BLUEBEARD

The monstrous Duke Bluebeard first appeared in Charles Perrault's collection of fairytales, Histoires ou contes du tempes passé, in 1697. A serial murderer who kills a string of wives and keeps their bodies locked in a secret room in his castle, Bluebeard soon came to refer to any violent womaniser or wife-killer in 18th-century English, while a Bluebeard's closet or Bluebeard's room is anywhere a person keeps something they wish to remain a secret.

BRAINIAC

Before it became a nickname for an exceptionally clever or geekish person, brainiac was the name of a super-intelligent adversary of Superman who first appeared in an edition of Action Comics in 1958.

BUNBURYING

In Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest (1899), Algernon admits to having a fictitious friend called Bunbury – "an invaluable permanent invalid" – who supposedly lives away in the country, and whom he "visits" whenever he wishes to excuse himself from a social obligation. Bunburying, a term Wilde himself coined in the play, has since been widely adopted beyond the theatre for similar prevarication.

CELADON

An enormous 5,000-page French novel called L'Astrée (1627) by Honore d'Urfé features a character named Céladon, who habitually dresses in green-coloured ribbons. A pale green-grey colour and a similarly coloured type of porcelain are both named after him.

DANDIE DINMONT

Dandie Dinmont terriers originated in the Scottish borders in the 17th century, where their long, low bodies made them effective hunters of badgers and otters. They took their name from a character in Sir Walter Scott's novel Guy Mannerling (1814) who owned two of the dogs, Pepper and Mustard.

FRANKENSTEIN

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was published when its author – who chose to remain anonymous until the second edition was printed in 1823 – was just 20 years old. The Oxford English Dictionary has since traced the earliest allusive use of its title back to 1827, when the writer Charles Lamb first used Frankenstein as a verb meaning "to assemble from disparate parts". More recently it's inspired its own prefix denoting genetically modified or scientifically engineered produce, like "Frankenfoods" or "Frankencrops".

GARGANTUAN

Gargantua was the name of a giant created by François Rabelais in a series of bawdy 16th-century comic novels, notably La vie très horrifique du grand Gargantua, or The Very Horrific Life of Great Gargantua (1534). The books are well known for their coarseness and their crude humour: Gargantua is born with a yard-long erection and immediately demands a pint of ale to drink, while his mother, having already endured an 11-month pregnancy, demands his father be castrated to prevent him from impregnating her ever again. The adjective gargantuan, literally referring to anything of Gargantua's size, first appeared in the late 1500s, while a related (and criminally underused) noun gargantuism has been used to mean "an enormously extravagant but impractical idea" since the mid-19th century.

GOODY TWO-SHOES

The original goody two-shoes was the title character in a nursery story, The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, published anonymously in 1765 but usually credited to Oliver Goldsmith. Although Goldsmith's was apparently the first published version of the story, references to its title character have since been uncovered as far back as the mid-1600s, suggesting it might originally have been a local folktale.

GRANGOUSIER

A grangousier is someone who will eat or drink anything put in front of them. Like Gargantua, the original Grangousier (the French for "great throat") was another of Rabelais' colourful creations dating from the mid-1500s.

GRINCH

Dr Seuss's How The Grinch Stole Christmas! was published in 1957. By the early 60s its title character – a bright green, grouchy, cave-dwelling monster – was already being figuratively employed to describe a spoilsport or grump.

JEEVES

PG Wodehouse's epitome of the perfect valet, Reginald Jeeves first appeared in the short story Extricating Young Gussie in 1915. Over the next 59 years, he and his "mentally negligible" master Bertie Wooster went on to appear in more than 40 stories and novels, up to and including Wodehouse's last completed work, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, in 1974. According to one biography of Wodehouse, Jeeves was named after Warwickshire cricketer Percy Jeeves, who was killed just months after the first book was published while fighting in the first world war.

LOTHARIO

The English playwright Nicholas Rowe is often credited with inventing the original Lothario, who appeared as a character in his play The Fair Penitent in 1703, but in fact an equally lascivious character by the same name had already appeared in William Davenant's play The Cruel Brother almost a century earlier in 1630.

MALAPROPISM

"She's as headstrong as an allegory", states Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan's The Rivals (1775), apparently mistaking allegory for alligator. She goes on to talk about "the pineapple of politeness", and her "oracular tongue" (instead of her vernacular), alongside a great many other tidally unintentional terrors. Mrs Malaprop's muddled use of language is the inspiration for malapropism – while the inspiration for her name was the French phrase mal à propos, meaning "misplaced" or "wrongly positioned".

MENTOR

Taking his name from a Greek word meaning "purpose" or "intent", Mentor was a friend and adviser of Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey, written in the 8th century BC. It wasn't until 2,500 years later that his name first came to be used generally for any similarly helpful guide or counsellor, in the early 1700s.

MRS GRUNDY

Although she never actually appears on stage, the merest threat of disapproval from her overbearing next-door neighbour Mrs Grundy is enough to terrify Dame Ashfield in Thomas Morton's popular comedy Speed The Plough (1798). Her constant speculating about "What will Mrs Grundy say?" soon became proverbial in 18th-century English, while Grundyism has since become synonymous with conventionalism or correctness and Mrs Grundy herself remains the personification of pompous propriety or mannerliness.

