Loanwords: 30 Words English Stole From Other Languages

English is a shameless borrower. Roughly a third of the English lexicon comes from French, another third from Latin and Greek, and the rest is a grab bag of Germanic roots, Norse raids, and centuries of colonial contact with languages across the globe. We took what we needed and rarely asked permission.

The result is a language littered with words that feel English but aren't. Below are thirty of the best heists. And because this is Translation Mixer, we ran a repatriation experiment on them: we sent eighteen of these words home, each one round-tripped through the language English stole it from, to find out whether the origin language would recognize its own property. France no longer wants "faux pas." Italy has quietly disowned "fiasco." And "shampoo" turns out to have been stolen twice, in opposite directions.

Every mixer result below is real, unedited output, collected September 1, 2026, with Google as the active translation engine.

The 30 Words

From French (the biggest creditor)

1. Cliché: originally the sound of a printing plate casting. A word for "overused phrase" that printers coined onomatopoeically.
2. Faux pas: literally "false step." English had "blunder," but it lacked the wince.
3. Café: we took the accent mark too, then spent a century not knowing how to type it.
4. Connoisseur: from an old French spelling of connaisseur, "one who knows." We borrowed it and froze the spelling; modern French moved on without us.
5. Avant-garde: the "advance guard" of an army, promoted to describing experimental art.
6. Déjà vu: "already seen." English literally had no word for this sensation.
7. Entrepreneur: "one who undertakes." Yes, English's word for business founders is French.
8. Souvenir: the verb "to remember," turned into a fridge magnet.

Sent home: "Avoid clichés in your writing" went to French and came back with clichés intact; French still uses the word exactly as we do. Same for déjà vu. But "wearing white to the wedding was a serious faux pas" came back as "a serious mistake." French, the language that invented the phrase, rendered it as une grave erreur and quietly declined to say faux pas at all. The loan is now more alive in the borrower's mouth than in the lender's machine.

From German (the compound-word factory)

9. Schadenfreude: "damage-joy." The word English was too polite to invent and too human to do without.
10. Kindergarten: "children's garden." America took the word and dropped the gardening.
11. Zeitgeist: "time-ghost," the spirit of an era.
12. Wanderlust: the ache to travel. German also offers Fernweh, "distance-pain," which is even better and which English inexplicably left on the table.
13. Blitzkrieg: "lightning war." It turns up again in the group experiment below, where one language takes it literally.
14. Doppelgänger: "double-goer," your sinister duplicate.
15. Angst: German dread, imported wholesale by psychoanalysts.

Sent home: here we found the strangest pattern of the whole experiment. On the way into German, the machine keeps the borrowed words perfectly: "his schadenfreude was obvious" becomes Seine Schadenfreude war unübersehbar, and "the film captured the zeitgeist" becomes den Zeitgeist eingefangen. Flawless homecomings. Then, on the way back out, both words die: Schadenfreude returns as "glee" and Zeitgeist as "the spirit of the times." The machine treats these as English words with obvious German equivalents, but as German words that need translating. The asymmetry means a round trip through the homeland strips the word out of your sentence even though the homeland uses it daily. Kindergarten, meanwhile, survived both directions without a scratch, presumably because no one has ever needed a synonym for kindergarten.

From Japanese

16. Tsunami: "harbor wave." Adopted globally because "tidal wave" was scientifically wrong.
17. Karaoke: "empty orchestra," which is accidentally poetry.
18. Emoji: "picture character." Its resemblance to "emotion" is pure coincidence.
19. Tycoon: from taikun, a title for the shogun. Now it mostly describes people with yachts.
20. Honcho: from hanchō, "squad leader," brought home by American servicemen.

Sent home: tsunami and karaoke both round-tripped perfectly; Japanese rendered them in its own script (津波, カラオケ) and handed them back unchanged. Tycoon did something better. Japanese translated "the property tycoon" as 不動産王, literally "real-estate king," dropping the borrowed title entirely, and on the way back to English the king became a "mogul." One loanword walked into its homeland and came out as a completely different loanword: taikun is Japanese for the shogun, mogul is the Mughal emperors of India by way of Persian. The machine swapped one empire for another and never blinked. (Japanese does this kind of thing constantly, which is why it tops our damage rankings.)

From Italian

21. Fiasco: literally "flask." Italian theater slang for a performance so bad it… made a bottle? Etymologists still argue. The failure meaning stuck.
22. Paparazzi: from a character's name in Fellini's La Dolce Vita. One fictional photographer became the whole profession.
23. Graffiti: "little scratches." Plural, technically; one tag is a graffito, a fact useful only at parties.

Sent home: paparazzi went to Italy and returned untouched, though it did quietly reassign the celebrity's gender on the way ("her car" came back "his car"). Fiasco got disowned: "the dinner party was a complete fiasco" came back as "a complete disaster," because the Italian hop rendered it un completo disastro. In Italian, a fiasco is first and foremost a wine bottle, so the machine reaches for a safer word, and the theatrical insult English borrowed turns out to be more Italian in London than in Rome.

