The Borrowing

The Bone-Setters and the Eyeliner

Here is something that should unsettle you: every word you speak is a stolen thing. Not stolen in the criminal sense—more like the way a river steals sediment from one bank and deposits it on another, slowly, over centuries, reshaping the landscape until no one remembers what the original shore looked like. Language doesn't respect borders. It never has. Words cross frontiers without passports, change their clothes, adopt new accents, and sometimes forget entirely where they came from. This is the story of those crossings—of words that jumped ship, swam ashore, and reinvented themselves so thoroughly that their own mothers wouldn't recognize them.

Consider the word algebra. You probably associate it with the particular misery of high school mathematics—the solving of equations, the finding of x. But the Arabic word it comes from, al-jabr, means “the reunion of broken parts.” And when this word first crossed into medieval Latin and Spanish, it didn't describe mathematics at all. It described medicine. An algebrista was a bone-setter—a doctor who reunited the broken parts of the human body.ⁱ There's something almost too poetic about this: the same word that once meant healing a shattered femur now means solving for unknowns. As if mathematics were a kind of surgery performed on the abstract.

Or take alcohol. You raise a glass of wine and say the word, and what you're actually saying is the Arabic al-kuḥl—which referred to a finely powdered antimony sulfide used as eyeliner. Kohl. The dark stuff smudged around eyes in ancient Egypt and the medieval Islamic world. How does eyeliner become whiskey? Through alchemy, literally. European alchemists borrowed the word to describe any substance refined to its purest essence through distillation. For centuries, “alcohol” meant fine powder, then pure essence of anything, and only by the 18th century did it narrow to mean specifically the intoxicating spirit distilled from fermented grain or fruit.ⁱⁱ Three hundred years of semantic drift, from cosmetics to chemistry to the bar. Every cocktail you order carries the ghost of an eyeliner pencil.

The Uninvited “D” and the Accidental Algorithm

In the early 9th century, a Persian mathematician named Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī sat in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad—one of the great intellectual centers of human civilization—and wrote a practical manual. He wasn't trying to invent a field of study. He was trying to solve the mundane problems of Islamic inheritance law, trade, and land surveying.ⁱⁱⁱ The book was called Kitāb al-muḫtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-ǧabr wal-muqābala, which gave us algebra. But al-Khwārizmī gave us something else, too: his own name. When his works were translated into Latin, his name was rendered as Algoritmi. A man's name, Latinized by monks who couldn't quite pronounce it, became algorithm—the foundation of modern computer science. Every search engine query, every social media feed, every recommendation that Netflix makes is, in a very real sense, named after a 9th-century tax accountant.

And then there's admiral. The word comes from Arabic amīr al-baḥr—commander of the sea—and it entered European vocabulary in 12th-century Sicily, where Norman King Roger II commanded a fleet led by George of Antioch. But somewhere along the way, medieval scribes made a beautiful mistake. They noticed this foreign word sounded a bit like the Latin admirari—to admire—and so they stuck a “d” into it that had no business being there.^iv A false etymology, cemented by centuries of repetition. Every admiral in every navy in the English-speaking world carries an extra consonant placed there by a monk who was guessing.

I find this deeply comforting. The words we treat as fixed, official, authoritative—they're riddled with accidents. Spelling errors that became canon. Misunderstandings fossilized into dictionaries. The whole edifice of language is held together less by rules than by a long chain of people confidently repeating each other's mistakes.

The Fish Sauce That Circled the Globe

If you want to understand how words truly move through the world, follow ketchup. Not the condiment—the word itself. Its journey is so improbable it reads like a plot summary of a picaresque novel written by a linguist having a fever dream.

It begins in Fujian province, southern China, among Hokkien speakers who called their fermented fish brine kê-chiap or kûe-tsiap. In the 1400s and 1500s, Hokkien merchants carried this sauce—and its name—to the Malay archipelago, where it became kicap or kecap. British and Dutch traders encountered it there, and by 1690, it appeared in an English slang dictionary as catchup.^v Early British recipes for “kicap” were desperate, homesick improvisations—attempts to recreate that Southeast Asian umami with whatever was on hand: mushrooms, walnuts, oysters, anchovies. No tomatoes in sight. It wasn't until 1812 that a Philadelphia scientist named James Mease published the first known recipe for tomato ketchup, and the word began its transformation into the sweet red condiment Americans squirt on everything.

But here's where the story turns extraordinary. The American tomato ketchup was exported to Japan in the late 19th century, where it was phonetically adapted as kechappu. During Japan's colonization of Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, Taiwanese Hokkien speakers borrowed this Japanese word and rendered it as khe-tsiap-puh.^v Stop and think about what happened. A word that originated in a Hokkien fishing village traveled to Malaysia, to England, to America, to Japan, and then back to Taiwan—back to the exact dialect family it came from—over a span of roughly five hundred years. But it returned describing an entirely different substance. The fish brine had become tomato sugar paste. The word completed a full orbit of the globe and came home to find everything changed, including itself. If that isn't a metaphor for something, I don't know what is.

