Borrowed Words Almanac
Words move along the roads that people move along: trade, administration, and literature. This page maps those roads — and explains why the same word sometimes travels two of them.
The oldest road is cargo. When goods move, their names move with them, because a buyer on a dock needs a word for what is being unloaded. English took calico, chintz, and bandana this way: the cloth arrived first, the word was written on the invoice, and the invoice outlived the cloth. Food travelled identically — chutney, punch, and candy are names that came with the thing.
The second road is the office. Where English speakers governed or soldiered, they wrote local terms into reports, manuals, and court papers, and print carried those terms home. Sepoy (from Persian sipāhī, 'soldier'), nabob (from Urdu nawwāb), and thug (from Hindi thag) all entered English through official paper before they entered ordinary speech.
The third road is the page itself. Travel books, letters, and newspapers were the printing press of borrowing: a writer in Calcutta or Madras used a local word, glossed it in a parenthesis, and a reader in London repeated it. Hobson-Jobson, the 1886 glossary, is essentially a catalogue of words that completed this journey.
Sometimes one etymon travels two roads and arrives as two words. Persian shāh came directly as shah in the sixteenth century, but it had already arrived centuries earlier through Arabic and French as chess and checkmate. Sharbat arrived as sherbet through Turkish, as sorbet through Italian and French, and — from the same root — as syrup through medieval Latin. The words look unrelated because the roads were different.
Each road leaves evidence in dates. Trade words cluster around the opening of sea routes; administrative words cluster around the nineteenth century; literary arrivals can be traced to specific books. The chronology of borrowing is, in effect, a chronology of contact.
Further reading