English is often called a glorious mess of a language. Unlike languages that guard their purity, English has never been shy about stealing vocabulary from others. Why coin a new word when you can borrow (or outright snatch) one that’s already in use abroad? 

Linguist James D. Nicoll put it most colorfully: “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”  In less vivid terms, English is a melting pot of linguistic ingredients that’s been simmering for centuries. 

As many as 350 languages have contributed words to English, accounting for an estimated 80% of its vocabulary =. Little wonder that “there is no such thing as pure English” – we’ve pilfered words for foods, fashion, technology, art, and more from every corner of the globe. (Even so, the everyday basics – words like water, eat, good, the – remain mostly old Anglo-Saxon stock.) 

To understand how English became this lexical smörgåsbord of the world’s languages, it helps to break down the “glorious mess” through the C.R.A.P. framework. But not the one I typically use on Obscure Curiosities. This one is specific to our study today of English linguistics: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity. Let’s explore how each principle illuminates English’s love affair with loanwords.

Contrast: A Patchwork of Words, Moods, and Meanings

One striking feature of English is the contrast between words of different origins, often used side by side. Because English has amassed synonyms and related terms from diverse languages, it can express subtle shades of meaning or tone depending on word choice. For example, calling a meal “hearty” versus a “cordial repast” conveys a different vibe, even though both essentially mean a filling, friendly meal. The first phrase uses plain Germanic words (from Old English), while the second uses Latinate terms borrowed via French – and the effect is a contrast in style: down-to-earth vs. refined. 

English is full of these doublets and triplets that contrast a simple word of Anglo-Saxon origin with a more “elegant” word from French or Latin. Think of kingly (Old English) vs. royal (French) vs. regal (Latin), or holy (Old English) vs. sacred (French/Latin). All these words coexist, coloring English with a rich palette of formal and informal, blunt and polite, earthy and sophisticated. It’s as if every concept comes in flavors: a plain Germanic vanilla and a fancy Romance sauce. This patchwork vocabulary lets speakers fine-tune their expression – one may dine (French origin) or simply eat (Germanic), depending on the desired nuance.

Historically, such contrasts often arose from social situations. After the Norman Conquest of England (1066), the French-speaking nobility used French words for many cultural and culinary things, while the common folk stuck with Old English words. That’s why we have contrasts like cow (the animal, from Old English cū) vs. beef (the meat, from Old French boef) – the farmers raised the cows, but the lords ate the beef. To this day, English retains these dueling terms: a peasant (French paysan) grows vegetables (French légumes), while a villager (Old English wícmann) grows roots or greens – and both sets of words are understood. 

The glorious mess of English is that it crowdsources vocabulary from multiple languages, resulting in a lexical wardrobe where rugged Anglo-Saxon denim sits next to French silk and Latin brocade. This diversity is chaotic, yes, but glorious: the language can be blunt or baroque at will. As one commentator gleefully observed, “The language is a rich, chaotic, glorious mess, full of inconsistencies, contradictions, and broken ‘rules’. That’s what happens when you crowdsource a language.” In English, contrast isn’t a flaw – it’s a feature that makes our expressions nuanced and our diction an eclectic art.

Repetition: Redundant Riches and Borrowed Synonyms

With so many overlapping imports, English sometimes feels like it’s hoarding words – a bit of lexical repetition (or redundancy) that turns out to be a treasure. The language doesn’t just borrow a term for a new concept; often it borrows multiple terms for the same concept over time, leading to swarms of synonyms. This is why English has, for instance, not just one or two but dozens of words for “destroy” – from smash, break, wreck (Germanic) to ruin, demolish, obliterate, annihilate (Latinate) and beyond. Each came into English through different routes, and while they all overlap in meaning, each carries its own connotation or typical usage. These synonym clusters are the result of layered borrowings. Consider our earlier example of the meal: hearty and cordial both mean warm and friendly, but thanks to their different roots, hearty feels plain and genuine, while cordial (from French cordial < Latin cor “heart”) feels refined or even old-fashioned. English speakers benefit from this redundancy by choosing the word with just the right je ne sais quoi (that certain something, as we say in a handy French phrase) to fit the context.

