Loanwords: 30 Words English Stole From Other Languages

April 22, 2026 (updated July 2026) · By Jeremy Lemley / Lemley Tech

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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. Here are thirty of the best heists — and then, because this is Translation Mixer, we stuff a sentence full of them and watch machine translation tear it apart.

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.

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." Remember this one; it detonates spectacularly in the experiment below.
14. Doppelgänger — "double-goer," your sinister duplicate.
15. Angst — German dread, imported wholesale by psychoanalysts.

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.

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.

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 entered English through 1960s astronauts, of all people.

Each of these words crossed into English because it captured something English couldn't say. Which raises a question this site is uniquely equipped to answer: what happens when you send them back?

The Stress Test

Translation engines, it turns out, haven't forgotten that these words are foreign. Or rather, they remember too well — and sometimes not at all.

I wanted to test how machine translation handles a sentence stuffed with loanwords. The sentence I constructed is, admittedly, a little ridiculous:

"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: Google Translate's language detection occasionally gets confused by text heavy with French and German borrowings. Adding "In this sentence" at the start was enough to anchor it as English — which is itself a small illustration of the problem.

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Run 1: Luganda → Thai → Somali → Russian → Makassar

Original: 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.

Final: In this context, scientists have repeatedly criticized prominent chefs' proposals to organize meals outdoors, which, due to numerous unprofessional mistakes, did not succeed.

See Full Path

English → 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.

Luganda → Mu sentensi eno, omumanyi yawa okunenya okw'ekika kya cliché ku avant-garde chef's alfresco café smorgasbord, ekyali total fiasco olw'a blitzkrieg of maladroit faux pas.

Thai → ในประโยคนี้ นักวิชาการได้วิจารณ์อย่างซ้ำซากจำเจต่ออาหารบุฟเฟ่ต์กลางแจ้งของเชฟแนวหน้า ซึ่งกลายเป็นความล้มเหลวโดยสิ้นเชิงเนื่องจากความผิดพลาดที่ไร้ฝีมือมากมาย

Somali → Jumladan, aqoonyahannadu waxay si isdaba joog ah u dhaleeceeyeen cuntada bannaanka ee ay bixiyaan cunto kariyaha hormuudka ah, taasoo noqotay mid gebi ahaanba fashilantay sababo la xiriira khaladaad badan oo aan xirfad lahayn.

Russian → В этом контексте ученые неоднократно критиковали предложения ведущих шеф-поваров по организации обедов на открытом воздухе, которые из-за многочисленных непрофессиональных ошибок потерпели полный провал.

Makassar → Ri anne konteks, ilmuwan a'mole-molemi angkritik proposal koki terkemuka untu' a'atoro' kanre ri pantarang, ia, lanri jaina kasalang tenaya na profesional, anre' na'kulle sukku'.

English → In this context, scientists have repeatedly criticized prominent chefs' proposals to organize meals outdoors, which, due to numerous unprofessional mistakes, did not succeed.

The collapse happens almost entirely in the first hop. Luganda keeps most of the loanwords intact — cliché, avant-garde, café, smorgasbord, fiasco, blitzkrieg, faux pas all survive as recognizable fragments, essentially left untranslated because Luganda has no native equivalents. But Thai has no such patience. Facing a string of European borrowings it can't resolve, it reaches for the nearest functional equivalent: the connoisseur becomes นักวิชาการ (an academic or scholar), the smorgasbord becomes a buffet, the blitzkrieg of maladroit faux pas becomes simply "numerous unskilled mistakes." Everything colorful is replaced with something accurate but drab. By the time Russian gets it, it's already a straightforward account of a culinary criticism that didn't go well. The wit is gone. The vocabulary is gone. What remains is the skeleton of an event: some experts, some chefs, some outdoor meals, some failure.

"Scientists," though. That's a new character. The connoisseur took a long journey through five languages and came out a researcher.

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Run 2: Rundi → Kyrgyz → Maori → Corsican → Occitan

Original: 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.

Final: In this sentence, the modern scholar firmly rejected the claims of the ancient cook that war was dangerous because of witchcraft.

See Full Path

English → 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.

Rundi → Muri iyo nteruro, uwo muhinga mu vy'ubuhinga bwa none yatanze inyishu y'agahomerabunwa ku bijanye n'ivyo umutetsi w'imbere y'igihe yari afise, ivyo bikaba vyari biteye akaga kubera intambara y'ubupfumu.

Kyrgyz → Ошол сүйлөмдө заманбап окумуштуу байыркы ашпозчунун сыйкырчылык согушунан улам кооптуу болгон дооматтарына кыйратуучу жооп берген.

Maori → I roto i taua rerenga kōrero, i tino whakahē te mataotao o ēnei rā i ngā kereme a te tunu kai onamata i mea ai ia he morearea te pakanga nā te makutu.

