Today we celebrate both Columbus Day and Native Americans' Day. As we remember the day the Old World met the New, we look at three words whose voyage into our language began on that October night in 1492 when a sailor—either Rodrigo de Triana or Juan Rodriguez Bermejo—first spotted land from the prow of the Pinta.

Convinced he and his men were at last among lands at the end of the Orient that marked a new route to India, Captain Christopher Columbus dubbed the island group the West Indies and its inhabitants Indians.

While still in the Bahamas (for he had landed at what we now know as San Salvador), Columbus first heard of the caniba, the people of what is now called Cuba, and of the carib, natives of what we now call the Lesser Antilles. Caniba and carib are dialect variants of Cariban origin, words that basically mean "strong men" or "brave men." Carib is the basis of the word Caribbean, and caniba is the basis of the word cannibal. Cannibal was coined out of the mistaken belief of European explorers that the caniba would eat human captives.

Of course, not every new term from the New World was born in error. Christopher Columbus also is credited with first recording canoa, a Carib name for a light and narrow boat—canoa eventually turned into our English canoe.