Southern state. It's classified as one by the US Census—though, to be fair, the Census also includes in the region Maryland and Delaware, which virtually no one today considers part of the South. Definitions of the "Deep South" are even more bizarre and inconsistent, since Florida is rarely called the Deep South even though it is geographically to the south of all the so-called "Deep South" states, and furthermore, the region of Florida that is most often thought of as culturally "Southern" is North Florida.
  • On top of that, even in areas that are universally considered to be part of the South, significant parts are not "Deep South".
    • The term "Upper South" has seen wide use to describe Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, a good chunk of Arkansas, and often West Virginia.
    • A different term, "Upland South", is defined more by landforms and does not correspond well to state borders. It includes southern Appalachia, the Ozarks and Ouachita Mountains, and the various plateaus, hills, and basins between the two. Significant parts of some Deep South states are Upland South, such as North Alabama, North Georgia, and Upstate South Carolina. By contrast, some parts of Upper South states are not Upland South, such as the coastal lowlands of North Carolina, the Purchase area of Kentucky, and parts of West Tennessee. On top of that, some authorities consider extreme Southern Illinois, southern Indiana, and parts of Southern Ohio to be Upland South despite being in "Northern" states.
• The town of North East, Pennsylvania is located in the northwestern corner of the state (it is in the northeast part of Erie County, however).
• West, Texas is located in north central Texas (and in several proposed bipartite divisions of the state, would actually be in east Texas^note eg, it is east of 98 degrees West and northeast of the Brazos River). It was named after its first postmaster, T.M. West.
• Hill County, Texas isn't located in the Texas Hill Country and is largely flatland. As with the above example, it's actually named after someone (early Texas settler George Washington Hill).
• Houston County, Texas does not contain the City of Houston (the city is a good 100 miles south). It just shares the same namesake as the city, Texas politician Sam Houston.
• While the very term "Jew" is a geographic term (referring to a person from the Kingdom of Judah), the modern Jewish state shares its name not with that kingdom, but with Judah's rival, the Kingdom of Israel, inhabited by those Israelite tribes whose territory was specifically not in Judah (and whose exile and assimilation ultimately erased their status as a distinct nation). This is because the state references the Land of Israel on a whole, from which both kingdoms were carved.
• Panama City, Florida.
• There's also Benin City. It's located one country over in Nigeria. And this time around, there is no Benin City actually in Benin. And actually, it's the country whose name is non-indicative; the city came first. The country was named after the Bight of Benin, a body of water near both the city and the country (and named after the city/the city's former empire).
• There are many airports that have three-letter IATA designations that bear no connection to the airport's current name or metropolitan area.
  • Orlando International Airport has the IATA code of MCO, since it used to be known as the McCoy Air Base.
  • O'Hare International Airport in Chicago has the IATA code of ORD, a holdover from when it was known as Orchard Field Airport.
  • Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport has the IATA code of SDF, a holdover from its original name of Standiford Field.
  • Most of Canada's major city airports have such codes. Pretty much the only one that doesn't apply is Vancouver International Airport (YVR). Notable cases include Toronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ) and Montréal–Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport (YUL). Subverted by Calgary's airport, which is now marketed as YYC Calgary International Airport.
• The identifier numbers on airport runways are based on the magnetic azimuth of the runway's heading in decadegrees. If there is more than one runway pointing in the same direction (parallel runways), each runway is identified by appending Left (L), Center (C) and Right (R) to the number to identify its position (when facing its direction). This only works, though, for up to three parallel runways. At large airports with four or more parallel runways, it's common for some of the runways to have their identifiers offshifted by 10 degrees from their actual direction to avoid confusing pilots or air traffic controllers. For an example, O'Hare International Airport has five runways on an east-west alignment. The runways to the south of the terminals use 10/28 identifiers, and the ones north of the terminals use 9/27 identifiers.
• The University of South Florida is in Tampa, roughly in the middle of the length of the state (less than one degree of latitude south of Orlando, home of the University of Central Florida). At the time it was founded, it was the southernmost college in the state university system. Even that justification is the artifact; four different universities in the state university system in Florida are further south than USF.^note Florida Atlantic (Boca Raton), Florida Gulf Coast (Fort Myers), Florida International (Miami), and New College (Sarasota); the last of these had been part of USF from 1975 to 2001.
• Dollar stores in general. What with the inflation, you are not likely to ever find a store where nothing costs above a dollar (and when it does, there's the sales tax). The same goes for several fast food dollar menus, which are lately changing to "value" menus instead.
  • Retailers like Dollar General and Family Dollar aren't dollar stores at all.
• The city of Morgan Hill, California is indeed located at the base of a prominent hill. However, the city itself was named after Hiram Morgan Hill, a Missouri businessman who established a weekend home there in the late 19th century (around which the town grew). The hill is named "El Toro" (partly because it looks like a reclining bull, and partly because local legend holds that author Bret Harte was chased down it by a bull).
• The central-southern part of Middlesex County, New Jersey has four municipalities with variants of the name "Brunswick": the City of New Brunswick (which is the county seat), and North Brunswick, East Brunswick, and South Brunswick Townships. You would expect North Brunswick to be north of New Brunswick, East Brunswick east of it, and South Brunswick south of it, right? Wrong. All three of the townships are south of the City of New Brunswick.
• North Bergen, New Jersey, located near the southern tip of Bergen County, is actually in Hudson County. It's part of the 17th-century township of Bergen, which in turn was part of Bergen County from 1709 until Hudson County was carved out from it in 1840.
• Bernards High School in New Jersey must be located in Bernards Township (Basking Ridge), right? Wrong, it's actually in the borough of Bernardsville right to the west. The Bernards Township high school is called Ridge High School, home of the Red Devils (despite green being their official color).
• Eight Kentucky high schools play with this trope. Barren County High School in Glasgow, Boyle County High School in Danville, Breathitt County High School in Jackson, Johnson [County] Central High School in Paintsville, Nelson County High School in Bardstown, Perry County Central High School in Hazard, Pulaski County High School in Somerset, and Taylor County High School in Campbellsville are within their respective counties, but lie outside the county school districts. The cities that house each of these schools have their own school districts, and it happens that each of the county schools has its campus within the city district. Interestingly, the Nelson County district does have one high school with a semi-indicative name, but it's Thomas Nelson High School, named after the county's namesake.
• Neptune City and Surf City, New Jersey, are both technically boroughs.
• The Spanish Riding School is in Austria, the horses are a Slovenian breed and the architect is an Austrian. Some of the horses used to create the were breed were from Spain though.
• The Royal Mews in London haven't been actual mews (used to house hawks and falcons) for almost five hundred years. Instead, the royal family keeps their horses, carriages, and motorcars there.
• Shippea Hill, Britain's least-used railway station (only on average 1 passenger per month in 2016), is below sea level, nor are there any hills to be seen when there; it's in the middle of a fen. The reason for the name is that the station is used mainly for freight traffic from the surrounding potato farms, and the farmers pressured the rail company for a name change because they could get better prices if their buyers believed that the spuds came from hill soil rather than fen soil.
• The Pacific Garden Mission is located 2,000 miles from the ocean in an industrial section of Chicago. The name derives from its original location, a former Chicago bar called the Pacific Beer Garden.
• In Melbourne, Australia, West Richmond railway station is almost due north of Richmond station (however, it isn't as far north as North Richmond station).
• The Charleston, West Virginia area has a couple of examples.
  • North Charleston is a neighborhood at the western edge of the city. Granted, it is on the north side of the Kanawha River that bisects the city... but it's still west of the neighborhood known as the West End.
  • On the other side of the river from North Charleston is the separate city of South Charleston. Which, like North Charleston, lies to the west of downtown Charleston. (Thus being indicative on the neighborhood level, but not the city level.) In fact, South Charleston has a fairly long southern border with the city of Charleston.
• At the corner of Whitehead and South Streets in Key West, Florida, the southernmost city in the continental US (i.e., not including Hawaii), an old concrete sewer junction painted to look like a buoy bears the phrase "Southernmost Point Continental U.S.A." It's one of the country's most photographed spots... and its status as "southernmost" is pure fiction.
  • The true southernmost point of Florida, and the continental US, is on Ballast Key, an island about 10 miles (16 km) south and west of the buoy. Before 2019, when the private owner deeded it to the US Fish and Wildlife Service in order for it to be added to a large marine sanctuary, signage on the island strictly prohibited unauthorized visitors. (Today, boaters can access it during daytime for minimally invasive activities such as birdwatching, nature photography, and environmental education.)
  • It isn't the southernmost point on the island of Key West. That lies on the grounds of the Truman Annex, a US Navy base that can only be entered by authorized Navy personnel.
  • Even before Ballast Key was deeded to the US government, the "buoy" wasn't even the southernmost point accessible to the general public. That would be the beach area of Fort Zachary Taylor State Historic Park, near the western tip of the island.
• A short drive away from Mexico City, there's a national park called Desierto de los Leones (Spanish for "Desert of Lions"). It's a forest, and in case you were wondering, no, there are no lions. A common joke is to call it Desierto de Leones, which can be read to mean "Deserted of Lions".
  • Although, there is a reason why it's called that. The zone is named after the Carmelite convent founded in the region centuries ago. These convents were called "Deserts" in honor of St. Elias, who lead an ascetic lifestyle in Mt. Carmel, Israel (which actually has a desert climate). Nobody is entirely sure about the "lion" part, but it may be a reference to mountain lions (which may or may not have lived there at some point) or to an alleged rich family named Leon.
• The northwestern Russian city of Beloozero, eventually renamed Belozersk, is actually quite temperate by the country's standards. (It's a case of false cognates; "beloozero" actually means "white lake".)
• Any city named Hell that is not actually a supernatural place of eternal torture, even if the residents think it is.
• The "Crystal Cathedral" in Garden Grove, Orange County, California, is not made of crystal (being a Postmodernist building by Philip Johnson, it is made of steel and plate glass), and was not intended to be a cathedral (being built for a Dutch Reformed Protestant congregation—a sect with no bishops and therefore no actual cathedrals). However, in a subversion, the Protestant congregation for which the building was built went bankrupt in 2011, and sold the building to... the local Catholic diocese, which after some hemming and hawing converted the building for use as an honest-to-God Roman Catholic cathedral. It was consecrated as Christ Cathedral in 2019.