PAMPHLET

Pamphilus, de Amore ("Pamphilus, or About Love") was a 12th-century Latin love poem describing the romantic adventures of its eponymous Greek hero and his lover Galatea. Little is known of its origins other than that it was written somewhere on the continent (most likely France) in the late 1100s, but what is known is that it proved immensely popular: its 720 lines were read, reread, reprinted and redistributed all over Europe throughout the 13th century, to the extent that references to it have been uncovered in literatures everywhere from Norway in the north to Italy in the south. In fact it proved so popular that the short, folded, uncovered booklets it was printed in eventually became known as pamphlets.

PECKSNIFFIAN

In Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), Seth Pecksniff is the sanctimonious, hypocritical architect who, we are told, "has never designed or built anything". His name is the inspiration for the adjective pecksniffian, meaning "hypocritical", as well as a host of other derivatives including peckniffianism and pecksniffery. Mark Tapley, another Martin Chuzzlewit character, has since given rise to the word tapleyism, meaning "naive or unerring optimism", even in the face of the most hopeless of circumstances.

QUEENBOROUGH MAYOR

The titular character in Thomas Middleton's play The Mayor of Queenborough (c 1627) is the origin of the old English phrase Queenborough mayor: a mayor or similar figurehead who appears to have all of the trappings of office, but in fact has no real power or authority.

RED QUEEN HYPOTHESIS

According to the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-glass (1871), "it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place". This motto is the origin of the Red Queen hypothesis, a theory from evolutionary science that states that in order to survive, a species must evolve at such a pace so as to remain sufficiently ahead of the evolutionary developments of a competing or predatory species.

RIP VAN WINKLE

When Charles Dickens spoke of the "oversleeping Rip van Winkles" who populate the Courts of Chancery in Bleak House (1853), he was alluding to a famous character created by the American writer Washington Irving in his Sketch Book (1819-20). In Irving's original story, Rip van Winkle falls asleep, after a drinking party, for 20 years (not, despite popular opinion, 100) only to awake to find that the Revolution has taken place and that he is now a citizen of the United States.

RODOMONTADE

Rodomontade is an old Tudor word for boastful talking or bravado, or else can be used as a nickname for a suitably bragging, blustering person. It is derived from Rodomonte, a courageous yet vainglorious Saracen warlord who features in an Italian epic poem, Orlando innamorato (1495), by Matteo Maria Boiardo. Other boastful characters whose names have become synonymous with bragging blowhards include Bobadil, from Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour (1598); Drawcansir, from George Villiers's The Rehearsal (1672); and Sacripant, another Saracen knight from Boiardo's Orlando.

ROISTER-DOISTERING

Roister has been used on its own to mean "a boisterous reveller or partygoer" since the mid-1500s, and is probably descended from rustre, an old French word meaning "coarse" or "violent". Roister-doistering, however, derives from Ralph Roister-Doister, the eponymous character in a comic play by the English dramatist Nicholas Udall written in the mid-1550s.

SHYLOCK

As well as being another name for an extortionate moneylender or pawnbroker, Shakespeare's notorious usurer Shylock can also be employed as a verb meaning "to force to repay a debt". Such is Shakespeare's influence over the English language that besides the thousands of neologisms and semantic reworkings for which he is responsible, the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary also feature entries like Dogberryism ("ignorance, self-importance"); Falstaffian ("fat, humorous, jovial"); Timonism ("misanthropy"); Bardolphian ("having a red nose"), benedict ("a confirmed bachelor who unexpectedly marries"); and Ophelian ("obsessively tending towards madness").

STRUWWELPETER

Der Struwwelpeter (1845) is an anthology of children's stories by the German writer Heinrich Hoffmann. Its title character, "Shock-headed Peter", is the subject of the first of the book's 10 allegorical tales and is portrayed as a young boy who never washes or combs his hair, or cuts his fingernails or toenails: a struwwelpeter, ultimately, is someone with wildly uncontrollable or unkempt hair. Other stories in the same surprisingly macabre collection include those of a girl who plays with matches and burns herself to death, and a habitual thumb-sucker whose thumbs are sliced off by an itinerant tailor.

SVENGALI

The mysterious magician Svengali appears in George du Maurier's novel Trilby (1894) in which he uses hypnosis to transform the title character from a tone-deaf laundry-worker into an operatic diva. Du Maurier's novel was immensely successful at the time of its publication (selling more than 200,000 copies in America alone in 1895), which doubtless helped to popularise not only the use of Svengali as a nickname for an illusionist or hypnotist, but also helped to gave Trilby hats their name.

WELLERISM

Named after Sam Weller, Mr Pickwick's astute cockney manservant in Dickens's Pickwick Papers (1836), a wellerism is a wittily reworked proverb or turn of phrase: as Sam himself states, "[that's what] I call addin' insult to injury, as the parrot said ven they not only took him from his native land, but made him talk the English langvidge arterwards". Like most of Dickens's novels, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was originally serialised and was printed in 20 monthly instalments from April 1836 to November 1837. Sam proved such a popular character that his appearance in chapter 10 transformed the book from a near financial failure into a publishing phenomenon, increasing its sales from 500 a month to upwards of 40,000 and helping to make its author a household name.

• Adapted from word origins guide Haggard Hawks & Paltry Poltroons (Constable & Robinson, 2013) by Paul Anthony Jones. For more word origins and word facts, follow @HaggardHawks on Twitter.