September 2003 newsletter
Exotic words in the OED
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Sarah Ogilvie, Senior Assistant Editor, Oxford English Dictionary, and Joanna Tulloch, Associate Editor, Oxford English Dictionary
As you sit on the sofa in your pyjamas stirring sugar into your coffee or cocoa, puzzling over the Scrabble board and searching through your mind for one of those useful exotic words like qi, mu, or xebec, do you ever stop to wonder where they originated? And does it ever occur to you that for some of us this isn't just a game, but the stuff of our working day?
We are a small team of people at the OED, backed up by a large number of specialist language consultants throughout the world, who work on words which have come into English directly or indirectly from outside the core area of Germanic, Romance, Classical, and Celtic languages. We call ourselves the non-European group because most of the words we edit come from the indigenous languages of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific, but we also cover some European languages such as Russian, Yiddish, and Romani.
Foreign words enter English either directly from their source language or via other European languages. The most common route into English for early exotic words was via explorers and missionaries who spoke Germanic or Romance languages. Most of these words have been part of our language for so long now that we forget they were once from exotic languages. For example, the word chocolate came from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, in 1604 via the famous Spanish missionary José de Acosta. Sugar (1299) and magazine (1583) came from Arabic via Romance languages, and coffee (1598) came from Arabic via Germanic languages. The word potato came from Haitian and was first introduced into English via the Spanish of Columbus in 1492. Haitian gave us other words such as canoe (1555) and barbecue, which was brought directly into English by the British explorer William Dampier in 1697.
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