• The United States of America, for international purposes, is a "state", and the 50 states are effectively "provinces". Additionally, the US is not composed entirely of these states: there is also one federal district (Washington, D.C.) and sixteen territories, five of which (American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and United States Virgin Islands) are inhabited. Finally, the country is not entirely within America, with several territories and the state of Hawaii being considered part of Oceania.
• The home of Syracuse University's highest-profile sports was known as the Carrier Dome, after the Carrier Corporation, a large manufacturer of air conditioners, from its opening in 1980 until 2022. It didn't have air conditioning at all until 2020, and it wasn't added throughout the stadium until the completion of a 2022 renovation... just in time for the venue to be renamed JMA Wireless Dome.^note Carrier had bought permanent naming rights in 1979 for $3 million, long before the value of such deals skyrocketed. Cuse was able to get out of the deal (probably with a healthy payment) in order to get a more lucrative naming deal.
• Northampton is in the British Midlands. There's a lot of England left to go north of there before you even get to Scotland. Southport and Middlesbrough, on the other hand, are Oop North. Southampton, however, actually is on the south coast.
• What most people consider to be the heart of Las Vegas, the Las Vegas Strip and even the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign, is not actually within the city limits of Las Vegas. It's an unincorporated area called Paradise. Many people spend their whole Las Vegas vacation without ever setting foot within the city limits (unless if they are going to Fremont Street, which is located in Downtown Las Vegas). That's the case whether people drive or fly in, as Harry Reid (formerly McCarran) International Airport^note Which has used "LAS" and "KLAS" (signifying Las Vegas) as IATA and ICAO airport codes, respectively, throughout its existence is also in Paradise. This even applies to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. For what it's worth, the metropolitan area surrounding the city of Las Vegas is known as the Las Vegas Valley.
• "Crisis pregnancy centers" are sometimes referred to as "medical centers", even though pretty much nothing medical happens there. These are centers that exist solely for the purpose of trying to talk people facing unwanted or unplanned pregnancies out of abortion, often with scare tactics, guilt tripping, and false information. They don't perform any kind of examinations or procedures, either regular gynecological exams or prenatal exams. They don't prescribe or provide any method of birth control, unless pamphlets on "Natural Family Planning" count. They don't perform ultrasounds or mammograms. They don't provide screening or treatments for STDs, or treatments for problems such as recurrent yeast infections or UTIs, or any other medical service one would expect from a medical center. They don't even provide referrals to doctors or midwives who do provide any of these things. In some cases, the people employed there aren't even doctors or nurses! At best, they provide urine pregnancy tests which are exactly the same as the home pregnancy tests. Some also provide services such as assistance with applying for WIC ^note  A US government-funded program which helps low-income families with babies and young children access food or other government programs, or provide diapers, formula, etc., or assistance with putting a baby up for adoption, but none of those are medical services.
• In the Davao Region◊ in the Philippines, Davao del Norte (Northern Davao) is on the same level as Davao Oriental (Eastern Davao). Then Davao del Sur (Southern Davao) is above Davao Occidental (Western Davao), while Davao Occidental isn't even the westernmost Davao province.
• There is a street in Hong Kong called Boundary Street. It used to be the actual boundary between British-controlled Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland, but the name stopped being indicative when the UK decided to lease some more land from China and incorporate it into the city.
• No part of Equatorial Guinea lies on the Equator. The country is mainly located in the Northern Hemisphere, but the island of Annobón is 155 km (96 mi) south of the Equator.
• The historical region of Mauritania (or Mauretania) is actually located in present-day Morocco, not the modern country of Mauritania. The fact that the name is rooted in "Moor", the historical name for North African Muslims, should be an indication that it originally referred to a completely different region.^note Despite the similarity, "Moor" and "Morocco" have different etymologies.
• East Aurora, New York is west of Aurora, New York.
• California State University Channel Islands is located in Ventura County on the California mainland, although it does operate a scientific research station on Santa Rosa Island.
• Tennessee does this quite a bit with its city and county names. The city of Franklin isn't in Franklin County, for example. Ditto Jackson and Jackson County, as well as McMinnville and McMinn County.
  • Decatur, Tennessee isn't in Decatur County, but Decaturville is.
• Its northern neighbor of Kentucky has a lot of this as well:
  • It also has a Franklin not in Franklin County and a Jackson not in Jackson County. While Jackson is two counties to the east of Jackson County, Franklin is nearly three hours' drive from Franklin County (and also in a different time zone).
  • There are towns called Russell, Russell Springs, and Russellville. Only Russell Springs is in Russell County, and it's not the county seat.
  • You might think that Liberty and West Liberty are close to each other. Nope, West Liberty is close to three hours northeast.
  • Hickman was the county seat of Hickman County when that county was formed in 1821, but became the county seat of Fulton County when it was carved out of Hickman County in 1845. The truncated Hickman County got a new county seat of Clinton... which is well over four hours' drive from Clinton County.
  • Grayson is more than three hours away from Grayson County, Union is about four hours from Union County, Clay is about the same distance from Clay County, and Carlisle is about five hours from Carlisle County. (Grayson and Carlisle are county seats; Clay and Union aren't.)
  • Crittenden County gets this in both directions. The county is a shade over four hours' drive from the town of Crittenden, and its county seat of Marion is about three hours from Marion County.
• Jackson County, Florida is a small rural county that does not contain the city of Jacksonville.
• The Kaʻu Desert in Hawaii is not a desert in the sense of being a place that gets very little rain, although it is a barren wasteland. That's because it is so impacted by vog and acid rain resulting from nearby volcanic eruptions that pretty much no vegetation can grow there. (And the soil, which is made mostly of tephra, is not very good at holding onto moisture anyway.)
• The Trinity River in northern California was named by 19th century explorers who just assumed that the river emptied into Trinidad Bay on the northern coast. The river doesn't even come within 25 mi/40 km of the bay, a fact that was soon discovered, but the name was already established by then. Trinity County was named after the river, but invokes the trope harder, because Trinidad Bay is in neighboring Humboldt County.
• Shinagawa Station in Tokyo, Japan is actually located in Minato Ward, which is to the north of the actual Shinagawa Ward. For extra confusion, there is a Kitashinagawa Station (kita meaning "north") that is to Shinagawa Station's south, but in the north of Shinagawa Ward.
• Telluride, Colorado was renamed in 1887 after gold telluride ores found in many parts of Colorado (reputedly in the hope that such ores would be found there, too), but they have never been found near Telluride. Gold ores have been found there, but not gold telluride.
• The term "Asia" originally referred to what is now Anatolia, Turkey. The term came from Luwian, an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken in Anatolia, and alluded to the land its speakers lived in. The peninsula is still sometimes called Asia Minor (with the rest of the continent being called Asia Major) and the Roman province that existed there was called Asia, but today, using "Asia" to refer only to Anatolia is unthinkable. Ironically, people often think of the Middle East as separate from Asia, hence excluding it from the term.
  
  In a similar vein, "East" and "Orient", from European perspective, referred to what is now the Middle East. Anatolia itself is Greek for "place where [the sun] rises", which remarkably makes it a counterpart term to Japan/Nippon, which in Sino-Japanese means "place where the sun originates". When it became clear that there is much more land beyond the so-called East, it was prepended with "Middle" or "Near".
  
  Then there's the term "West(ern)", which typically refers to cultures in Europe and the Americas. However, Australia and New Zealand are also culturally Western, despite being longitudinal neighbors with the likes of Japan and Korea, and are rarely ever called "Eastern" countries.
• Most of the Republic of Azerbaijan sits on the historical region of Shirvan, which in antiquity was called Albania (now prepended with "Caucasian" to differentiate it from the Republic of Albania). There is an actual region of Azerbaijan, but it is located in Iran, right next to Shirvan but not part of it. The people of both regions speak the same Turkic language and are nowadays called "Azerbaijani", but its usage to refer to the people of Shirvan is relatively recent, dating back to the fall of the Russian Empire, as intelligentsia in Shirvan appropriated the name to identify themselves (before then, they were simply called Turks).
• Syria is a Greek shortening of "Assyria", a region in northern Iraq. Confusingly, the modern Assyrians speak a language (Aramaic) that originated from what is now Syria; the original Assyrian language, that is, a dialect of Akkadian, has been dead for over 2500 years.
• The neighborhoods of Boston are quite puzzlingly named when it comes to their geographic relationships. To quote the book Boston Curiosities:
  The geographical center of present-day Boston is Roxbury, but due north of the center is the South End, which is different than South Boston, which is east of the South End. North of South Boston is East Boston, and southwest of East Boston is the North End. [...] Don't even think about orienting yourself using the Old South Church; It's north of the New Old South Church.
• Australia's Rottnest Island's name is from the Dutch for "rats' nest". A Dutch sea captain named it after seeing the island's sizable quokka population and mistaking them for large rats.
• Little Dell Reservoir in the mountains east of Salt Lake City is actually bigger than the adjacent Mountain Dell Reservoir. "Little Dell" refers to the pre-existing name of the area where the reservoir was built, not the reservoir itself.
• The Turks and Caicos Islands have no connection with Turks or the Republic of Turkey whatsoever. The "Turks" part is derived from Melocactus intortus, also known as the Turk's cap cactus, which has a red cephalium on top of it, making it look like a cactus that wears a fez (traditional hats from the Ottoman Empire).
• The Indonesian province of Southwest Papua is actually located on the northwestern edge of the island of New Guinea.
• The largest lake in the Philippines, Laguna de Bay, is neither a lagoon or a bay: the "Laguna" in the name refers to the province of Laguna, which lies on its southeastern coast, while "laguna" also refers to lakes in Spanish aside from the word "lago", aside from lagoons. "Bay", on the other hand, refers to the town of Bay in the same province, whic is instead pronounced "ba-ee", and is commonly mispronounced like the English word.

Sports

• Major League Baseball:
  • The annual championship series is called the "World Series", though it only involves teams from the American League and the National League, which reside in either the United States or Canada. No other teams from throughout the world are admitted.
  • Despite their name, the foul poles and foul lines themselves are in fair territory — a batted ball that hits a foul line is considered fair and in play, and a batted ball that hits the foul pole is a home run if it hits the pole on the fly and a ground-rule double if it bounced in fair territory first.
  • Team names:
    • Prior to 1994, the Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds played in the National League's West division. Both cities are farther east than Chicago and St. Louis, whose teams, the Cubs and Cardinals respectively, played in the National League East. Major League Baseball mostly fixed this issue in 1994 when they realigned the divisions. Atlanta was placed in the East division where it belonged, and the other three teams went into the newly created Central division... alongside the Pittsburgh Pirates, who are east of Atlanta, so now the Braves were geographically miscast in the other direction.
