What words has English borrowed from other languages since 2000?

“Emoji” means “picture character” (e = picture, moji = character) in Japanese. It’s not derived from “emotion” or “emoticon,” if that’s what you’re thinking. (Though I’m sure the purely coincidental similarity between “emoji” and “emoticon” contributed to the widespread use of “emoji”.)

p.s. I suppose anime is an example of a foreign word derived from an English word (animation), which was subsequently borrowed back into English.

I submit the word only used in India

Prepone.

Opposite of postpone.

Not in the dictionary but after rampant usage in India is now borrowed officially by OED

This kind of borrowing back and forth is fairly common for English and French.

What are some examples?

“Country dance” -> “contredanse” -> “contra dance”

“Le parc” -> “park/parking” -> “le parking”

I dunno that I’d call it “fairly common”, though, I had to cudgel my brains with my braincudgel for quite a while before coming up with those.

Oh, and Old French “chalenge” -> Eng. “challenge” -> modern business jargon French “le challenge”.

ETA: wait wait there’s more! Fr. “jean” as in “twilled cloth from Genoa” -> Eng. “jeans” -> Fr. “jean” as in jeans.

ETAgain: And if you’ll stretch a point with your pointstretcher, Eng. “gentleman” appears to have been coined on the model of Fr. “gentilhomme” but was later borrowed back into French as an English loanword.

I guess “fairly common” is maybe not that far off after all.

– okay, one more: how about Fr. “coquetier” “eggcup”, thought to be the origin of Eng. “cocktail”, whence Fr. “le cocktail”?

Wow, that’s cool–thanks!

There are places in California that have “borrowed” the entire Spanish language … although “mugging” is maybe a better and more colorful metaphor.

French words reborrowed from English:

Here’s a list of French words borrowed from English. I’ll assume it’s correct. Just from the first few pages, I see basket, camping, challenge, charter, consumérisme, dance, and distancer. I probably missed some.

Some more English-Japanese-English borrowings (used mainly in dork circles):

Cosplay - “costume play”, dressing up as a favorite pop-culture character for an event
Boys love / Girls love - genres of m/m and f/f romance fiction, respectively
mook - magazine/book hybrid (usually a publication with contents formatted like a magazine but printed as a perfect-bound softcover book, and with no pull date)

And then there are interesting hybrids like “panko”, a type of coarse breadcrumb, made of “pan” (Portuguese for bread) + “ko” (child), which is now nativizing in English due to cooking shows, etc (there are several American brands of panko available in my local supermarket).

Hey! I mentioned that one. :slight_smile: What about other Indian English words like “timepass” or “freeship” or whatnot? Or are you saying that “prepone” is now being used outside India? I guess I’ve only heard it in Indian English, but it’s kind of obvious what it means to me, so I probably would not have noticed.

I heard it sporadically. I had a professor in central California, circa 1990, who was obviously from Hawaii. When he wanted us to pass our papers to the center aisle, he said “Wiki-wiki!”. He also ended classes by saying Konichi Wa.

When did we pick up umami?

That “ko” means powder, not child. (Same sound, different kanji.) Good example though.

I’m not sure such examples count because it’s still English on both sides? I mean, we don’t really speak of, say, Americanisms in British English (or vice versa) being “loanwords”. This is the same sort of thing.

Without being prepared to dispute the issue of when a different dialect counts as a different language, I would still maintain that since Indian English and British (or American) English are almost entirely mutually comprehensible, “prepone” doesn’t seem to qualify as a “loanword”, IMO.

Looks like it shows up sporadically, according to google n-gram viewer, until about 1984 where it experiences a sudden jump in popularity, but around 2000 it experiences even another popularity surge. My recollection of it is that I wasn’t aware of the word until that second surge, but looking through Google books, it certainly was being used as it is today well before that.

Oh, I agree. If you look back to post 17, my last sentence says that I just consider it a “regional [English] dialect word.” The question about “mani-pedi” kind of shifted to whether it was not, as I assume, Philippine English, but possibly a borrowing into a local language (like Tagalog) and then a reborrowing back into English.

“Pan” is Spanish for bread. Portuguese for bread is “pão.”