Loanword Origins

Loanword Origins flips the detective work into English itself: you get an everyday English word — tsunami, robot, safari, ketchup — and you name the language English took it from. Ten words per game, each from a different donor language.

Some are gifts once you think about them (fjord could hardly be anything but Norwegian); others are genuine surprises — robot is Czech, coach is Hungarian, and ketchup started life as a Hokkien fish sauce.

How to play

• Read the English word in the middle of the screen, then type the language it came from.
• Pick a suggestion or press Enter to lock in a guess. Guess as many times as you like — a wrong language drops out of the list.
• The country name usually counts too — "Japan" works for Japanese, "Hungary" for Hungarian.
• Stuck on one? Hit Skip to reveal the answer and move on — a skipped word does not score.
• When you get it right (or skip), the game reveals the donor language and the word's original meaning.
• The clock counts up from your first guess — it is a stopwatch, not a time limit.

What counts in this quiz

• About eighty loanwords across twenty donor languages, from Japanese and German to Yiddish, Hawaiian and Inuit. Each game draws ten words from ten different languages.
• Every word carries its origin story on the reveal — what it meant before English borrowed it.

What's not included — and why

• No words whose origin linguists still argue about — every answer follows the standard etymological dictionaries.
• One language per word: the language English actually took it from, even when the word travelled further back beyond it.

Good to know

• Robot was coined in Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R., from the Czech robota — forced labour.
• Checkmate preserves a whole Persian sentence: shāh māt, "the king is helpless".
• Cookie is Dutch (koekje, "little cake") — one of many words New Amsterdam left behind in American English.