    • Except for a few brief seasons in the early and middle 20th century, the Chicago White Sox have never worn white stockings.
    • During several seasons, and for decades-long stretches, the Boston Red Sox have eschewed red stockings.
    • For roughly half the 20th century, the Cincinnati Reds' dominant uniform color was navy blue.
    • And during the 1950s when they changed their name to the Redlegs during the Red Scare, they made it clear they weren't a team made up of Communists.
• Speaking of baseball, the uninitiated might think that the National Baseball Hall of Fame honors greats throughout baseball, at least in the U.S. Its scope is strictly restricted to MLB, with very specific eligibility rules linked to MLB service.
• Pitcher Homer Bailey plays a position not known for hitting homers. His real name is David and Homer is a nickname.
• Many people note that gridiron football does not involve very much kicking of the ball with the players' feet, particularly in comparison to association football (soccer). There is some speculation that the name "football" refers to the fact that the original sport was played on foot, rather than on horseback, but this has not been proven.
• College conferences:
  • The Big Ten Conference in collegiate athletics was rendered non-indicative when it added an eleventh member (Penn State) in 1990. The number eleven was hidden within the logo to represent the true number of schools. In 2012 a twelfth school (Nebraska) was added and the logo was changed again, giving up on even alluding to the true number of schools. Now the letters "I" and "G" in "Big" are subtly altered and recolored to look vaguely like the number "10". Oddly enough, they had once been the Big Nine, when The Ohio State University joined during a period when the University of Michigan was an independent, becoming the Big Ten for the first time when Michigan re-joined the conference, and reverting to the Big Nine from the time the University of Chicago dropped out until Michigan State University joined. Also subverted in that the legal name of the conference throughout almost all of its pre-1990 history was the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives—it didn't officially become the "Big Ten" until 1987.
  • Since the defection of Nebraska and Colorado in 2011, the Big 12 has had ten teams. So, at that time, the Big Ten had 12 teams and the Big 12 had 10 teams.
    • And in 2014, the Big Ten went up to fourteen members (with the addition of Rutgers University and the University of Maryland). And then it announced that UCLA and USC would join in 2024... oops, make that UCLA, USC, Oregon, and Washington, bringing the grand total to 18.
    • Colorado recently announced they would rejoin the Big 12, and with them Utah, Arizona, and Arizona State. Along with the additions of Cincinnati, the University of Central Florida, and Houston, that brings the Big "Twelve" up to 16 teams by 2024.
  • Now, even a name as straightforward and non-numerical as the Atlantic Coast Conference is becoming non-indicative. Cal and Stanford announced they would join, both schools being located on the Pacific Coast.
• Also in 2014, the Atlantic 10 Conference went up to 14 members with the addition of Davidson College, and added a 15th member in 2022, namely Loyola University Chicago. In fact, the last time the A-10 had exactly 10 members was 1991... and the conference even had as many as 16 members in the 2012–13 school year before three schools left.
• National Football League:
  • Neither the New York Jets nor the New York Giants of the NFL play in New York City. They don't even play in New York state (unless they're playing the Buffalo Bills on the road): their stadium (they share one, which can be all kinds of awkward) is in New Jersey.
  • The San Francisco 49ers don't play in San Francisco proper. They did from 1946 to 2014 (at Kezar Stadium and later at Candlestick Park) but relocated to Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, about 50 miles south (and is adjacent to San Jose). This is the result of failed negotiations with the city of San Francisco for a new stadium in SF proper. The team has been headquartered in Santa Clara since 1988, so the name had actually been Non-Indicative for a while.
  • The Cleveland Browns' dominant uniform color is orange (as on their helmets; their home jerseys are brown, however, and their away jerseys are white with brown lettering and numbering). They were named after their former coach, Paul Brown.
  • The "West Coast offense" was developed in Ohio, some 2,000 miles away from the West Coast, when Cincinnati Bengals offensive coordinator Bill Walsh began running a pass-based scheme in 1968. The "West Coast" tag happened because of Walsh's later success with the offense when he became head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, which football pundits conflated with the similar, but distinct passing styles pioneered by coaches Sid Gillman and Don Coryell for the Los Angeles, and later San Diego, Chargers.
  • The Miami Dolphins are often nicknamed "the Fish", when, of course, dolphins are actually aquatic mammals.
• Australian Rules Football: When first formed, the Brisbane Bears played their home games at a ground 70 miles from Brisbane, and their mascot was a koala. They have since moved to Brisbane proper, and merged with Fitzroy to become the Lions.
• Sports leagues:
  • The National Hockey League has had teams from both the U.S. and Canada for most of its history, which makes it international rather than national. It was founded in 1917 with four teams, all Canadian. The Boston Bruins were the first American team to join, in 1924. Today, the majority of teams are American, and the league's headquarters are in New York City; ironically many people assume that "National" refers to the US, and the inclusion of Canadian teams makes it a misnomer!
    • Speaking of which, the league's six oldest teams (Bruins, Chicago Blackhawks, Detroit Red Wings, Montreal Canadiens, New York Rangers, Toronto Maple Leafs) are known to this day as the "Original Six", even though only the Canadiens and Maple Leafs were actually in the league when it started play in 1917.^note The Maple Leafs technically succeeded a prior Toronto team that had folded in 1919, but the two teams had the same ownership, and both the Leafs and the NHL consider the Leafs' history to have started with the league in 1917. That said, all six teams do date to the league's first decade, and were the league's only teams from 1942 to 1967.
  • The National Basketball Association currently hosts one team from outside the US (the Toronto Raptors) and used to host the Vancouver Grizzlies before they moved to Memphis, Tennessee.
  • Major Junior Hockey:
    • The Canadian Hockey League, an umbrella organization for the country's three junior hockey leagues, has U.S. based teams. Each of the member leagues demonstrates this trope in its own way:
    • The Ontario Hockey League has teams in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
    • The Western Hockey League has six teams on the US side of the border, five in Washington state and one in Oregon. In fact, the US teams are all grouped in the "U.S. Division".
    • The LHJMQ (Quebec Major Junior Hockey League) has teams in all three of the Maritime provinces, with those teams grouped in the "Maritimes Conference"/Conférence des Maritimes. It once had teams in the other province of Atlantic Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador, as well as the US state of Maine.
  • The East Coast Hockey League had teams in the Western U.S. before renaming itself as the ECHL (just the initialism, no words).
  • Both versions of the International Hockey League, at times, included teams from the U.S. only.
  • When the Premier League was formed in 1992-93, the Football League kept its hold on the three tiers below and renamed its Second Division to the First Division etc, somewhat justifying the naming by being their ranking within the Football League. Following a rebrand in 2004, the First Division became the Championship and Divisions Two and Three respectively Leagues One and Two.
    • The Football League was rebranded as the English Football League in 2016, despite always having at least one Welsh club in its ranks since 1920. This also became a double whammy with the Department of Redundancy Department as they were the first ever football league, though simultaneously fixing the Artifact Title and hindering its prestige.
  • The trend of improperly ranking leagues started in Scotland when the Scottish Football League (SFL) revamped its structuring in 1975; part of this was renaming its top tier the Premier Division and its second tier Division One (and third Division Two). Following from England's example in 1992, the Premier Division teams broke away from the SFL in 1998 and formed the Scottish Premier League (SPL), the remaining SFL divisions maintained their names. The SPL and SFL merged in 2013 to become the Scottish Professional Football League (SPFL), they again copied England by renaming its second tier the Championship and tiers three and four Leagues One and Two.
  • Similarly, the National Rugby League, Australia's top tier Rugby League competition, includes one team from New Zealand.
  • Australian rugby union followed suit in 2017, when the National Rugby Championship (now defunct) added a team from Fiji.
  • The US' Major League Rugby is a Rugby Union competition, not a Rugby League one.
  • The transhemispheric^note Ireland, Italy, Scotland, South Africa, Wales rugby union competition known from 2017 to 2021 as Pro14, reflecting its team count, became non-indicative in its final season under that identity in 2020–21. One of the league's two planned South African teams folded before that season after a planned takeover bid collapsed in fraud. After that season, the league's other South African team left, four different teams from that country joined, and the league averted the trope by renaming itself the United Rugby Championship.
• In Texas, the University Interscholastic League is doubly non-indicative. Seeing the name, non-Texans might be inclined to think it's a college athletic conference. It's actually a governing body that oversees competition among high schools, specifically public schools and a very small number of private ones. Its scope goes well beyond sports; UIL also governs music and academic competitions. The "University" part comes from its founding by the University of Texas at Austin, which operates it to this day.
• NHL players Larry and Jim Playfair were both enforcers, meaning they preferred to fight instead of a fair game.
• Basketball player Purvis Short is actually 6'7", which is average height even for an NBA player.
• In the NBA, the Oklahoma City Thunder play in the Northwest Division, despite being much closer to teams that play in the Southwest Division (whose name can also be non-indicative with two teams playing east of the Mississippi). Justified, as they were initially the Seattle SuperSonics.
• The World League of American Football (WLAF) flip-flopped between playing it straight and aversion. Originally (1991 and 1992) it featured teams from 5 countries and 2 continents (aversion), when it was revamped in 1995 it only featured European teams (straight) before being renamed the NFL Europe (aversion). At the end even the NFL Europe name was a bit of a misnomer as the 6-team league featured 5 German teams with a sole Dutch team keeping it from turning into NFL Germany. But at least the "National" part was mostly accurate.
• Formula One has a few instances of this. The Luxembourg Grand Prix was in Germany, the San Marino Grand Prix was in Italy, and the 1982 Swiss Grand Prix was held at a track near Dijon, near the Franco-Swiss border. Though to be fair on that last one, Switzerland had banned motorsport in the country in The '50s.^note More accurately, Switzerland banned motorsport that involved direct on-course competition between vehicles. Races against the clock, such as rallies and hillclimbs, were not banned and remain legal to this day. More recently, the country lifted the ban on on-course competitive motorsport, but only for electric vehicles, in hopes of getting a stop on the Formula E circuit, which it finally got in the 2017–18 season. The ban was finally lifted completely in May 2022. The European Grand Prix has been held in Germany, Spain, and the UK, but the 2016 race was held in Baku, Azerbaijan, which is in Asia. Somewhat downplayed with the Budapest track: it is not located in the city of Budapest proper, but rather Mogyoród, which is on the outskirts of Budapest.
