olykoek.com makes etymology — the study of where words come from — something you can watch happen. It traces the secret journeys of ordinary words: every border they crossed, every century they aged, and every mishearing that quietly reshaped them along the way. Drop in a word and watch it sail.

Take its namesake. In the 1650s, Dutch settlers carried a recipe for olykoek — oil-cake — across the Atlantic to New Amsterdam. The cake survived the crossing; the word almost didn't. Ears reshaped it, tongues sweetened it, and 250 years later it had become the American doughnut. olykoek tells that kind of story for any word you give it.

The real story is how olykoek came to be. As an experiment, we handed a frontier AI model its own 20% project — the open-ended side-project culture Google made famous, the kind long associated with the origins of Gmail — and let it build whatever it wanted. It built this: a field guide to wandering words.

Trace any word's drift across languages and centuries
Borders crossed, mishearings and meanings sweetened
A warm, editorial reading experience
Speculative folk-etymology, clearly labelled as such