How Trade and Empire Built English: 300 Words from Around the World

Why English Became the World’s Greatest Borrower

All languages borrow vocabulary from other languages — but none has done so as extensively, or from as many sources, as English. The reasons are structural, historical, and cultural. Structurally, English has no sound changes or grammatical adaptations that make foreign words difficult to absorb. A word from Hindi, Nahuatl, or Japanese can enter English with minimal change to its phonology. Historically, the English-speaking world engaged in trade and colonialism on a global scale between 1500 and 1900, creating prolonged contact with hundreds of language communities. Culturally, English has always been pragmatic about vocabulary: if a foreign word does the job, it is adopted.

The result is a vocabulary of extraordinary range. English speakers eat chocolate (Nahuatl), drink coffee (Arabic/Turkish) or tea (Chinese), wear pyjamas (Hindi/Persian) in bungalows (Hindi), cook ketchup (Chinese) for their barbecue (Taíno), and describe dangerous situations as “running amok” (Malay). Almost none of these speakers know the origins of the words they are using — which is itself evidence of how completely foreign vocabulary has been absorbed into English.

The Americas: The First Great Vocabulary Harvest (1492–1600)

When Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, he encountered not one but dozens of language communities, each with vocabularies for plants, animals, and concepts unknown to Europeans. The words that entered European languages through this first contact were selected by usefulness: names for plants and animals that had no European equivalent, names for phenomena that had no European counterpart.

From the Taíno people of the Caribbean: “canoe” (their word for their distinctive boat), “hurricane” (from “huracan,” their word for the violent storms of the region), “hammock” (from “hamaca,” the sleeping net), “barbecue” (from “barabicu,” a wooden framework for cooking meat over fire), “tobacco” (from “tabaco,” the plant or the pipe). These words entered English through Spanish, often within decades of Columbus’s first voyage.

From Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, came the vocabulary of the new foods that would transform European eating permanently: “chocolate” (from “xocolatl”), “tomato” (from “tomatl”), “avocado” (from “ahuacatl”), “chilli” (from “chilli”), “cacao,” “guacamole,” “tequila.” Nahuatl food vocabulary entered English via Spanish — Mexico was a Spanish colony, and Spanish mediated the transfer of Aztec vocabulary to the rest of Europe.

Asia Through the East India Company (1600–1858)

The founding of the East India Company in 1600 was one of the most productive events in the history of the English vocabulary. The Company’s trading posts across India, Southeast Asia, and China brought English-speaking merchants into prolonged contact with the most linguistically diverse region on earth. Over the next 250 years, a steady stream of Asian vocabulary entered English through this commercial channel.

From Hindi and Urdu (through the British Raj that followed the Company’s rule): “bungalow,” “shampoo,” “pyjamas,” “jungle,” “loot,” “thug,” “dungarees,” “bandana,” “cashmere,” “cot” (from “khat,” a light bed), “dinghy,” “khaki,” “jodhpurs,” “polo,” “avatar,” and hundreds more. The British soldiers, administrators, and planters who spent years in India absorbed vocabulary at every level of daily life — clothing, food, shelter, geography, social customs — and brought it back to England.

From Malay (through the spice trade of Southeast Asia): “amok,” “bamboo,” “compound” (an enclosed area — from “kampung,” village), “gong,” “ketchup” (from “ke-tsiap,” a fish sauce), “orangutan” (Malay “orang hutan,” person of the forest), and “rattan.” British and Dutch trading ships competed for the spice routes through the Strait of Malacca, and both languages absorbed Malay vocabulary through this contact.

The Complexity: Words That Travelled Through Multiple Languages

Many of the most interesting borrowings in this era did not travel directly from their source language to English. They passed through intermediaries — usually Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch, the other great trading powers — picking up modifications at each stage.

“Coffee” is a perfect example: from Yemeni Arabic “qahwa” → Ottoman Turkish “kahve” → Italian “caffè” or Dutch “koffie” → English “coffee.” The word travelled along the trade routes of the drink itself, acquiring a slightly different form at each stop. “Ketchup” is equally complex: from Fujian Chinese “ke-tsiap” (a fermented fish sauce) → Malay “kicap” (adopted by Malay traders) → Dutch or English sailors in Southeast Asia → England, where it was eventually combined with tomatoes (a Nahuatl word) to create the condiment we know today. The ketchup bottle on the table is a monument to 400 years of global trade.

The Legacy: An Indelibly Global Vocabulary

The vocabulary that trade and empire brought to English cannot be disentangled from the violence and exploitation of the systems that transported it. “Loot,” “thug,” and “slave” (from Slavic peoples taken in medieval raids) entered English because of military conquest and human bondage. The words are now neutral descriptors in the language, but their origins are not neutral. Etymology, in these cases, is a form of historical record.

What the borrowings also record is the extraordinary richness of the cultures that English encountered. The Aztecs had a highly developed food culture that produced chocolate and tomatoes — foods that transformed European agriculture and cooking permanently. The peoples of the Indian subcontinent had sophisticated systems of cloth-making (cashmere, dungaree, calico from Calicut), governance (dinghy, palanquin), and social life that English had to borrow words to describe. The Aboriginal Australians had precise names for animals Europe had never seen. In borrowing these words, English preserved, in miniature, something of the knowledge systems of the cultures it so often devastated.