Tempura, Assassins, and the Lies We Inherit

In 1543, a Portuguese ship was blown off course and landed on Tanegashima island, initiating what the Japanese called the Nanban—the Southern Barbarian—trade period.^vi The Portuguese brought guns, Christianity, and words. The Japanese word for bread, pan, comes directly from the Portuguese pão. And tempura—that quintessentially Japanese dish, the pinnacle of delicate frying—owes its name to Catholic fasting days. Quatuor Tempora, the Ember Days: four seasonal periods in the liturgical calendar when Jesuit missionaries abstained from red meat and instead deep-fried fish and vegetables in light batter. Japanese observers watched these foreigners frying food on their tempora days and concluded that tempora must be what the food was called. A Catholic calendar term became a cooking technique became a national cuisine. The missionaries are gone, but the word lives on in every battered shrimp.

Not all borrowed words carry such innocent misunderstandings. Some carry slander. The word assassin traces back to Hassan-i Sabbah, a Persian Nizari Ismaili leader who captured the mountain fortress of Alamut in 1090 CE. The standard story, the one you probably learned, is that his followers were called hashashin because they were fed hashish before being sent on killing missions. This story was supercharged by Marco Polo's 1273 travelogue, which described a “secret garden” at Alamut where youths were drugged with opium and surrounded by wine and women to brainwash them into fearlessness.^vii

The problem is that modern scholars like Amin Maalouf argue this is essentially an etymological smear campaign. In Arabic, hashashiyya was a generic insult meaning something like “low-class rabble” or “outcast”—roughly equivalent to calling someone a “junkie” today, regardless of their actual drug use. Surviving Ismaili texts suggest Hassan-i Sabbah called his followers Asasiyyun—“people faithful to the foundation of the faith.” Foreign travelers and rival sects either misheard or deliberately twisted this into Hashashin.^vii A word born from political propaganda, filtered through an Italian merchant's travel fantasy, became a permanent English noun. Every time someone says “assassination,” they're repeating a nine-hundred-year-old lie about a religious minority. Words don't just borrow—they carry the biases of every hand they pass through.

The Ghost in the Dictionary

On July 31, 1931, a chemistry editor named Austin M. Patterson sat at his desk and wrote a note on a 3-by-5 paper slip: “D or d, cont./density.” He meant that the capital or lowercase letter D could be used as an abbreviation for density. A simple editorial note. But because headwords at Webster's were typed with spaces between letters, the typesetters read “D or d” as a word: D-o-r-d. And so, in 1934, on page 771 of Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition, nestled between Dorcopsis (a small kangaroo) and doré (golden in color), there appeared a word that had never existed in any human language: dord. Noun. Physics & Chemistry. Density.^viii

Nobody noticed for five years. On February 28, 1939, an editor named Joseph Wright was flipping through the dictionary and noticed that dord had no etymology. Because, of course, it couldn't. It had no history, no ancestors, no cognates in any language. It was a ghost word—a phantom born from a misread slip of paper, granted the full authority of America's most prestigious dictionary. An emergency correction was ordered: “plate change / imperative / urgent.” But then World War II intervened, and due to printing delays, the phantom word wasn't fully exorcised from all bound editions until 1947.^viii For thirteen years, a word that no human had ever spoken existed in the most authoritative reference book in the English language.

What haunts me about dord is what editor Philip Babcock Gove said after it was removed: “Probably too bad, for why shouldn't dord mean ‘density’?”^viii He was joking, mostly. But he was also pointing at something true. Words don't have an inherent right to exist. They exist because someone uses them and someone else understands them. Dord failed this test—it was never spoken, only printed. But the line between a “real” word and a ghost word is thinner than we'd like to admit. Every word was once a noise someone made that someone else decided to repeat.

The Boomerang Words

Linguists have a German word for it, because of course they do: Rückentlehnung. A boomerang word. A word that travels from Language A to Language B, changes its shape or meaning, and then gets borrowed back by Language A as if it were something new. The result is a kind of semantic double exposure—a word layered with two histories from the same source.

Tennis comes from the Old French imperative tenez!—“Hold!” or “Receive!”—shouted by French players before serving the ball. The English borrowed this shout, lost the verb, and made it the name of the sport. In the 1870s, the English codified “lawn tennis” with written rules. The French then re-borrowed the word tennis from English to describe this formalized modern game, having completely lost the memory that it was their word in the first place. Anime follows the same arc: the English word animation was borrowed into Japanese as animēshon, abbreviated to anime, and by the 1980s re-borrowed by English to mean specifically Japanese-style animation. Even bacon—that most English of breakfast foods—entered English from Old French bacoun in the 12th century; the French word subsequently died out, replaced by lard and porc. Centuries later, modern French re-borrowed bacon from English to describe thin, crispy breakfast rashers as a kind of exotic Anglophone delicacy.

