Cloth and dress
Calico, chintz, bandana, dungaree, khaki, cummerbund, pajamas, shawl. Fabric needed names at the dock, and the names outlasted the trade that carried them.
An independent word record
English keeps receipts. Hundreds of its everyday words — shampoo, bungalow, pajamas, bazaar — arrived from Urdu, Hindi, and Persian, and each arrival can be dated and traced. This almanac records those words: where they started, which road they took, and how their spellings settled.
01
The mechanisms of borrowing: trade, administration, and literature. Includes the case of words borrowed twice — one etymon arriving by different roads as two different English words.
02
The four shelves of the Anglo-Indian lexicon: household, wardrobe, kitchen, and office. Each group is given with dated, checkable examples from standard dictionaries.
03
The older stratum beneath the loans: Persian as the administrative language of Mughal India, and the formal clues that show when a word passed through Persian hands.
A borrowed word is one English took from another language and made its own, keeping a traceable path back.
Lexicographers call them loanwords, though nothing is ever returned. A word enters English speech, then print, then the dictionary; somewhere along that path its spelling is fixed and its origin recorded. Shampoo, bungalow, and bazaar all completed that journey.
The words in this record share three donors: Urdu and Hindi, whose everyday vocabularies largely overlap, and Persian, which supplied the court and administrative register of northern India for centuries. Many entries therefore carry more than one label.
Inclusion requires evidence: a dated first record in English print and a plausible source form in the donor language. Attractive stories without dated records are marked as folk etymology or left out.
Calico, chintz, bandana, dungaree, khaki, cummerbund, pajamas, shawl. Fabric needed names at the dock, and the names outlasted the trade that carried them.
Chutney, punch, kebab, pilaf, sherbet, samosa, candy. Some arrived with the dish itself; punch — from Hindi pānch, 'five' — arrived as a recipe's name.
Bungalow, veranda, cot, shampoo. Domestic borrowings: words for the building, its furniture, and its habits, taken up because daily life required them.
Sepoy, nabob, mogul, divan, pundit, thug. Administration and the army wrote local terms into reports, and print carried the vocabulary of rank into ordinary English.
Jungle from Hindi jangal; khaki from Persian khāk, 'dust'; caravan and bazaar from the road and the market. Geography and travel pushed these words into print.
Chess, checkmate, and rook descend from Persian terms of the game — shāh, shāh māt, and rukh — reaching English through Arabic and French in the Middle Ages.
Every loanword is a dated receipt: it records who met whom, and on what terms.
A word can be borrowed twice and arrive as two different words.
The list names the standard reference works used to check dates, forms, and routes for every entry.