Visual Thesaurus Online Edition: "Old Europe

Nearly all languages today have leaky borders: globalization has led to the phenomenon of words - whether for food items, technological developments, or business practices - slipping across borders and naturalizing themselves in another language.

A unique feature of English is that it has always had leaky borders. Unlike its contemporaries in other parts of the world, English has freely incorporated foreign words from the get-go. This largely accounts for the rich vocabulary of English, and the fact that multiple synonyms, often with subtle nuances of meaning, exist for nearly all common English words. The profligate borrowing habits of English also account for the fact that many English words that are related in meaning have roots in different languages - and that's a topic we'll explore this month. Our focus is Old Europe, and we don't mean the one that Donald Rumsfeld recently disparaged: we're going way back, to ancient Greece and Rome, and to the Germanic group of languages, where English finds its closest relatives. "