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A word adopted directly into English from another donor language with little or no morphological modification.
English is famously the most cosmopolitan, voracious borrower among world languages. Linguist David Crystal estimates that over 70% of the modern English lexicon consists of borrowed vocabulary. English absorbed Celtic words during antiquity, Scandinavian Old Norse during Viking invasions (sky, skin, egg, window), Norman and Central French following 1066 (court, judge, pork, beef), and Renaissance Latin and Greek for science and theology. In modern centuries, global maritime exploration and trade incorporated words from over 350 languages: Arabic (algebra, zero, coffee), Hindi (jungle, pajamas, shampoo), Native American tongues (chocolate, tobacco, hurricane), Japanese (tsunami, karaoke, emoji), and Russian (mammoth, sputnik, tundra).
Test any English word to explore global linguistic contact and loanword origins:
Verified English words exemplifying loanword with Scrabble scores
Linguistic definitions, etymological origins, and tournament usage
Roughly 28% of English vocabulary is of French origin, 28% of Latin origin, 25% Germanic (native Anglo-Saxon and Norse), 5% Greek, and 14% derived from other world languages or proper names.