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From shampoo to whiskey, where English found its words

© Kara VanDam

Echo, shampoo, window, balcony, hurricane, cruise, noodle, whiskey--all good English words, aren't they? Well, they are now, but they are only a few of the tens of thousands of words that English has borrowed from other languages. These are from French, Hindi, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, German, and Irish Gaelic, respectively. In fact, English has borrowed and generated so many words that many say it has the largest lexicon (vocabulary) of any language on the planet. Just how many words it has cannot be determined (are 'care', 'careless', and 'carelessness' to be counted as one word or three), but the range is from 500,000 (the number of entries in the Oxford English Dictionary) to well over a million. To be fair, no individual English speaker has a vocabulary of this size; depending on education and other factors, the individual range is 15,000-70,000. Yet it remains fascinating that English has gained most of its words by borrowing them from other languages. So let's explore the vocabulary of English.

Some English words have been around as long as English has, about 1500 years. These are our most commonly used words, like family terms (mother, father), animal names (horse, cow, dog), common verbs (eat, drink, think, sleep), and domestic terms (house, home, floor, ceiling). These words are considered 'inherited', meaning they have always been a part of English, though their history does not begin with English.

English descends from the Germanic subgroup of a language long dead, Indo-European, and many of our most common terms can be traced all the way back to it. Indo-European was a language spoken before 5000 BC. by a group of people living near the Black and Caspian Seas. Its speakers split up and migrated across Western and Eastern Europe, and into Russia, India, Iran and Western China. As the speakers moved apart, their language changed, developing into many different languages. These languages too are now long gone, but only because they developed into other languages. So linguists speak of subgroups of the Indo-European language family. These include the Germanic languages (German, Dutch, English, Norwegian, Icelandic, and others), the Balto-Slavic languages (Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Latvian, Lithuanian, to name a few), the Italic languages (Latin and its modern descendents: French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese, and Catalan--the Romance Languages), Greek, Albanian, Armenian, and the Indo-Iranian languages (Sanskrit and its descendent Hindi, and Modern Persian, spoken by a minority in Iran). As you can see, it's quite an extensive family! For more information on it, visit "Everything you ever wanted to know about

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