• In American football, "touchdown" does not require you to touch the ground with the ball. Rugby League and Rugby Union's "try", however, does.^note In the rugby codes, the touch to the ground is required because the conversion kick must be attempted from a point no farther from the nearest sideline than the point where the ball was touched down.
• The "rugby punt" in American football (where the punter kicks while running) was actually introduced to the sport by imported Australian Rules Football players.
• Before Major League Baseball effectively took over Minor League Baseball in 2021, the latter's "Pacific Coast League" included teams as far off the Pacific coast as Nashville, Tennessee. Even this league's "Pacific" divisions included Albuquerque, Salt Lake City and El Paso (though Salt Lake and El Paso both host teams that relocated from Portland).^note The PCL's expansion was unusual, though, as it was based primarily on the league's longstanding reputation for excellent baseball—not only was it a Triple-A league, it was usually considered the better Triple-A league, as it was historically the West Coast equivalent of the Majors. Moreover, when MLB began considering expansion to the West Coast in the early 1950s, "promoting" the PCL to Major League status was a serious option, and the league was given the unique-in-history status of an "Open" league (higher than AAA) in 1952, with certain protections against the Majors poaching its star players—the idea being that if the quality of baseball improved enough when given Major League-like freedoms, the league was clearly worthy of joining the top tier. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, the Dodgers and Giants decided to move to the PCL's California heartland, and the league was returned to AAA status. Nevertheless, the PCL's reputation for excellent ball remained, and cities that know that they don't have a hope of an MLB franchise were usually more than happy to host the PCL. Several of the easternmost PCL teams were absorbed from the American Association when that league disbanded in 1997, which explains the pre-2021 extreme geographic spread. Averted with the reorg, when MLB decided to rebrand all leagues above Rookie level with a simple "Level + Direction" format. So, the Triple-A leagues were no longer the International League or PCL, but simply Triple-A East and Triple-A West. However, with fans continuing to use the old names, the trope returned in 2022, with MLB restoring the old league names in all of their non-indicative glory.
• The UEFA Champions League. It's only a league for the first round, and most of the teams competing in it aren't champions. Oh, and there's no apostrophe in "Champions" for some reason.
• During the era when NASCAR's top circuit was known as the Sprint Cup Series, none of the races could be considered sprints. Sprint is the telecommunications company that sponsored the series from 2008 to 2016.
• And Dale Earnhardt's famous "pass in the grass" wasn't actually a pass — he was ahead and was preventing himself from being passed.
• The Third Saturday in October football match between the Alabama Crimson Tide and Tennessee Volunteers hasn't usually taken place on this day since 1992.
• In shooting, a clay pigeon is a target shaped like a flying disc.
• There are many cases of sports teams with names related to where they were founded, but eventually moved away and their names are now examples of this trope:
  • Millwall FC are no longer in Millwall; they moved to New Cross decades ago. Where their original ground was is now Millwall Park. When the Docklands Light Railway was being built, using the trackbed of the disused line which once carried supporters to/from Millwall home games, the idea of naming the adjacent station "Millwall Park" was rejected due to possible confusion; it was named "Mudchute" instead.
  • Olympique Lyonnais no longer play in Lyon, but instead in the adjoining suburb of Décines.
  • Argentine team Tigre was founded in the homonymous location in Buenos Aires, but is now located in Victoria.
• Chelsea FC have never been based in Chelsea, which has always been a posh district. The club has been based in Fulham since its creation in 1905, but Fulham FC had been founded back in 1879.^note Originally as Fulham St Andrew's Church Sunday School FC; shortened to the current name in 1888. The neighbourhood of Chelsea is immediately to the east of Fulham, and "Chelsea" may have been chosen because it sounds more upmarket than "Fulham" (in the same way that Clapham Junction was called that instead of the more accurate Battersea Junction).
• There are three notable teams in Argentina called Central Córdoba: Instituto Atlético Central Córdoba and two teams merely called Central Córdoba. Only Instituto is actually located in the province of Córdoba — the other two are from Santa Fe and Santiago del Estero. The reason they have these names is because of a railway company called Central Córdoba, which had stations in these provinces.
• The Baseball Ground in Derby opened in 1890 — it staged baseball until 1898, by which point Derby County Football Club had began playing soccer there. They continued to use it until 2003, meaning that it lived up to its name for 8 years out of 113.
• Each of New Zealand's five Super Rugby teams has a name that references its home city or region. For example, the Hurricanes hail from Wellington, aka "the Windy City". One problem: a hurricane, by definition, is a tropical cyclone formed in the North Atlantic. New Zealand is in the South Pacific.
• The Argentina national rugby union team got its nickname, Los Pumas, from its crest, which depicts a jaguar instead of a cougar.
• In cricket, a team is "all out" when all but one of the players are out (the last player standing can't continue without a batting partner).
• Brazilian association football team Santos is known by his supporters as "Fish" given their mascot is a... whale. Then again, to quote a comedian from the country: "whales live on the water and die outside of it, they're just fish that drink milk!"
• Water polo isn't an equestrian sport, but a ball game practiced in a swimming pool, with participants swimming.
• Boxing rings are square.
• Boxing gloves don't have individual fingers, so they're more like boxing mittens, aren't they? The term "boxing mitt" is reserved for the pads that coaches wear on their hands for boxers to punch at.
• Rolls Gracie's five black belt Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu students were called the "Famous Five" and considered some of the best BJJ practitioners of the 1980s. When Gracie promoted a sixth student into the group, the name had already stuck, so there are six members of the Famous Five.
• The Slickrock mountain bike trail is not made of slick rock at all: the sandstone there is very coarse and grips rubber tires and shoe soles like there's no tomorrow (skin, too, so don't fall off!); in flatter spots it's almost like a tarmac road. The name's an Artifact Title from the days where the main transportation was horses: they slipped a lot on the sloping stone because of their metal horseshoes.^note In current times that goes for shoes with metal cleats, such as ones used with clipless bike pedals.
• In sumo, the top four ranks of sumo wrestlers are collectively called san'yaku, which means "three ranks". This is because the highest rank, yokozuna, is also considered to be a subset of the next highest rank, ozeki, which means "champion".
• The NCAA Basketball Tournament, commonly known as "March Madness", has its final two rounds the first weekend of April.
• The 2020 Summer Olympics kept the "Tokyo 2020" branding despite having to be postponed to 2021 (the first postponed Olympics in history) on account of the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Similarly, Euro 2020 and the 2021 Africa Cup of Nations were pushed back a year but kept their original names.
• Hanyu ("born of feathers") Yuzuru ("taut as a bowstring") isn’t an archer, but an accomplished men's singles figure skater.
• The Harlem Globetrotters have never been based in Harlem—or anywhere in New York City, for that matter. They started out as the Chicago Globetrotters in 1926; three years later, founder Abe Saperstein changed the location name to "Harlem" to more clearly associate the team with African-American culture. Their present-day corporate offices are in Atlanta.
• A softball sounds like a foam rubber ball for little kids that doesn't hurt when it hits you... nope. It's only soft compared to a baseball, and then only slightly (though softer "low-compression" versions may be used to make youth games a bit safer). There are a number of other historical and technical reasons that have been used to justify the game's name, but again, pretty much always relative to baseball, and it's no Nerf no matter how you look at it.
• Because they're geographically isolated from the rest of their states, a few American high schools compete athletically in a neighboring state's federation. For a long time the major example was five California schools^*Coleville, North Tahoe, South Tahoe and Tahoe-Truckee, all cut off from the majority of California schools by the Sierra Nevada, plus Needles, separated by the Mojave Desert in the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association, but then an Arizona school ^*Beaver Dam, in the extreme northeast corner of the state joined the NIAA as well. In 2017 a school in Oregon^*Hermiston, in the northwest part of the state joined the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association, then a few years later six small Washington schools^*Bickleton, Glenwood, Klickitat, Lyle, Trout Lake, Wishram defected to the Oregon School Activities Association.
  • Tennessee has two schools that embody this trope in different ways. Northpoint Christian School was founded in Memphis in 1973, but moved across the state line to Southaven, Mississippi in 1988. However, it remains a member of the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association due to a rule that allows a school located in another state to be a member if the majority of its students are Tennessee residents (which has been true even after the move to Mississippi). Fort Campbell High School, on the eponymous US Army post, is physically located in Tennessee, but has always been a member of the Kentucky High School Athletic Association. The school was originally in Kentucky until moving to a new campus on the Tennessee side; most of the base housing is on the Kentucky side; and Fort Campbell's schools are part of a Department of Defense educational district that also includes schools on Fort Knox, well to the northeast and entirely in Kentucky.
• Shoeless Joe Jackson played every game of his professional career wearing shoes. He got the nickname long before he was a player during a game where actually did play without shoes though.
• Prince Fielder throughout his career received very poor reviews for his defense (ie fielding). This was also true of his dad Cecil Fielder.
• Game 5 of the NBA Finals is known as the "Flu Game" after Michael Jordan led all players with 38 points and led the Chicago Bulls to a 90-88 victory despite being sick — with food poisoning. His symptoms looked more like influenza, hence the name despite being the wrong illness.

Computers & Programming

• Although internet service providers used to be one-stop shops for all things internet — internet access, Usenet access, email, web-page hosting, etc. — nowadays (at least in Britain) they only provide internet access. If you want any of the other services, you go to a specialist provider.
• Software with "DVD" in the title (PowerDVD, DVD Fab, DVD Audio Extractor...) can usually handle Blu-Rays as well.
• Most internet RFCs are no longer Requests For Comments, but full-blown specifications of how things must work in order to ensure compatibility. Those which are actually requests are called "draft RFCs".
• The JavaScript programming language has absolutely no relation to the Java programming language: it was originally named LiveScript but was renamed JavaScript at the last minute simply because Java was popular at the time.
  • While the BASIC programming language remains mostly true to its word, Microsoft's dialect is anything but.
  • Objective-C and C# are not compatible in any way with C (or C++) and both languages have much different higher level concepts. Their only relation to C is that they use similar syntax, as well as the former's ability to use C or C++ code in the same program.
• Adobe Photoshop is commonly used to edit photos, and to create digital art. The latter was an unintended side effect though.
