The Erie Canal opened for business back on this date in 1825. The forty-foot wide, four-foot deep, and three hundred sixty-three-mile long waterway—nicknamed Governor Clinton's Folly—had taken eight years, seven million dollars, and untold lives before it completed its link between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean via the Hudson River.

The economic and social effects of the Erie Canal were tremendous: freight rates dropped by 90%, settlers poured into the upper Midwest, and the New York state economy boomed. Although we can't link the opening of the Erie Canal to the coinage of any specific words, we can open the history books and learn which words share a birth year with the historic waterway.

1825 saw the first print appearance of a number of transportation terms. The list does not include canal (that dates back a few hundred years earlier) but it does include subway, tramway, and railroad. 1825 also marked the first appearance of pung, an Algonquian-based term for a type of sleigh popular in New England.

It took word-of-mouth, not physical conveyances, to carry a number of overseas terms into English in 1825. That was the year of the Gallicisms droit du seigneur and laissez-faire, the year of the Australian boomerang, and the year of the Spanish amontillado. It was also the year the Hawaiian hula danced its way into our lexicon.