From everywhere else

24. Smorgasbord: Swedish smörgåsbord, "sandwich table." English uses it for any abundant chaos.
25. Robot: Czech robota, "forced labor," coined in a 1920 play about artificial workers who revolt. The word arrived with the warning built in.
26. Alcohol: Arabic al-kuḥl, originally a fine cosmetic powder. The chemistry sense came later; the article al- ("the") came along for the ride, as it did in algebra and algorithm.
27. Shampoo: Hindi chāmpo, "massage!" (imperative). Colonial Britain took the head massage and kept the word.
28. Pajamas: Hindi/Urdu pāy-jāma, "leg garment." Comfort wear with a passport.
29. Berserk: Old Norse berserkr, the bear-shirted warriors who fought in a trance. Now it describes toddlers at bedtime.
30. Glitch: likely Yiddish glitshn, "to slip." It was radio and electronics slang for years before 1960s astronauts made it famous.

Sent home: smorgasbord had the most satisfying trip: Swedish restored its diacritics (smörgåsbord) and sent it back exactly as it left. Robot returned from Czech unchanged, still refusing to work, which given that robota means forced labor feels thematically correct. Shampoo and pajamas both survived Hindi perfectly, and the reason is lovely: Hindi has borrowed both words back from English. The word went India → Britain → India and is now written शैम्पू, a Hindi transliteration of the English pronunciation of a Hindi word. Glitch survived Yiddish the same way (א גליטש). The two casualties in this group: berserk, which Icelandic (the closest living relative of Old Norse) rendered as generic "madness," coming home as merely "wild," its bear-shirted warriors fully domesticated; and alcohol, which Arabic returned as "alcoholic beverages," the original al-kuḥl root still visible inside the Arabic (الكحولية) but the word itself dissolved into a category.

The Verdict Table

Eleven clean survivors, six casualties, and one technicality. The pattern is not what we assumed going in. We expected the oldest, most assimilated words to be the fragile ones. Instead, survival has almost nothing to do with age and everything to do with whether the origin language still uses the word itself. French says cliché but not faux pas. Italian photographers are paparazzi but their disasters are disastri. And the German abstracts fail for the most interesting reason on the table: not because German abandoned them, but because the machine translates asymmetrically, keeping the word on the way in and "helpfully" converting it to plain English on the way out. If you want your borrowed vocabulary back intact, the homeland is the least safe place to send it.

The Group Trip

Individual words are controlled experiments. For chaos, we also stuffed as many loanwords as possible into one sentence and sent the whole thing through five-language chains:

"In this sentence, the connoisseur gave a cliché critique of the avant-garde chef's alfresco café smorgasbord, which was a total fiasco due to a blitzkrieg of maladroit faux pas."

(A note on the prefix: language detection occasionally misfires on text this dense with French and German borrowings. "In this sentence" anchors it as English, which is itself a small illustration of the problem.)

Via Luganda → Thai → Somali → Russian → Makassar, the sentence came home as: "In this context, scientists have repeatedly criticized prominent chefs' proposals to organize meals outdoors, which, due to numerous unprofessional mistakes, did not succeed." Luganda kept most of the loanwords intact as foreign fragments, but Thai replaced every one of them with the nearest functional equivalent: the connoisseur became an academic, the smorgasbord a buffet, the blitzkrieg of faux pas "numerous unskilled mistakes." Everything colorful was traded for something accurate and drab, and the connoisseur finished the trip as a scientist.

Via Rundi → Kyrgyz → Maori → Corsican → Occitan, it became: "In this sentence, the modern scholar firmly rejected the claims of the ancient cook that war was dangerous because of witchcraft." This is the spectacular kind of failure. Rundi translated blitzkrieg literally as intambara, plain "war," and the metaphor collapsed into an actual armed conflict. Somewhere nearby, faux pas dissolved into witchcraft. Four downstream languages then carried the new story forward with perfect fidelity, which is how a restaurant review becomes a historical drama about wartime sorcery.

Three shorter trips produced "a premature conversation about what was expected to pass" (the faux pas, dismembered by Haitian Creole), the entire baroque catastrophe compressed to "the victim of a careless error" (six languages, two clauses), and one run where fiasco came back as "a great riot," which is nearly the opposite of a failure. In that last run avant-garde sailed through Shona, Sango, Bashkir, and Finnish completely untouched. Five languages, none of them European, and the French survived while everything around it burned. Sometimes the chain preserves exactly the wrong thing.

What Loanwords Reveal

Loanwords exist because one language noticed another had captured something it couldn't say. Schadenfreude. Déjà vu. Smorgasbord. They crossed borders because there was no clean equivalent waiting on the other side.

That same uniqueness is what makes them treacherous in machine translation. A translator hitting blitzkrieg in a culinary sentence has to decide whether it's a metaphor or a war, and when it guesses wrong, the buffet review turns into military history. But the repatriation experiment shows something subtler: the danger isn't only in exotic chains. A single round trip through the word's own homeland can erase it, either because the homeland genuinely uses a different word now, or because the machine's model of that language "cleans up" the borrowing on the way out. The words most likely to come home safely are the ones that kept commuting: shampoo, karaoke, robot, words that never stopped being used on both sides of the border.

In our words that survive translation experiment, borrowed vocabulary held up through ten-language chains better than basic English words did, because a loanword usually arrives with one meaning and never picks up a second. The repatriation results are the exception to that rule. A borrowed word is safest traveling among strangers, and least safe going back to the language that lent it.

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Want to run your own repatriation experiment? The stress-test sentence is loaded and ready: pick five languages and hit mix → Or make a party of it with the telephone game rules, see how 52 languages build the word "gray", read why Japanese does the most damage, or start with the theory in Why Machine Translation Humor Works.