• Adobe Acrobat has nothing to do with the circus. The name originates from Adobe wanting a "nimble" universal read-only document type which could "jump" from system to system without suffering formatting or layout issues, which back in the origin days was nearly unheard of. Thus, the original creation program for the PDF (Portable Document Format) file was born.
• The computer architecture Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) does not mean it has fewer instructions than Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC), though it often does anyway. Nor does it mean it doesn't include "complex" operations. The "reduced" part originally meant that the time it takes to do an instruction has been reduced, the goal being 1 clock cycle per instruction. However, RISC processors often have operations, such as floating point, multiply/divide, and memory tasks, that take more than one clock cycle to complete.
  • The Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architecture isn't actually a really long, single instruction, but a culmination of multiple smaller instructions sent as a single unit.
  • The No Instruction Set Computer (NISC) still contains instructions, but they don't have instructions in the traditional sense. NISC instructions describe dataflow, whereas traditional computer instructions describe control flow.
• Graphics processing units do more than just process graphics; they can process any sort of data. In fact, the world's most powerful supercomputer is made up of an array of computers with a single CPU and multiple GPUs, and they don't produce any graphics at all (well, unless they're modeling something).
• The kill command on most Unix operating systems does not simply kill processes; instead it can be used to send any signal to a process. Besides, the default signal sent when the type-of-signal parameter is omitted is SIGTERM (which instructs the process to close on its own) instead of SIGKILL (which forcibly terminates the process).^note Compare SIGTERM to closing a Windows program by clicking the X or pressing Alt+F4, and SIGKILL to terminating the process in the Task Manager.
• In all but the oldest versions of MS-DOS and Windows, COMMAND.COM is actually an .EXE and has its old name for backwards compatibility. The latest versions of Windows change the name to CMD.EXE.
• British ISP Freeserve would more accurately have been called "ridiculously-expensive-serve"; although their advertising gave the impression (without actually stating) that they were "free" in the sense of "no cost at all", they were actually "free" in the sense of "no subscription charges" — they ran on the pay-as-you-go model, which (as is often the case) proved to be the most expensive way of doing it. One (subscription-based) rival proudly proclaimed itself to be "cheaper than free".
• In the 140 named HTML colours, "lightpink" is darker than "pink" (gamma values of 205 and 212 respectively).
• Up to and including version 3, Microsoft Windows, while marketed as an "operating system", is actually more of a GUI shell running on top of DOS. It didn't become an OS in its own right until version 4 (Windows 95).^note Though Windows 9x was in some ways dependent on DOS; it wasn't until the NT architecture that any dependency on MS-DOS was finally removed.
• Intel's branding of its recent processors say it's the "Nth generation Core processor." If one traces the numbers back, they do indeed stop at the first generation of the Core i3/i5/i7 processors, but there's also three generations of processors named "Core" before that. And the current line of processors aren't direct ancestors of the original Core microarchitecture either.
• Those so-called "MP4 players" common during the mid-to-late 2000s do not actually play MPEG-4 videos, instead using a proprietary codec depending on the chipset used, usually AMV or MTV.^note Not to be confused with Anime Music Video or MTV, though you could encode either or both of them in either format and load them on an MP4 player anyway. Some manufacturers take a step further and sell media players with additional functionality (such as emulated NES games and such) as an "MP5" (no, not that MP5) or even an "MP12" player, despite the Moving Picture Experts Group having not developed an MPEG-5 standard yet.
• The DEC PDP-10 computer architecture included instructions named JUMP and SKIP, which stood for "Do Not Jump" and "Do Not Skip." These were part of groups of instructions whose mnemonic used suffixes such as A (always), LE (less than or equal) or N (not equal) to indicate the conditions on which a jump or skip would be performed. If no suffix was specified, the condition was implicitly "never."
• Tesla's automated driving system is named "Full Self Driving", which has earned a lot of criticism for being misleading as to its actual ability and has gotten the company in trouble in places like California. On an objective scale it is considered to be at SAE Level 2, allowing for automated driving but requiring constant human oversight. The phrase "Full Self Driving" implies something that requires no human input whatsoever, and has caused at least a few drivers to act as such, raising safety concerns about their lack of attentiveness and ability to intervene.
• In C, the keyword "register" doesn't mean "put this on a register", it means "make sure the size of this variable can fit in a register." In addition, certain data type keywords only require they represent a minimum size, their actual size depends on the compiler.
• PCs in the late 1980s to early 1990s had a turbo button actually slowed down the computer rather than speeding it up. The main purpose behind a turbo button was to slow down the CPU clock speed so that older games and programs wouldn't be running at super fast speeds. The idea of a having the button labeled turbo was very likely a marketing gimmick to push sales on new computers since most consumers either didn't need the turbo feature or were confused on why their computer slowed down when turbo was enabled.

History & War

• A number of wars are referred to by either incorrect or misleading names.
  • "Civil war" generally does not mean a war fought politely, or between civilians. It refers to a war fought between factions of the same country. There have been many such. (See also "civil dispute" or a "civil disturbance" which aren't terribly polite either.)
  • The Social War was not a Roman civil war, but a war against the subject Italian cities. Socii was Latin for 'allies', and the name was just carried forward. The same applies to an earlier conflict between Athens and its allies.
  • The Hundred Years War lasted 116 years (with some interruptions).
  • The Eighty Years' War lasted for 68 years of fighting, but 80 from beginning to end. The Twelve Years' Truce separated two lengthy periods of warfare. Also, only one of the parties involved (the Netherlands and Spain) considers it a war.
  • The French and Indian War, which was the North American phase of the Seven Years' War, was not France vs. the indigenous peoples of the American continent. The French and Indians fought together against the British. (There were Indians on the British side too.) Dave Barry Slept Here refers to this confusion, further asserting, "The British didn't even realize they were suppose to be in this war until several years after it started, by which time the French and the Indians, totally confused, had inflicted heavy casualties upon each other."
  • Which means that the Seven Years' War lasted nine years in America; in Europe the war started after a two-year delay.
  • Some historians have called the period of fighting between Britain and France from roughly 1689 to 1815 (including the Seven Years' War) the "Second Hundred Years' War". Actual length, 126 years.
  • La Guerra de los Pasteles (literally the War of the Cakes) was fought because of complaints made by a French baker whose property was damaged during previous battles in Mexico.
  • The War of 1812 lasted three years (from January 1812 to February 1815). At least it began in 1812.
  • The Korean War began as a war between North and South Korea. When it ended, it was largely a war between the United Nations and China. Though the name still makes sense if taken to mean "a war fought on the Korean peninsula".
  • During the American Revolutionary War, the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought on Breed's Hill. Bunker Hill was the original target for both sides, but the Americans moved over to Breed's Hill upon realizing it was in a more defensible position, and it was there that they made their stand against British forces. However, the original name would be the one that stuck.
  • The Wars of the Roses are a flowery name for a series of civil wars in England between the rival branches of the House of Plantagenet; the House of Lancaster and the House of York. Their house symbols were a red rose and a white rose respectively, hence the name.
• There is a modern Hispanic idiom translating as "the conquest was performed by the Indians and the independence by the Spaniards" (la conquista la hicieron los indios y la independencia los españoles), reflecting how the Spanish Conquest of America was primarily carried on by indigenous armies recruited by the conquistadors through diplomacy, while conversely, the wars of independance against the Spanish Empire were instigated and led by criollos (ethnic Spaniards born in the Indies), with the indigenous being more often in the royalist side. Historiography calls it the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire because the conquest was officially done in the name of King Charles I of Spain, but otherwise it would be more proper to call it the "Spanish-Tlaxcaltec-Totonac-Texcocan-Chalcan-etc. Conquest of the Aztec Empire". Spanish wouldn't even become the main language of administration in New Spain until 1696 (almost 200 years after the Conquest).
• In Russia, the February and October revolutions of 1917 respectively took place in March and November. This was because Russia was using the Julian calendar at the time, which was 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar (and will remain that way until 2100).
• Most historical events known as the "Night of the Long Knives" don't actually involve knives.
  • Events of the Night of the Long Knives lasted three days instead of a single night. The Night of the Long Knives was a series of murders commanded by the heads of the Nazi Party, which resulted from gunshots instead of stabbing. The name of the event is actually taken from a song of the Sturmabteilung (the official victim of this purge).
  • There was another "Night of the Long Knives", that took place in the UK in 1962, and nobody died. It was the term adopted by those critical of Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's removal of over a third of his own Cabinet.
  • The Irish Night of Long Knives was a feud between IRA branches, Irish People's Liberation Organisation and the Provisional IRA, over the former's dealing of drugs. The PIRA killed the IPLO's leader, and then kneecapped the rest of the members with clubs.
• The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, acted under Tomás de Torquemada's Alhambra Decree, was almost everything but an expulsion. As the rationale behind the decree was much more religious than racial, they gave the Jews the option to convert to Christianity and stay without any more trouble, and most of them did exactly that (and even among those who left, many changed their mind and returned). The result is that those who converted vastly outnumber those who were expelled, at the very least by two to one. You could call it better an Expulsion of Judaism from Spain.
• The Knights Templar were in fact not all knights. The overwhelming majority of their membership were commoners, both on the battlefield (where they served infantry and lighter cavalry) and off it (where they employed various day-to-day trades and crafts needed to keep the strongholds running). The organization's real name, "The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of the Temple of Solomon", was far more accurate. Except for the "poor" thing; they were the richest organization in Europe for many decades.
• The British Band was not British, but a band of Native American warriors who fought against the United States during the Black Hawk War. They earned the name from their leader Black Hawk's experience fighting for the British during the War of 1812 and rumors that Britain had promised to support them in this conflict.
• The Malayan Emergency, by the name it might seem the name of a minor crisis, until you realise it was a major civil war/independence war in Malaysia that mobilized almost 400 thousand troops and resulted in more than 15 thousand casualties. It is also considered a precursor to the Vietnam War, as it created the term "Hearts & Minds", "Search & Destroy" tactics and the use of Agent Orange as a weapon of war. Crosses into Insistent Terminology, as the term "emergency" was devised by the British owners and investors in local rubber plantations for insurance purposes, as London-based insurers would not have paid out in instances of civil wars.
• The 1692 Salem Witch Trials took place in what is now Danvers, Massachusetts. The town had been called Salem Village at the time, but changed its name in 1752.