Sometimes English’s duplicate acquisitions are etymological twins – the same original word entering the language twice from different sources. Linguists call these doublets. A classic example is shirt and skirt: both come from an ancient Germanic word for a garment, but one came down through Old English and the other was borrowed from Old Norse (Viking influence). Now, shirt and skirt refer to different items, but their kinship hints at how English absorbed Norse vocabulary alongside its Anglo-Saxon base. Another twin-set is ward (Old English) and guard (Old French < Germanic): same Germanic root, one native, one re-imported via Norman French, now with distinct meanings. 

In some cases, the repetition is even more obvious: we borrowed sauce from French (ultimately Latin salsa “salted”) and much later borrowed salsa directly from Spanish – effectively the same word twice, now referring to different condiments . We did the same with chair (French chaire) and cathedra/cathedral (Latin/Greek for the same seat), or strait and strict (both from Latin strictus). Perhaps the tastiest example is our beloved tea. English got tea from Dutch thee (ultimately from a Chinese dialect) and chai (as in chai latte) from Hindi/Urdu cháy (from a different Chinese dialect), both names for the same drink . Rather than choosing one, English happily uses “tea” and “chai” to mean different varieties or preparations of the beverage – doubling its lexicon for the price of one concept.

Far from being a problem, this lexical redundancy is English’s superpower. It lets us express fine distinctions (compare: ask vs. question vs. interrogate – all share a core meaning but differ in formality and nuance). It also gives English a built-in thesaurus for creativity: we can avoid repeating a word by swapping in a synonym without loss of meaning. These layers of vocabulary contribute to modern English’s richness. 

For language lovers, exploring English is like opening a treasure chest where many items come in pairs or trios – parallel words inherited, borrowed, and reborrowed across time. The repetition of borrowed words has yielded an abundance of ways to say practically anything. It might seem redundant, but it’s also redundantly rich – a linguistic buffet where multiple words serve the role that a single word might serve in other tongues. English doesn’t mind a little duplication; in fact, it revels in it, turning lexical overlap into a source of poetic variety and precision.

Alignment: Making Foreign Words Our Own

If English is so promiscuous in acquiring foreign words, how does it manage to fit them all into a coherent language? This is where alignment comes in – the process of anglicizing and assimilating loanwords so they play nice with English sounds, spellings, and grammar. English has a long history of naturalizing imports, often bending them to our phonetic and orthographic rules . Over time, borrowed terms tend to lose their foreign flavor and align with English norms. 

For example, the word “algorithm” doesn’t look obviously foreign to us now, but it traces back to the name of a Persian scholar al-Khwārizmī; as it passed through Latin into English, it got aligned to English phonetics (no guttural Arabic sounds, just straightforward English spelling) . Likewise, “ketchup” originated from a Chinese/Malay sauce name (kecap), yet in English it stabilized as ketchup, fitting our patterns and even spawning that ultra-English spelling confusion with “catsup” . These are examples of loanwords that underwent makeovers to become almost indistinguishable from native words.

Often, the first thing to go is pronunciation fidelity. English speakers will pronounce karaoke or déjà vu in a way that feels natural in English, even if it’s not exactly how a Japanese or French speaker would say them. We typically put the stress and sounds where our habits dictate – and that’s fine, because the goal is to integrate the word. Similarly, we apply English grammatical rules: we add -s for plurals (one pizza, two pizzas, never mind that Italian plural is pizze), we form past tenses with -ed if it’s a verb, and so on. A phenomenon becomes phenomenons or phenomena in plural, but many English speakers just go with “phenomenons” by analogy to our regular plural rules. In writing, we also tend to drop accent marks and other diacritics from imported words as they become familiar. Over the years, “déjà vu” often loses its acute accents to become “deja vu”, “naïve” sheds its trema to become “naive”, “smörgåsbord” simplifies to “smorgasbord”, and even the Vietnamese “phở” is commonly written as “pho” in English. Those little marks are useful guides in the original languages, but once the words settle into English, they’re frequently deemed optional or dropped – a sign that the word is now an English citizen. It’s telling that many English speakers don’t even realize cafe was once spelled café, or that facade was façade. The foreign origin gets obscured as the word aligns with English conventions.

