Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English

As an island nation with a long and chequered history of invasion, colonisation and immigration, being told that our mother tongue is, in fact, cobbled together from many other languages, should be far from a surprise. Loanwords – words borrowed directly from a donor language – in fact “make up a huge proportion of the words in any large dictionary of English”, according to Philip Durkin, a specialist in etymology and Deputy Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Because the Roman Conquest of Britain in the first century CE, the English language has been shaped by Latin, French,...