• Edward I was not the first King Edward of England. He was preceded by Edward the Elder,^note Alfred the Great's son and successor, who while never titled "King of England" or "King of the English" (the first to that was his son Æthelstan), he did rule almost all of England and so completely broke the back of Norse power in England that his son pretty much eased into the "uniting England" thing he's famous for. Edward the Martyr, and Edward the Confessor. However, he was the first since the Norman Conquest and was named after Edward the Confessor. ^note  Edward is an Anglo-Saxon name and was not common among the English aristocracy post-Conquest.
• The Cambodian Genocide resulted in about 2 million deaths, but was not a "genocide," since it was primarily ethnic Cambodians killing and enslaving other ethnic Cambodians. If anything, it was classicide.

Diseases & Medical Conditions

• Anything named -philia. The Greek stem, φιλία (philia), means "highest form of love", and is one of the four ancient Greek words for love: philia, storge, agape and eros, but in English usage it means "perversion", as most things ending in "-philia" are actually paraphilias, psychiatric aberrations.
• Syphilis spent a long time being referred to as "the [Acceptable Target Nation] disease"^note German Wikipedia suggests Naples, Italy, France, Spain, Castile (i.e. Spain), England, Scotland, and Poland, with the nation being swapped out with whoever your local culture currently has bad blood with. The disease's true origin is still disputed, but the strongest evidence points to Spanish sailors having brought it back from the Americas in the 16th century. This nickname scheme thankfully died out when modern antibiotics made the treatment of syphilis a lot easier.
• Ebolavirus was named after the Ebola river, which is over a hundred kilometers from the village where it was first identified. This was done deliberately so that the name of said village (Yambuku) would not be directly associated with the deadly disease.
• Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease does not affect one's teeth, but one's feet. The "Tooth" refers to one Dr. Howard Tooth, one of the three doctors who discovered the disease.
• Diabetes insipidus and diabetes mellitus are unrelated; the former is caused by hormones or overactive kidneys, the latter is at least four different types of pancreas-related problems. They are named after the one thing they have in common: they both have excessive urination as one possible symptom.
• Diabetes mellitus is often called "sugar" diabetes (presumably to distinguish it from diabetes insipidus, although the latter is less common so there's not much potential for confusion), but any sufferer knows that it's all carbohydrates that are the problem, not just sugar. Starchy carbs such as white bread are more harmful than sugar.
• The Oedipus Complex is named after a character that didn't have it: Oedipus didn't know that the man that he murdered was his father or that the woman that he married was his mother (his biological parents abandoned him at birth because of a prophecy saying he would do exactly that...), and was revolted by both revelations. Moreover, he wasn't in love with his mother, and he didn't hate his father—he killed his father after a chance encounter with him (because his father tried to run him off the road with a chariot), and he only married his mother (the queen) as a reward for slaying the Sphinx and to replace the missing king.
• A Napoleon Complex is in reference to Napoléon Bonaparte, who was actually of average height by modern-day standards. The confusion came because the inches the French used were larger than the inches the British used, along with Napoleon often being painted surrounded by rather tall soldiers which made him seem shorter by comparison.
• The Florence Nightingale Effect, in which nurses fall in love with their patients, was named after a nurse who not only did not fall in love with any of her patients, but lived her entire life as a Celibate Heroine.
• The Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 probably originated in either China or the American Midwest. It was called Spanish Flu because Spanish newspapers were the only ones reporting about it freely. This was because the disease nearly killed King Alfonso XIII of Spain, making it massive news for the Spaniards, and also because the country was neutral in World War I, and thus was not subjected to wartime censorship.
• Hay fever is not an allergy to hay, nor does it cause a raise in body temperature.
  • Pollen allergy also used to be known as "rose cold" even though it has nothing to do with the common cold.
• Polycystic ovarian syndrome is a misnomer, because it's not strictly an ovarian disorder; basically, the patient's whole endocrine system is all kinds of screwed up, leading to a sort of "domino effect" of symptoms including, but not limited to, infertility, excessive hair growth, acne, and fat distribution around the belly. Nor does it always present with ovarian cysts — in fact, it can affect people who don't even have ovaries. Its origins are thought to be genetic, although environment and lifestyle do play a role as well.
• Heartburn is caused by gastric acid irritating the esophagus, so has nothing to do with the heart. It is a (chemical) burn, but not one resulting from fire.
• Exploding head syndrome involves loud auditory hallucinations heard when falling asleep or awakening, and does not involve actual head explosions (although it might sound like one's head is exploding).
• "Stomach flu" has nothing to do with influenza. The condition, properly called gastroenteritis, is usually caused by either rotovirus or norovirus, with the former more common in children. Neither are closely related to influenza viruses.
• The term "heart block" doesn't refer to an actual blockage in the heart chambers or in the arteries surrounding the heart. What it refers to instead is a problem with the heart's natural pacemakers (special cells that send out an electrical signal to maintain a steady rhythm), which affects the heart's rhythm. There are a few different kinds. In a "first degree" heart block, the rhythm is steady, but the interval between the atrial contraction and ventricular contraction is delayed. In a "second degree" (or Wenkebach) heart block, the interval between the atrial contraction and ventricular contraction becomes longer and longer and longer over time. And in a "third degree" heart block, the intervals and rhythm are just all over the place.
• Diogenes syndrome is a mental condition characterized by withdrawal from society, compulsive hoarding and extreme self-neglect. Its namesake, Diogenes of Sinope, was known for his utter lack of possessions and was quite sociable.
• Hemophilia literally translates to "love of blood", but it's in no way analogous to most things with -philia in their names. Justifying it requires a bit of semantic gymnastics (hemophiliacs have reason to be extra-concerned about avoiding bleeding).
• Malaria is a contraction of "mala aria", which is Italian for "bad air." Scientists originally believed that it was caused by the foul-smelling air around swamps and marshlands. Nowadays, we know that swamps and marshlands are often breeding grounds for mosquitoes; it's mosquito bites that spread the protozoan parasite that actually causes malaria, not so-called bad air.
• Lupus pernio is a bluish-red facial rash that is neither lupus nor pernio. It has nothing to do with systemic lupus erythematosus and is instead actually a form of cutaneous sarcoidosis. Pernio is itching, bumps or rash in the fingers, toes or ears in response to cold and is also completely unrelated to lupus pernio.
• Chickenpox has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with chickens or with anything remotely related to chickens. To this day, while there are several theories, no one knows how or why the disease came to be called that.

Miscellaneous

• Renaissance Festivals are often modeled after England in the Medieval period.
• One of the most popular traveling acts on the Renaissance Festival circuit is a comedy trio called "The Tortuga Twins".
• Arabic numerals are from India. They got the name because Europeans learned them from Arabs. Arabs call them Hindu numerals. They're also sometimes known as Hindu-Arabic numerals (NOT to be confused with Arabic-Indic numerals, which are different).
• Team Shanghai Alice. It is not based in Shanghai and only contains one member, whose name isn't Alice. And... okay, technically Touhou does have a character named Alice (who owns a puppet named Shanghai), but this is probably unrelated. Shanghai, according to ZUN, "is a multicultural city where the East and the West meet," while Alice (as in Alice in Wonderland) suggests fantasy elements. Thus Shanghai Alice fits the overall theme of Touhou Project. There's still only one member, though.
• The correct legal definition of "assault" doesn't actually refer to assaulting anything, but making a threat (if they carry is out, it's battery). The phrase "assault and battery" has blurred the line in the public eye, so that many people think that the former word means the same thing as the latter. But depending on the legal system, they refer to different things. Also, while "battered" is commonly understood to refer to serious physical harm, "battery" legally means any unwanted physical contact. Breathing on someone might even qualify. Adding to the confusion, these definitions are only universal in the civil law of torts; criminal assault and criminal battery have a bewildering array of definitions across the common-law world (with the US—where each state has its own definition—providing the bulk of the confusion).
• The Guilford College Yachting Club is home to the "geek club" centering itself on sci-fi, gaming, and anime — they put on a con called "What the Hell Con" which has an incredibly indicative name. Legend has it that the geeks took over a real club about boats and need the longevity of the club's name to get the level of funding they need.
• The linchpin of Einstein's two theories of relativity is that certain things (like the laws of physics and speed of light) are not relative to your frame of reference.
• The Scripps National Spelling Bee has had contestants from outside the US since 1997.
• Oktoberfest is held in September in most areas.
• RPG no longer describes most of the video games the label is attached to anymore, and makes even less sense when spelled out. Even before game-makers were jumping on the bandwagon to add RPG Elements, the meaning had been diluted for over a decade by JRPGs, so few reviewers bother to challenge them.
• Georgia College and Longwood University in Virginia have an event each semester right before finals called Midnight Breakfast. It starts at 10pm and goes till 11:45.
• Scorpion Racing is a Canadian manufacturer of dirt bike parts that has nothing to do with racing scorpions.
• The late Randy Pausch's "The Last Lecture" was the last lecture he gave as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, but not the very last lecture in his life. He gave a lecture on time-saving at the University of Virginia, where he formerly taught, two months later.
• The Catholic Church. "Catholic" means "all-encompassing". Nowadays, it most certainly is not. This stretches back to the 11th century, where they continued calling themselves "the Catholic Church" when the Eastern Orthodox Church split off.
• Most surnames come from nicknames that described someone's appearance, recent family lineage, birthplace, occupation or personality. These nicknames got turned into surnames that get passed down to people that they no longer describe. We all know Smiths who aren't smiths and MacDonalds whose fathers aren't named Donald. And people named Young can be as old as anyone else. There were people called Bloggs long before there were blogs.
• The word denude means actually making something nude. Declothe also means that. The "de-" refers to taking something off; you can't take off nudity but you can take off clothes.
• Many retail stores start their "Black Friday" event well before Friday now and can last as long as the following Sunday. ^note The origins of the term are contentious and most likely coined by a media spin doctor for a catchy headline, the "black" supposedly referring to either the chaos involved (alluding to Black Tuesday, when the Stock Market crashed) or the store finally turning a profit for the year (which is not a feasible theory); regardless, the sale is rarely limited to just Friday any more.
• "Reality television": the term is probably derived from the idea that professional actors aren't used, and the drama isn't scripted—but the situations are often so contrived or manipulated by the producers that this term can be seen as a misnomer, and misleading if it's relying on the inherent virtue of the word "reality" to appeal to viewers. (This is why TruTV, which billed itself on depicting situations that actually happen in real life with no contrivances, advertised itself with the slogan "Not reality, actuality.")
• The Australian Vaccination Network was told in December 2012 to change its name to something that clearly reflects its anti-vaccination agenda or be shut down.
