loanword

plural loanwords · alternative loan word

1. A word directly taken into one language from another one.

   "Calque" is a loanword with French origins, and "loanword" is a calque with German origins.

   3 more examples

   New words, and particularly loanwords, are simplified, and hence naturalized in American much more quickly than in English. Employé has long since become employee in our newspapers, and asphalte has lost its final e, and manœuvre has become maneuver, and pyjamas has become pajamas.

   [1921 [1919], H. L. Mencken, chapter 32, in The American Language, 2nd edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, →ISBN, →OCLC

   This searching was facilitated by the author's knowledge of the vagaries of Anglo-Indian spelling and the numerous colonial-era transliteration systems used for loanwords from Indian languages.

   2018, James Lambert, “Anglo-Indian slang in dictionaries on historical principles”, in World Englishes, volume 37, page 251

   Indeed, in 1957 Xenophon Zolotas, the then governor of the Bank of Greece, gave two speeches to the IMF that contained just Greek loanwords apart from the inevitable basic English. (Example: “Our policies should be based more on economic and less on political criteria.”)

   2021 April 25, John Malathronas, “Which languages are easiest – and most difficult – for native English speakers to learn?”, in CNN, archived from the original on 22 Mar 2022

   Synonyms: borrowing, foreign word, gainword