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[not verified in body] [4] [page range too broad] English borrowed many words from Old Norse, the North Germanic language of the Vikings, [5] and later from Norman French, the Romance language of the Normans, which descends from Latin. Estimates of native words derived from Old English range up to 33%, [6] with the rest made up of outside ...
The English language has borrowed many words from other cultures or languages. For examples, see Lists of English words by country or language of origin and Anglicisation. Some English loanwords remain relatively faithful to the original phonology even though a particular phoneme might not exist or have contrastive status in English.
English words gave way to borrowings from Anglo-Norman following the Norman Conquest as English lost ground as a language of prestige. Anglo-Norman was used in schools and dominated literature, nobility and higher life, leading a wealth of French loanwords to enter English over the course of several centuries—English only returned to courts of law in 1362, and to government in the following ...
The following are lists of words in the English language that are known as "loanwords" or "borrowings," which are derived from other languages.. For Old English-derived words, see List of English words of Old English origin.
All told, approximately 600 words were borrowed from Latin during the Old English period. [2] Often, the Latin word was tightly restricted in sense, and was not widely used by the general populace. Latin words tended to be literary or scholarly terms and were not very common. The majority of them did not survive into the Middle English Period.
Throughout its history, English has not only borrowed words from other languages but has re-combined and recycled them to create new meanings, whilst losing some old words. Dictionary-writers try to keep track of the changes in languages by recording (and, ideally, dating) the appearance in a language of new words, or of new usages for existing ...
This borrowing is commonplace in many world languages, but English has been especially open to borrowing of foreign words throughout the last 1,000 years. [245] Nevertheless, most of the core vocabulary and the most common words in English are still West Germanic.
Lizard was borrowed into Middle English from Old French lesarde, from Latin lacertus. [1] The earliest occurrence of the word (spelled lusarde) is in the poem Piers Plowman (written about 1360–1399). Old English āðexe does survive dialectally as ask ('newt', 'eft', 'lizard'): cf. German Eidechse, Dutch hagedis. ælepūte: 'burbot'.