• The months of September, October, November, and December aren't the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months respectively... even though that's their numeral prefix. They used to be, however; the Romans changed the beginning of their year from March to January sometime in the 2nd or 3rd century BCE.
• Magnetic Video originally started out as an audio duplication facility. The company wouldn't start duplicating videos until several years after its founding, though even before then founder Andre Blay wanted to start a home video venture.
• In psychology and anthropology the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis suggests that language defines the limits of thought. Dr. Sapir and Dr. Whorf never worked together, nor did either of them propose such a hypothesis, probably because neither of them ever believed anything like that.
• Anti-Semitism refers to prejudice towards ethnic Jews, but not all Semitic peoples are Jewish. Indeed, the single largest population of Semitic-speakers are Arabs, who (for very painful reasons) are among the most likely to be labeled "anti-Semites". Some prefer to write "antisemitism" in an attempt to remove this implication. The term was coined in the 19th century by European Jew-haters who wanted to give their prejudice an identifying name that sounded scientific, and since Jews were the only Semitic people with substantial presence in Europe at the time, the term was understood from that point on as referring to Jews and not to "Semites" as a whole.
• The Apollo space program sent men to the Moon, not the Sun. Presumably "Artemis program" didn't have the same macho ring to it. (The "Artemis" name would later be used for the 2020s U.S. effort to return to the Moon—making sure to bring a woman this time.)
• Tardar Sauce, the real-life Grumpy Cat, actually had a nice demeanor in Real Life.
• Chances are you have a credit card that belongs to HSBC, which stands for Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. The bank is British in origin and though it used to have its headquarters in Hong Kong, it is now located in London. The current HSBC is the result of a merger between the original HSBC (which was a Hong Kong corporation) and the (British) Midland Bank, which as the name says was based in the Midlands, not London.
• The video game company California Dreams was based in Poland.
• The term "metrosexual" actually has only tangential relations to one's sexuality. This is because it's a portmanteau of "metropolitan" and "homosexual". It refers to men who take a lot of care in their appearance, based on the presumption the gay men are supposedly like this. It's been historically used to distinguish men who merely "act gay" and men who are gay, though as stereotypes about homosexuals fade it will probably go back to its original definition and have nothing to do with sexuality anymore.
• Noon comes from a Latin word meaning "9th hour", supposedly since days started at around 3AM.
• The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, which states that every polynomial of degree n has exactly n complex roots (counting multiplicity), was named before the far more expansive field of abstract algebra was developed, and furthermore, cannot be proven using algebraic techniques alone. It is therefore neither fundamental, nor a theorem of algebra.
• The term "Wi-Fi" was created in imitation of "hi-fi" and has nothing to do with "fidelity". It simply means "wireless connection".
• Television networks Global, TV Globo, and Telemundo, whose transmitters only respectively reach Canada, Brazil, and the United States.^note Globo does operate a worldwide satellite channel named Globo Internacional.
• Sonic! Software Planning was a unit of Sega that developed the early Shining Force games but had nothing to do with any Sonic the Hedgehog games.
• Hollister Clothing Co. is named after a surf shop near Hollister Ranch which doesn't actually exist. Not to mention, it could be confused for Hollister, California which is a small farm town.
• "G-force" is neither a force (it's the sum of all "fictitious forces" caused by inertial stress during acceleration relative to a freefalling reference frame, including the "centrifugal force") nor is it necessarily correspondent to gravity. (Objects on the ground experience 1G, because the ground exerts a force preventing them from falling toward the center of the Earth. Objects in orbit experience 0G even though gravity is still in effect, as all parts of the object is in freefall and thus experience no inertial stress.)
• Only two physicists christened the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss experiment: Hanbury Brown and Twiss. The confusion is caused by the first dash, so the rest of the name is accurate. In more recent times, this has been averted, as the effects that were first discovered in said experiment are now called "Hanbury Brown and Twiss effects".
• The adjective "motheaten", used to describe fabric that's been noticeably gnawed by bugs, is technically inaccurate. Adult moths don't eat fibers; most, in fact, have no capacity to eat at all (which is why they only live for a few days). They only eat fibers in their larval stages, when they're more commonly known as "worms" or some variation thereof. "Wormeaten" would be closer to the truth.
• As any hairdresser will tell you, a "permanent" wave is only temporary.
• The name of the gnuplot (the name isn't capitalized) plotting software seems to imply a connection with the GNU Project, but the name is completely coincidental. However, the GNU Project did sell disks and tapes containing it alongside its own software before the proliferation of affordable Internet access (particularly broadband) made physical distribution unnecessary.
• The organization of the Conservative Jewish movement was founded in 1913 as the United Synagogue of America. Only in 1991 was it changed to the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.
• Despite the misleading name, Anton LaVey's Church of Satan does not actually endorse or condone the worship of Satan, and it officially rejects the very existence of Satan (as well as the existence of God). Philosophically, the Church is actually an atheistic organization, incorporating a hefty dose of Skepticism and Ayn Rand-style objectivism into its doctrine. The name has more to do with the fact that the Church sees itself as the ideological inverse of Christianity, hearkening back to the old meaning of the Hebrew term "Satan", meaning "Adversary" or "Opposer". Where Christianity preaches faith, charity, goodwill and self-discipline, the Church of Satan preaches rationality, self-interest, and self-gratification.
  • Groups who actually worship Satan, such as the Church of Azazel, are known as "Theistic Satanists", and are an insignificant minority even amont Satanists. This is arguably an instance of a "backronym".
• Video game publisher U.S. Gold was actually British. The name was only chosen because the company initially localized American video games for the European market, although they later branched out into home computer ports of arcade games from Japanese companies (namely Capcom's and Sega's) and eventually worked on original games.
• A great deal of formal/informal scientific principles or laws named after people (i.e. Pythagoras' Theorem, Benford's Law, even The Bechdel Test) weren't originally invented/discovered by those people (Pythagoras' Theorem was already known to the Babylonians, Benford's Law was originally discovered by Simon Newcomb and the Bechdel Test was actually created by Alison Bechdel's friend Liz Wallace). This is known as "Stigler's Law of Eponymy"... which also happens to be an example of itself, since the eponymous Stephen Stigler attributes Robert K. Merton with its "discovery".
• The Tri-State Tollway in northeastern Illinois functions as a bypass around Chicago. Contrary to what its name suggests, it does not have segments in Indiana or Wisconsin.
• In the United States Interstate Highway system, east-west highways are assigned even numbers and north-south highways are assigned odd numbers. This numbering system holds true even if the local direction of the route does not match the compass directions.
  • Interstate 94 is an east-west highway from Billings, Montana to Huron, Michigan. However, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Lansing, Illinois (just south of Chicago), a distance of about 117 miles, the highway operates on a north-south alignment as it follows the west shore of Lake Michigan. Here, signs for "east"bound I-94 translate to "south", and "west" translates to "north".
  • Interstate 90 is this trope through the parts of the Chicago area where it overlaps with Interstate 94 (the Kennedy and Dan Ryan Expressways). In fact, it has a second segment where it operates on a north-south alignment even though it has an east-west designation: from about Portage, Wisconsin to Rockford, Illinois.
  • Interstate 95 is the east coast highway from Maine to Florida. Through Connecticut, though, the highway has more of an east-west routing to follow the north shore of the Long Island Sound.
  • Through Virginia, Interstate 64 runs almost exactly the wrong way in the Hampton Roads region (Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Chesapeake, et al.), where sections that once were labeled "east" running almost due west have had these labels removed due to confusion in that area.
  • While in many cases, this is due to relatively short deviations, compared to the overall routing of the highway, it is not always the case. For example, Interstate 26 from Kingsport, Tennessee to Charleston, South Carolina is labeled east-west as its number suggests, but it carries a more generally north-south routing. Interstate 24 from Pulley's Mill, Illinois to Chattanooga, Tennessee by way of Nashville has an east-west designation but a more northwest-southeast routing.
  • Diagonal highways can end up with either an odd or an even number. For instance, there is a 145-mile section of overlap between east-west Interstate 20 (which runs between Kent, Texas and Florence, South Carolina) and north-south Interstate 59 (between Chattanooga, Tennessee and New Orleans, Louisiana) from Meridian, Mississippi to Birmingham, Alabama. The overlap segment runs on a northeast to southwest diagonal.
  • Though on a north-south alignment, Interstate 25 has a 45-mile segment where it runs on a northwest-to-southeast diagonal between Santa Fe and Las Vegas, New Mexico, where it crosses Glorieta Pass.
  • There's a section of freeway in the Bay Area that's labeled 80 West/580 East. It runs north.
• On a related note, U.S. Route 101 is normally a north-south freeway but becomes east-west when passing through Los Angeles County. However, the road signs in Los Angeles still refer to it as "101 North" and "101 South", even though you're actually traveling west and east, respectively.
• In Jamaican slang, the term "rude boy" does not mean an impolite young man. It's actually a subculture, consisting of young people who listen to ska and rocksteady music (and later reggae) and wear sharp suits, thin ties, and pork pie or Trilby hats. It eventually turned into a general term for "cool" "bad boys" into whatever music and fashion was "in" at the moment (hence Rihanna asking whether a "Rude Boy" whether he could satisfy her in 2009—he probably wasn't wearing a Trilby^note Though weirdly, through the vagaries of fashion, 2009 is one of the few years between 1970 and 2020 when he might have been.).
• When a "mandatory evacuation" is ordered ahead of a disaster like a hurricane or a wildfire, it is not actually mandatory. It does not mean "you will be arrested if you don't evacuate". What it actually means is "it is highly recommended that you should leave this area as quickly as possible, since evacuation routes become severely congested during mass exoduses." That said, while the police won't arrest you for refusing to heed a mandatory evacuation order^note From a practical standpoint, no police force has the manpower or jails large enough to arrest everyone who refuses to leave under mandatory evacuation. Government officials would also have to deal with the public outcry that would undoubtedly follow such actions, be aware that you should be prepared to be self-sufficient for the first 72 hours after a storm.
• "Monochrome" pictures are actually of two colours, not just one; usually black and white, or sepia and white for an antique look, but can be any two. This is explained by the fact that when printing, white isn't considered a color and is instead considered empty space. When you are printing "light blue", what you're really doing is printing a little bit of blue on a white surface.