That said, alignment is not absolute – some loanwords stay obviously foreign in look or sound, yet we embrace them anyway. We still spell schadenfreude with its German sch- and eu, and we haven’t forced spaghetti to become “spagetti” or fiancé to drop its accent completely (though fiance without the accent is common). In many cases, English keeps a quirky spelling or a hint of an accent in writing (résumé still often has its accents to distinguish it from the verb resume ) but pronounces it in an anglicized way. And sometimes we can’t decide: is it “karaoke” pronounced “kah-rah-OH-kee” (closer to Japanese) or “carry-OH-kee”? Is “croissant” “kwah-SAHNT” (French-ish) or “krə-SANT”? Both exist in English. 

The general pattern, however, is that the longer a loanword sticks around, the more it adapts to English phonology and morphology. After enough years of usage, a borrowed word becomes “ours,” often to the point that people forget it ever came from abroad. For example, no one today feels that “bagel” (from Yiddish beygl) or “orchestra” (from Greek via Latin) are foreign – they’re thoroughly aligned with English. The alignment principle ensures that even though English keeps absorbing exotic delicacies, it digests them into familiar nutrients. We naturalize our loanwords so they work with English grammar and spelling, making the linguistic smorgasbord relatively easy to consume for English speakers. In short, English will happily invite new words to the party, but it eventually asks them to follow the house rules – at least most of the time.

Proximity (and Prestige): Borrowing by Need, Greed, and Opportunity

English borrows words because it can – and because it often needs to. Language contact drives borrowing: whenever English speakers bump into a new object, idea, or cultural phenomenon that lacks a native term, we have a history of grabbing the nearest word available. Linguists often summarize the reasons for loanwords as “need and prestige.” Need is straightforward: if another culture has invented or introduced something – whether it’s coffee (from Turkish kahve, via Arabic) or kimchi (Korean fermented cabbage) – it’s easier to adopt the item’s original name than to make up a new word from scratch. 

As one source wryly explains, when other cultures bring new objects or ideas, “the borrowing culture tends to adopt those names instead of inventing their own words.” In other words, why reinvent the lexicon? English saw no point in coining a fresh word for “ballet” or “sushi” or “taco” when French, Japanese, and Spanish already had perfectly good words for these things. We simply took them wholesale. This is practical – a kind of linguistic finders-keepers.

Over centuries, everything from musical terms (piano, opera, viola – all Italian) to scientific concepts (oxygen, protein, vaccine – coined from Latin/Greek roots) to foods (chocolate from Nahuatl xocolatl, tea from Chinese te, banana from Wolof) entered English because they filled a need in describing new experiences. English speakers have rarely been shy about shopping abroad for vocabulary. The British in India, for example, gleefully absorbed words for the local flora, fauna, clothing, and cuisine – “bungalow” (Hindi bangla), “jungle” (Hindi jangal), “khaki” (Urdu khāki), “shampoo” (Hindi chāmpo, to massage), “cheetah” (Hindi cītā) and so on – rather than devising new English terms for these things. The pattern repeats whenever cultures meet. It’s linguistic karma (from Sanskrit karma, meaning fate – yet another loanword we use casually).

