10 Foreign Words That Have Successfully Disguised Themselves As Everyday English
You had no ideas what the origins of these words were.
The name for this soup came from the French word for cauldron, chaudière.
Aficionado the past participle of the Spanish verb aficionar: to inspire affection.
Mosquito means little fly in Spanish.
Tsunami is the Japanese word for harbor wave. It was used for the first time in English in a 1896 issue of National Geographic.
In the English language, kowtow means to behave in a subservient manner. It's actually taken from the Mandarin and Cantonese word kòu tóu, which is a traditional bow of respect that involves touching one’s head to the floor.
British explorer James Cook used the word to describe his Pacific voyages and the tattooed people he met in Polynesia.
In Hinduism, the Sanskrit word avatar means the manifestation of a deity in human form.
The word for this frozen dessert comes from the middle east. It originated from the Turkish word şerbet or from the Persian term sharbat.
The word lemon actually originated from the Arabic word for citrus, līmūn.