Are you a Marvel or DC fan? That question carries great weight in the comic book world. But the influence of these cultural icons has spread far beyond the page. Now superheroes come to life on film, in video games, and at conventions flooded with fans doing their best cosplay. We're team Marvel (at least for today), so let's take a look at some of the words and phrases we owe to their wonderful world of heroes and villains.
Avengers
The definition of "avenger" — a person who exacts punishment or inflicts harm in return for an injury or wrong — seems to be more appropriate for a villain. How did our favorite superheroes earn this moniker? As we saw in Captain Marvel, Nick Fury was originally going to call his superhero collective the Defenders Protocol. But when viewing a photo of Carol Danvers, Fury noticed her flight call sign was Avenger, and aptly retitled his project the Avengers Initiative.
The name’s origin makes for wordplay at the start of Avengers: Endgame, when one hero criticizes the team for always being reactive. So now the definition of "avenger" makes more sense. The Avengers are only ever called on after a villain wreaks havoc on their world.
Spidey Sense
Most of us haven’t been bitten by radioactive spiders, but we can still use Peter Parker’s description of a sense of intuition that danger is lurking. While the phrase hasn’t made the Oxford English Dictionary yet, tell someone your spidey sense is tingling, and they’ll immediately know something’s up.
Mutants
Most superheroes are mutants of some sort. Inspired by the Latin mutare, meaning changing, this word was coined in the early 20th century. It solidified in popularity once comic books adopted the term to describe everything from the diverse powers of the X-Men to the Jekyll and Hyde-esque nature of The Hulk.
Adamantium and Vibranium
X-Men fans are quite familiar with adamantium, a fictional metal alloy that gives Wolverine his nearly indestructible skeleton and claws. Of course, Wolverine isn’t the only part-adamantium being; Ultron from the Avengers and Wolverine's enemy, Sabretooth, also have adamantium as part of their physiology. Another infamous Marvel metal? Vibranium, which has the ability to absorb, store, and release energy. It’s harvested in Black Panther’s fictional kingdom of Wakanda and used in King T’Challa’s suit and Captain America’s shield.
MacGuffin
This moviemaking term was popularized in the 1930s by Alfred Hitchcock to describe a filmmaker’s shortcut to provide a desired object or other goal for the protagonist to pursue, usually with little or no explanation. While it’s not exclusively a superhero term, many people associate it with movies where the hero is in pursuit of an object: Think the Avengers' Infinity Stones as a primo example.
Tesseract
Speaking of Infinity Stones, their first cinematic sighting came in the form of the tesseract in Captain America: The First Avenger. The word "tesseract" is a real thing and not just something crafted for comics. A tesseract is a cube in a four-dimensional space, where every face is a cube. In the Avengers film series, it’s the ultimate early days MacGuffin that laddered up to the series’ concluding Endgame.