The prestige factor is the flip side: sometimes we borrow not out of need, but because the foreign term just sounds cooler or confers status. French has long been the language of high cuisine and fashion, so English speakers sprinkle their speech with a bon appétit, a je ne sais quoi, or a certain panache, purely because the French phrasing adds charm or cachet that a plain English equivalent might lack. (Why say “I don’t know what” when je ne sais quoi does the job with so much more flair? ) 

In the mid-20th century, educated English writers loved using Latin epigrams and tags (e.g. vice versa, circa, persona non grata), as Latin carried prestige of learning. Today, borrowing for prestige is just as prevalent – think of tech jargon or pop culture. We talk about anime (Japanese animation) or karaoke (Japanese “empty orchestra”) or manga, because using the Japanese terms shows we’re in the know about those cultural imports. We adopt trendy words from whatever culture is influential: from Italian we took espresso, al dente, paparazzi; from French, résumé, boutique, genre; from Yiddish (via Jewish American culture) we got playful words like schmooze, klutz, oy vey; from Arabic and Persian came exotic concepts like alchemy, harem, shah, sofa. 

Each loanword often rides in on a wave of cultural prestige or popularity – taco and salsa with Mexican cuisine’s rise in the U.S., yoga and guru with South Asian spiritual practices gaining Western followers, feng shui and kung fu with interest in Chinese concepts, hamburger, jeans, OK going out from American culture to the world, and so on. English’s attitude has generally been open-arms: if it’s useful or trendy, we’ll take it!

Unlike some languages, which have official academies or policies to resist foreign influence (France famously fights to replace Anglicisms with French coinages, and Icelandic invents new words rather than borrow), English has historically had a laissez-faire (there’s a French one!) approach. There is no English language academy policing our word stock. If enough people use a foreign word, it becomes English by acclimation. This openness is a key reason English has one of the highest rates of loanwords of any major language . (In a linguistic survey, English vocab was about 42% borrowed, far higher than, say, Mandarin Chinese’s tiny ~2% of loanwords – China tends to calque or coin new terms instead of borrowing .) English has generally preferred to add rather than subtract, embracing new words even if they cause a bit of chaos in spelling or pronunciation. 

Each wave of migration, trade, conquest, or cultural exchange simply tossed more words into the stew. From Old Norse words brought by Viking invaders (e.g. sky, ugly, egg) to French words after Norman rule (tens of thousands of them, from government to dinner), to words from around the world during the age of exploration and colonialism (Native American words like tobacco, potato, hurricane, Indian words like pyjamas, jungle, thug, African words like zebra, safari, Chinese words like tea, ketchup, typhoon, and so on) – English accumulated vocabulary at an astonishing rate. In modern times, global media and the internet continue the trend: we casually talk about the emoji we sent (Japanese e “picture” + moji “character”), binge on tacos and sushi, jam to k-pop (Korean pop music) or reggae (Jamaican Creole, from “ragged” for the music style), and might say “hasta la vista” (Spanish for “see you later”) for flair. English has become a magpie language, gleefully collecting shiny new words wherever it finds them.

Ultimately, this proximity and prestige–driven borrowing has made English immensely flexible and expressive. It’s often said that “English doesn’t just borrow words; it outright absorbs them,” making them its own. We have a colossal lexicon precisely because we haven’t been picky about word origins. Every loanword carries a bit of the culture it came from, turning English into a linguistic global village. And as speakers, we get to enjoy the richness: we can be mathematical with Greek-derived terms one moment, then scholarly with Latin phrases, then crack a kung fu movie joke, order pad thai for lunch, and describe a déjà vu feeling in the afternoon – all without leaving English. 

English’s borrowed diversity means we have words with precise meanings (there’s a reason schadenfreude – German for “pleasure at another’s misfortune” – caught on; no single English word captures that concept as neatly) and words with unique flavors (calling someone kaput sounds more fun than “finished,” and going on a safari evokes more romance than “overland journey”). English speakers, consciously or not, embrace this buffet of words. Our dictionary is a living bazaar of global contributions, and we are all the richer (and perhaps a bit locally confused) for it.