• If you hear astronomers talk about "Sagittarius A-star" or "Messier 87-star", they're not talking about a star as you'd probably think. Sagittarius A* and Messier 87*^note The first one of its kind to be imaged are the supermassive black holes at the center of the Milky Way and Messier 87 galaxies respectively. Black holes are stars and not actually holes, which is its own case of this trope.
• Actual stars tend to have very weak colors. As such, the color description used in stellar classification usually aren't that accurate. Red dwarf stars are more of a burnt-orange color, while yellow dwarf stars (such as the sun) are usually white with a very faint yellow tint. Blue giant stars actually are somewhat blue, although it's still usually a very pale blue.
• The Metric System uses the prefix "milli" to represent thousandths of a unit, not millionths. This is because a million (from the Latin milia for "thousand" and augmentative suffix '̈́'-on) refers to a thousand thousand, not just a thousand. A million is literally "a big thousand". 1,000 in Latin is milia'', which is also the stem word for the numeral in all Romance languages.
  • The SI prefixes upwards stem from Greek, while the SI prefixes downwards stem from Latin.
  • The SI prefix for one millionth is micro-, denoting as "very small".
• A so-called "Test Tube Baby" actually originates in a Petri dish, which is a very distinct piece of equipment from a test tube. The term "test tube" probably caught on with the popular media because the mainstream may not know what a Petri dish is, but everyone recognizes test tubes as scientific equipment.
• "Plow steel", at least when labeled as such, is almost exclusively used for making... wire rope.
• Astronomers refer to the nuclear processes that take place within stars as "burning", even if they are totally unrelated to "burning" in the sense of a chemical combustion.
• The so-called "golden spiral" sometimes seen (especially on YouTube videos about the "golden ratio") isn't a spiral, or any other kind of unified curve; it's a series of quarter-circles joined together. At the large scale it looks like a spiral, but close examination (or numeric analysis) shows that there are discontinuities of slope where the arcs join. The confusion is made worse by the fact that it is a close approximation to a real golden spiral — but it is not possible for a real spiral to pass through the points where successive squares meet. (The "golden ratio" itself almost is this trope, as it's an algebraic irrational number; it only escapes qualifying because a ratio doesn't need to be between integers.)
• In physics, there are two commonly encountered gravitational constants, which physicists colloquially call "big G" and "little G". When expressed in standard units, big G is very, very small, less than one ten-billionth, whereas little G is about ten. Their names instead refer to their capitalization, with the constants represented by G and g respectively.
• In 2017, Nationstar Mortgage changed its name to Mr. Cooper. While there likely are men with a surname of Cooper working for the company, none of them have been founders, owners, CEOs, or anyone else influential enough to have the company named after him.
• Chinese Laundry has nothing to do with laundry, not based in China, nor was it founded by a Chinese person and definitely has nothing to do with historical Chinese laundries. Maybe it has Chinese employees, who knows. It's actually a women's footwear company based in Los Angeles.
• There are a fair number of companies floating around with the words "Bitcoin" or "blockchain" in their names, despite having absolutely nothing to do with the cryptocurrency. This was generally done as a desperate gambit, in the hope that some of the crazy hype surrounding Bitcoin would rub off on them. Incredibly, this actually worked, as the companies' share prices would often double or more-than-double overnight following the name change.
• The 1995 Million Man March was estimated by the National Park Police to have been attended by 400,000 people. This caused some backlash, as the event organizers claimed an attendance as high as 2 million. Louis Farrakhan threatened to sue the National Park Service, causing them to stop issuing official crowd size estimates.
• Euxinia refers to when water is both anoxic (contains a depleted level of oxygen) and contains a high level of hydrogen sulphide. It is quite hard for many organisms to survive in euxinic conditions, because most creatures require oxygen to live, and hydrogen sulphide is highly toxic. Despite this, the word "euxinia" is derived from the Greek word for "hospitable", because the Greek name for the Black Sea, Εὔξεινος Πόντος (Eúxeinos Póntos), translates to "hospitable sea"—because its southern shore was dominated by Greek colonies, and the rest of the coastline was largely either controlled by Greeks or by kingdoms friendly to the Greeks—and the Black Sea is euxinic.
• The steampunk genre generally doesn't include Punk Rock music or any punk tropes such as spiky, mohawked hair, piercings, insider slang, or black leather, all of these being relics of The '70s punk movement. The term "punk" refers to subversiveness and often fringe existence. Steampunk isn't even particularly anti-establishment, as it stereotypically is set in the Victorian periods, which were quite conservative. Unlike Cyberpunk, the term is somewhat meaningless in steampunk's case as it solely denotes a visual style, not an aesthetic in storytelling (though one can easily use such a setting in a non-visual medium like literature).
• The term "friendly fire" is anything but friendly. It refer to an incident where soldiers accidentally fire at soldiers on their own side (non-hostiles combatants are usually referred to as "friendlies").
• From the Wikipedia page: 'German Whist is a variation on classic whist [a card game] for two players. Also called "Chinese Whist", the game is most likely of British origin.'
• The M25 is often called the London Orbital Motorway — it's an A-road between junctions 31 and 2 (clockwise), where it crosses the River Thames to the east of London. However, the crossing's A-road designation is justified. Several significant categories of traffic are barred from motorways (M roads in the UK), most notably agricultural vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, riders of small motorbikes, and vehicles driven by provisional licence holders. The A-road designation allows the crossing to be used by all but pedestrians and cyclists, and the crossing authority offers a free shuttle service to cyclists.
• The British Thermal Unit is a measure of energy, roughly equal to 1055 J. It was coined in the United States and primarily used there — most British scientists would use the Joule by default.
• The clothing brand Nautica had the short-lived "Nautica Jeans" offshoot in the '90s to early 2000s. Its main focus wasn't denim but rather, urban-style clothing to appeal to young African Americans who wouldn't be into Nautica's usual preppy look.
• "Entry-level" jobs get a fair bit of this—one would expect from the title that it means it's a job for people with no experience, but it actually tends to mean people with low experience. (In fact, studies suggest over half of all jobs marked "entry-level" actually require a few years of experience.) This is a major point of frustration for job-hunters.
• Among Kirby speedrunners, there's a category called the Flagship Trilogy, so named for the late Flagship company, where you run through three Kirby games: Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land, Kirby & the Amazing Mirror, and Kirby: Squeak Squad. The problem is that there's no such thing as a Flagship Kirby trilogy. Flagship only worked on the latter two games and had no involvement in Nightmare in Dream Land. However, there isn't really any other way to unify these three games under one category, and the name is pretty cool, so those involved just let it slide.
• This image◊ gives us 3 in one: French toast is Roman, French fries are Belgian, and the guillotine — named after a Frenchman — is English.
• Math examples:
  • Rational numbers don't seem very rational, but they are — they're just ratios (division), not rational like "reasonable".
  • Imaginary numbers aren't imaginary at all, they're perfectly usable numbers. Rene Descartes just thought they were silly — and they were, until they weren't.
  • The mathematical sequence of "taxicab numbers": The nth taxicab number is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in n different ways. Why? Because Hardy didn't think his taxicab number of 1729 was particularly interesting, but Ramanujan observed it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two [positive] cubes in two different ways.
  • Very few people would consider "sexy primes" as attractive, as they are a pair of prime numbers exactly six values apart from each other with no other prime numbers in between, such as 23 and 29, or 31 and 37.
• The Tex-Mex fast casual chain Moe's Southwest Grill has never been present in the southwestern United States.
• With the term "single-action revolver", one would expect you only need a single action to fire the gun. They require two actions (cocking the hammer, then pulling the trigger). The "single action" part refers to just the trigger, as it only drops the hammer, it doesn't cock it.
• The method of saying how small the transistors are in a computer chip used to be somewhat accurate. But past a certain point, the naming convention stuck despite none of the parts of the transistor or the chip reflecting the size that it supposedly is. For example, a chip made with a 7 nanometer process doesn't actually contain a part that's 7 nanometers.
• The Hudson-Bergen Light Rail in New Jersey is named for the Hudson and Bergen counties of the state — however, it runs exclusively in Hudson County with no stations in Bergen County. There have been proposals to extend the system into Bergen, but none have seen success as of yet.
• Pity anyone who says they "sleep with" someone and literally mean just that, because "sleep with" conventionally means "have sex with". Often, in order to clarify that no sexual activity took place, one has to say "sleep next to" instead of "sleep with". This can be a frustration point for people from cultures where non-sexual, non-romantic bed-sharing is normalized, especially when that bed-sharing is with family, as many Westerners are quick to jump to the conclusion that the person saying "I share a bed with my parents/siblings/other-family" is an incest-committer.
• The Underground Railroad was neither underground nor a railroad. It was so called as fugitive slaves who took passage in it effectively disappear from public view, and rail transport was a new and novel idea at the time, hence why they adopted rail terminology.
• While the clothing company American Tall does specialize in apparel for tall people, it's based in Canada. One could argue that it's still "American" in the broader sense, but English speakers (as opposed to Spanish or Portuguese) never use the term that way without "North-" or "South-" as a prefix.
• The color used for the logo and fleet of trucking company Yellow Freight is not yellow but, rather, "swamp holly orange," which was determined by researchers hired by the company in the 1920s to be easiest to see from a great distance.
• The Kirkland Signature brand, Costco's private label, is named after Kirkland, Washington, which is where they originally had their headquarters. The name would imply that the products are made in Kirkland, but none of them actually are. In fact, the rotisserie chickens are made in a plant in Nebraska, nowhere near Washington.
• The Ottoman Empire, towards the end, was full of positions with this type of name, thanks to Mission Creep. For example, the Head Gardener was actually the Sultan's personal executioner, and Soup-Seller started out as a title for a Camp Cook but eventually became the title of a Janissary regimental commander.
• As anyone who works in a dry cleaning shop will tell you: "dry cleaning" isn't "dry" at all. Dry cleaners still wash clothes in liquid—they just use liquid solutions with solvents other than water.
• Amaterasu particle, an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray, is named after the Japanese goddess of the sun, but it neither came from our sun (it came from outside the Milky Way), not was detected in Japan (it was detected in Utah, USA).
• Unlike astronomical objects like dwarf stars and dwarf galaxies, dwarf planets are considered as being a separate type of astronomical object from planets, which notably includes Pluto, the main difference being that unlike "official" planets, while they must both orbit stars, be roughly spheroid, and not be able to produce their own light, dwarf planets are not massive enough to dominate their own orbits.
• The black ice you get warned about after every snowfall isn't black, it's transparent and difficult to see on a black road surface.

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