Borrowed Words Almanac
Beneath many English words from India lies an older Persian form. This page shows how Persian reached English — directly, and through Urdu, Arabic, Turkish, and French — and how its handwriting can still be read in the words.
Persian was the language of court and administration in Mughal India for centuries, so when English borrowed from Urdu it often received Persian at one remove. Sepoy is Persian sipāhī; cummerbund is Persian kamarband; khaki is Persian khākī, from khāk, 'dust'. The Urdu word was the envelope; the Persian word was the letter.
Persian also reached English without India. Bazaar (1599) and caravan (sixteenth century) came through travel accounts; dervish and divan through Turkish; jasmine and tulip through gardens and trade — tulip, remarkably, is from Persian dulband, 'turban', which the flower was thought to resemble.
The oldest Persian arrivals are on the chessboard. Chess itself descends from shāh, 'king', through Arabic and Old French; checkmate is shāh māt, 'the king is helpless'; rook is rukh, the chariot piece. These words reached English in the Middle Ages, centuries before the Company period, proving that the Persian layer is far older than the Raj.
Persian mediation leaves formal clues. Words with kh (khaki), with long a (bazaar, caravan), or with office-and-rank meanings (divan, dewan, mogul) often passed through Persian hands. Dictionaries mark the route language by language; where a word's shape and its label seem to disagree, the route is usually longer than it looks.
The clearest sign of the layer is repetition: one Persian word surfacing in English several times. Shāh gives shah, chess, and checkmate; dīwān gives divan and dewan; sharbat gives sherbet and, by other roads, sorbet. Each pair is a fossil of a separate journey.
Further reading