Conclusion: Embracing the Glorious Mess

English, in all its anarchic glory, shows that making up new words is overrated when you can adopt (or adapt) someone else’s. The result is a “glorious mess” – a tongue cobbled together from countless sources , full of oddities but also full of possibilities. Its very impurity is its strength. Every time English encountered a new culture or innovation, it said “Welcome, vocab!” rather than “Not in my backyard.” This grabby, generous habit has given us a vocabulary that’s arguably broader and more nuanced than any “pure” language could be. Yes, it means English spelling is bizarre and etymology a tangle; yes, it means there are eight ways to say “beautiful” and you still haven’t touched “pulchritudinous.” But it also means English speakers can express ideas with a precision and color that comes from having just the right word for every shade of meaning – whether it’s homely breadth (Germanic) or highfalutin magnitude (Latinate), a simple idea (Greek ideā) or an esoteric schadenfreude (German) feeling.

In the end, English wears its loanwords proudly, like a patchwork quilt made of linguistic souvenirs. It’s chaotic, yes, but it works. The next time you ski (Norwegian), or enjoy champagne (French) at a fiesta (Spanish) with an aficionado (Spanish, originally Latin) of language, take a moment to appreciate the marvelous mishmash that is English. Our everyday speech is a living museum of global words – a testament to centuries of exploration, trade, migration, conquest, and creativity. English has no qualms about mixing entrée with main course, linguistically speaking. As a result, English is an ever-growing, ever-changing collage, one that happily shrugs off purity and says, “Bring on the new words – the more, the merrier!”

After all, English is the ultimate word thief, and we speakers are its willing accomplices. Instead of guarding a tidy native lexicon, we celebrate the glorious mess. In English, borrowing isn’t a flaw; it’s the raison d’être of our expansive vocabulary. Pourquoi pas? Why not grab that foreign word if it does the job? The story of English shows that when it comes to words, stealing – or let’s say sharing – is caring. Every borrowed word is a tribute to some cross-cultural encounter. 

So, let’s embrace English for what it is: a beautiful Frankenstein of a language stitched together from old and new, near and far, high and low. In the grand scheme, it proves the point: why make up new words when you can just steal them? English certainly never saw a good word it didn’t like – and pinch. And we’re all the richer (linguistically speaking) for it, enjoying the cornucopia of expression that this gloriously messy, mongrel tongue affords us.

Key Sources

• Shea, Ammon. Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation. (Penguin Random House blurb) – “English is a glorious mess of a language, cobbled together from a wide variety of sources and syntaxes, and changing over time with popular usage.”
  
• ProofreadingPal Blog – “Perhaps the greatest glory of English is its expansive vocabulary… As a mottled product of Greek, Germanic, and (via French) Latinate influences, English has many pairs of words with approximately the same meaning yet subtle distinctions of mood. ‘A hearty meal’… vs. ‘a cordial repast’… the former uses Germanic vocabulary, whereas the latter uses words that entered English via Norman French.”
  
• Nicoll, James (1990), quoted in LINGUIST List 13.499 – “English… We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
  
• Dictionary.com – “Loanwords make up 80% of English… As many as 350 other languages are represented… What this means is that there is no such thing as pure English. English is a delectable, slow-cooked language of languages.”
  
• Wikipedia (Foreign-language influences in English) – Statistical analysis showing that while Anglo-Saxon words account for ~78% of words in a sample of everyday English (letters), the overall English lexicon is heavily influenced by French, Latin, and others .
  
• Wikipedia (Doublet (linguistics)) – Explains etymological doublets in English, e.g. “Romance ‘beef’ and Germanic ‘cow’” as cognates from the same Proto-Indo-European root, reflecting English’s dual heritage ; also examples like borrowing both sauce (Old French) and salsa (Spanish) from the same Latin root , and tea vs. chai coming via different routes .
  
• ThatTranslationBlog – Loan words enter a language by: (1) Need – if there’s no word for a new concept, speakers borrow one; (2) Prestige – foreign words can add a certain “je ne sais quoi” to conversation.
  
• Boston Globe (Pagel, 2014) – Notes that Mandarin Chinese has only ~2% loanwords (preferring to coin new terms or use calques), while English has one of the highest rates, ~42% , reflecting English’s openness to borrowing.