Top Ten Words of Summer

# 1. Frisbee

Where did that Frisbee come from?

The story involves 1950s college students playing catch with cake tins and pie pans – sometimes from the Frisbie Pie Company of New England.

There was already a plastic flying disk on the market called the Pluto Platter, and the students nicknamed it Frisbie. When Wham-O bought the rights to that plastic disk in 1957, they respelled the nickname and made it official.

Because Frisbee remains a trademark, the more earthbound generic term is flying disk.