the.com/bonanza
Spanish for calm seas, now means you just won big — etymology did a full 180.
means A sudden run of great luck or abundance — a windfall, especially a profitable one.
from From Spanish bonanza, meaning 'fair weather' or 'calm sea' for sailors, itself traced back to Latin bonus, 'good.' Spanish miners carried the word into mining slang, where it came to mean a rich vein of ore — a stretch of good fortune underground instead of at sea. English borrowed it in that mining sense in the 1800s, especially from American silver and gold rushes, and it widened from there into any sudden stroke of abundance.
- original meaning
- fair weather or calm sea in Spanish
- mining slang shift
- 19th-century miners used it for rich ore veins
- tv boost
- 1959 western Bonanza cemented the word in pop culture
- irony
- now means jackpot, once meant nothing happening