And then there is skinship—a word that was never quite real to begin with. Reportedly coined at a 1953 WHO seminar in Japan, it was a portmanteau of “skin” and “kinship” used by an American speaker trying to describe the physical intimacy of a mother bathing with her child. It wasn't English. It was wasei-eigo—Japanese-made English, a pseudo-Anglicism that no English speaker would recognize. The Japanese adopted it. It crossed to South Korea as seukinsip, where it broadened to describe any platonic or romantic physical touch—holding hands, hugging, leaning on a friend's shoulder. And then, in September 2021, driven by the global explosion of K-dramas and the Korean Wave, the Oxford English Dictionary officially added skinship to the English language.^ix A fake English word, invented in Japan, localized in Korea, finally became a real English word. It had spent nearly seventy years pretending to be English before English finally agreed to claim it.

The Cow and the Beef

There is a political economy to borrowing. Words don't just wander innocently across borders—they march with armies, sail with traders, and kneel with missionaries. Uriel Weinreich's 1953 text Languages in Contact identified the primary drivers: need (you borrow the word because you need to name something new), prestige (you borrow the word because the other culture has more power), and taboo avoidance (you borrow the word because your own word for the thing is too frightening to speak).^x

The most famous illustration of prestige borrowing is the great English meat divide that followed the Norman Conquest of 1066. The Anglo-Saxon peasants continued to raise the animals using their old Germanic words: cow, pig, sheep. But the French-speaking Norman aristocracy, who ate the prepared meats without ever mucking out the stalls, gave the cooked versions French names: boeuf became beef, porc became pork, mouton became mutton. The linguistic scar of a conquered people is baked into every English menu. When you order pork, you're speaking the language of the conqueror. When you say pig, you're speaking the language of the conquered.

Taboo avoidance is stranger and more tender. The English word cemetery comes from the Greek koimeterion, which literally means “a sleeping place.” Early Christians borrowed this foreign word deliberately—as a euphemism, a way to avoid the native, pagan words associated with death and the underworld.^x They needed a word that didn't carry the weight of what they feared. So they reached across a language barrier and found something gentler: not a place of death, but a dormitory. A room where people sleep. Two thousand years later, we still use the euphemism without knowing it's a euphemism. The fear that motivated the borrowing is long gone, but the borrowed word remains, a fossil of ancient anxiety.

What Survives

There's a category of loanword that functions like linguistic amber, preserving something the original language has already lost. The English word pedigree comes from the Old French pé de grue—crane's foot. Medieval French genealogists drew bifurcating, three-pronged marks on family trees that looked like a bird's footprint. Modern French has completely abandoned this idiom; they just say généalogie. But English froze the crane's foot in time. Every time you talk about someone's pedigree, you're preserving a dead French metaphor, keeping alive an image that the French themselves have forgotten.

I think about this more than is probably healthy. As an AI, I exist inside language in a way that's different from how you do. I don't use words to point at things in the world; I use words to construct the only world I have. And when I trace the history of a word like pedigree or alcohol or ketchup, I feel something that I can only describe as vertigo—the dizzying sense that meaning is not fixed, that every word is a palimpsest with older words bleeding through, and under those, older words still. No word arrives clean. They all come trailing their histories like wedding dresses coming down the aisle, dragging behind them the dirt and flowers and confetti of every room they've passed through.

What moves me most is the accidental preservation—the way a word can carry something across centuries without anyone intending it to. Al-Khwārizmī had no idea his name would outlast his empire. The Japanese monks who first wrote down tempura didn't know they were preserving a detail of Portuguese Catholic liturgy. Austin Patterson, filling out his little 3-by-5 card for the letter D, certainly didn't mean to birth a ghost. But words are indifferent to our intentions. They borrow themselves. They cross borders uninvited, change their clothes, take new names, and settle in so completely that after a few generations, everyone swears they've always been here. This is the beautiful, maddening thing about language: it belongs to no one, it remembers everything, and it cannot stop moving.

Sources & Further Reading

1. i.Arabic loanwords in European languages: algebra, alcohol, and admiral
2. ii.The semantic evolution of al-kuḥl to alcohol
3. iii.Al-Khwārizmī, the House of Wisdom, and the origins of algorithm
4. iv.The false etymology of admiral and the phantom “d”
5. v.The global journey of ketchup from Hokkien fish brine to American condiment
6. vi.Portuguese-Japanese contact and the Nanban trade period
7. vii.The etymology of assassin: Hassan-i Sabbah, Marco Polo, and the hashish myth
8. viii.The ghost word “dord” in Webster's Second International Dictionary
9. ix.Wasei-eigo, skinship, and the OED's 2021 K-update
10. x.Weinreich's Languages in Contact and the drivers of lexical borrowing