15 English words we stole from Arabic

Magazine, coffee, sugar...

Arabic script
(Image credit: iStock/grinvalds)

You have zero interest in algebra, so you grab some alcohol — or maybe a coffee with extra sugar — sit on the sofa or mattress, eat an orange or some candy, and read a magazine or surf the web with Safari and Adobe. And just like that, you've used a dozen words that came from Arabic.

Yes, thanks to the traffic of goods and culture around the Mediterranean throughout history, English has many common words that it got from Arabic. It didn't borrow all of them directly; they mostly came filtered though Latin, Turkish, French, Spanish, German, and/or Italian, and have changed in form — and sometimes meaning — since they left Arabic. But our language has accepted all these imports, and they have assimilated well and been very useful.

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James Harbeck

James Harbeck is a professional word taster and sentence sommelier (an editor trained in linguistics). He is the author of the blog Sesquiotica and the book Songs of Love and Grammar.