Corsican → In quella frase, u studiosu mudernu hà ricusatu fermamente l'affermazioni di u cuocu anticu chì a guerra era periculosa per via di a stregoneria.

Occitan → Dins aquela frasa, l'erudit modèrne refusèt fermament las afirmacions de l'ancian cosinièr que la guèrra èra perilhosa a causa de la bruèissaria.

English → In this sentence, the modern scholar firmly rejected the claims of the ancient cook that war was dangerous because of witchcraft.

This is a different kind of failure — and a more spectacular one. Where the first run produced something bland and forgettable, this one produced something that sounds like a historical drama.

The divergence starts in Rundi. Lacking equivalents for most of the loanwords, the translator does something creative: avant-garde becomes "modern" (reasonable), and blitzkrieg — a German word literally meaning "lightning war" — gets translated as intambara, which simply means "war." The metaphor collapses into the literal. By the time Kyrgyz gets it, the sentence is about a modern scholar responding to an ancient cook's claims about a dangerous war involving witchcraft, and the remaining languages — Maori, Corsican, Occitan — all faithfully carry that story forward.

Faux pas disappearing into witchcraft is the highlight. A French phrase meaning a social misstep, filtered through a language that has no frame for it, became something genuinely supernatural. It's the most extreme semantic drift in any of these runs, and it happened because blitzkrieg had a literal meaning that reasserted itself the moment the chain hit a language without the cultural context to treat it as a figure of speech.

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Three More Quick Runs

The same sentence, routed through different language combinations, kept finding new ways to disintegrate.

English → Hebrew → Basque → Haitian Creole → Amharic → Dinka → English

Original: 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.

Final: In the episode, the expert reveals the absurdity of a chef's dinner at an outdoor kitchen, which fails miserably due to a premature conversation about what was expected to pass.

The faux pas — meaning something expected to pass social muster but failing — gets pulled apart by the Haitian Creole hop, with "pass" surviving as a literal concept. By Dinka, the blitzkrieg has become a "premature conversation." The event drifted from a culinary disaster to something more like an awkward dinner party scene.

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English → Sepedi → Dzongkha → Kurdish (Kurmanji) → Albanian → Tetum → English

Original: 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.

Final: Experts have criticized the chef's variety of eating out, deeming him the victim of a careless error.

The most compressed result of the lot. Six languages reduced a baroque sentence to two clauses. The smorgasbord became "variety of eating out" — not wrong, exactly, just very flat. The entire blitzkrieg of maladroit faux pas became "a careless error." Singular. The chain stripped everything down to the quietest possible version of the story: someone got criticized, someone made a mistake.

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English → Shona → Sango → Bashkir → Finnish → English

Original: 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.

Final: In this context, the scientist refers to the avant-garde chef's coffee delicacies, which are a great riot due to his mental insecurity.

Two things worth noting. First, café survived all the way to the end — but transformed. Rather than an outdoor café, it became "coffee delicacies," the food and drink detached from the setting. Second, fiasco — originally Italian theatrical slang for a failed performance — became "a great riot," which is nearly the opposite of failure. And maladroit faux pas became "mental insecurity," which is arguably a more psychologically sophisticated reading than the original intended.

The avant-garde survived intact through Shona, Sango, Bashkir, and Finnish, emerging unchanged in the final English output. Five languages, none of them European, and the French phrase came through untouched. Sometimes the chain preserves exactly the wrong thing.

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What Loanwords Reveal

The sentence was designed as a stress test, and it failed in every direction at once — which is the point.

Loanwords are borrowed precisely because one language recognizes that another has captured something it hasn't. Schadenfreude. Zeitgeist. Déjà vu. Smorgasbord. These words crossed borders because they were useful, because there was no clean equivalent on the other side.

That same uniqueness is what makes them treacherous in translation. A translator encountering blitzkrieg in a culinary context has to decide: is this a metaphor or a literal reference to war? Most humans would read it as a metaphor without thinking. The machine has to guess — and when it guesses wrong, a buffet review becomes a historical account of wartime witchcraft.

The connoisseur became a scientist, then a scholar, then an expert, then a researcher. The smorgasbord became a buffet, then outdoor dining, then coffee delicacies. The faux pas became an error, then a conversation, then a supernatural event. Every language in every chain was doing its job correctly. The problem wasn't the translation. The problem was that the words themselves carried too much history for any single chain of machines to untangle.

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Want to run your own loanword experiment? The stress-test sentence is loaded and ready — pick five languages and hit mix → The more culturally loaded your vocabulary, the more surprising the result. Or see what the same treatment does to slang, old and new, find out which borrowed words are indestructible and which die at hop eight, see how 52 languages build the word "gray", or read Why Machine Translation Humor Works for the theory behind why these failures are so entertaining, and What's the Hardest Language to Translate? for the same method applied to whole languages.