Etymology

Welshland

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Today it means: The land of foreigners; a foreign land, originally applied to Celtic lands, but later extended to include Roman and Romance-speaking areas. Full definition →

German Welschland
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The story

  1. German · semantic loan fromWelschland
  2. English todayWelshland

From Welsh + land. Compare Old English wēalland (“foreign country, Normandy”). Cognate with German Wälschland (“Italy”, literally “foreign-land”), German Welschland (“French-speaking Switzerland, Romance-speaking land”). Sense 3 is a semantic loan from German Welschland.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.