Where English Words Come From: A Language Built in Layers

English is less like a single tree and more like a city built on top of its own ruins. Every invasion, conversion, trade route and scientific revolution left a layer of words behind. Once you can tell the layers apart, the language stops looking random.

Layer 1: the Germanic core

In the 400s, Angles, Saxons and Jutes crossed the North Sea from what is now northern Germany and Denmark. Their dialects became Old English, and those words are still the bedrock: house, mother, water, bread, eat, sleep, love, go, the, and.

They are the words you can't avoid. In the Oxford English Corpus, a database of over two billion words of real English, the 100 most common words make up about half of everything written. Nearly all of those hundred come from Old English or Old Norse. The commonly cited exceptions are just four: just, people, use and because, all with Latin roots.

Most of the dictionary is borrowed. Most of what you actually say is not.

Layer 2: the Vikings

From the mid-800s, Danish and Norwegian settlers took over much of northern and eastern England. Their language, Old Norse, was a close cousin of Old English, so the two mixed easily. The words that came over were not fancy. They were everyday ones:

The Norse even gave English some of its grammar. They, their and them are Norse. Old English used forms of one pronoun for both "he" (hē) and "they" (hīe), which were easy to confuse, and the clearer Norse words slowly took over. The change took centuries: in Chaucer's London, around 1400, people said they but still used the old hem for "them" and here for "their."

Sometimes both versions survived and drifted apart. Old English scyrte became shirt. Its Norse twin skyrta became skirt. Same word, two doors in, two pieces of clothing.

A small story from 1490. William Caxton, England's first printer, tells of some London merchants whose ship stalled in the Thames. They went ashore in Kent and asked a woman for "egges." She said she spoke no French. Another man asked for "eyren," the old southern word, and she understood him at once. Caxton's complaint: "what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges, or eyren?" The Norse egg won. Eyren died out.

Layer 3: the French

In 1066, William of Normandy conquered England, and for roughly three centuries the people who ran the country spoke French. English survived among ordinary people, but over the following centuries it took in roughly ten thousand French words, especially for power, law, fashion and food: government, court, judge, jury, prison, fashion, dinner, beef.

Everyone's favourite example is the farmyard. The animal kept its English name, and the meat on the table took a French one:

The usual story behind it is that Saxon peasants raised the animals and Norman lords ate them. That picture was popularized by Walter Scott's 1819 novel Ivanhoe, where two Saxon servants joke about exactly this. It is broadly fair, but it is too neat. Most French loanwords, the meat words included, don't turn up in English writing until after about 1250, nearly two centuries after the Conquest, when French was a prestige language rather than the rulers' everyday speech. The split was gradual, and it was about class and fashion as much as conquest.

One more twist: cow and beef are distant relatives. Both go back to the same ancient root for cattle. One reached English through the Germanic line, the other through Latin and French.

Layer 4: Latin and Greek, through the scholars

Latin came in several waves. A few words, street (strata) and wine (vinum), were picked up from Roman traders before the Anglo-Saxons ever left the continent. Church words came with Christianity after 597. The biggest wave came in the Renaissance, when scholars borrowed thousands of Latin and Greek words for ideas English had no word for.

Not everyone liked it. In the 1500s, critics mocked these "inkhorn terms," big words that used up a lot of ink. In 1553 Thomas Wilson wrote a parody letter stuffed with them to show how ridiculous they sounded. Many of the words he and others objected to are now completely ordinary: celebrate, commit, capacity, ingenious, encyclopedia.

Greek has been the workshop for science ever since. Photograph is "light-writing." Telephone is "far-sound." Television (first recorded in 1900) is a mongrel: Greek tele "far" plus Latin visio "seeing."

This is why English so often has a set of three words for one idea. The Old English one feels plain and warm, the French one polite, the Latin one formal:

*Strictly, regal and assist also passed through French, but they stay much closer to the Latin. Royal and regal are the same Latin word, regalis, one worn smooth by centuries of French speech and one borrowed later in its bookish form.

Layer 5: the whole world

Once English travelled, it borrowed from everyone it met:

• Arabic: algebra, from the title of al-Khwarizmi's book on "restoring" (al-jabr) equations
• Hindi: shampoo, from a word meaning "press, knead," and pyjamas
• Hokkien Chinese: tea, via Dutch traders, around 1655
• Nahuatl: tomato (tomatl), via Spanish
• Dutch: boss, cookie, yacht
• Czech: robot, from robota "drudgery," coined for Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (written 1920) on his brother Josef's suggestion
• Guugu Yimidhirr (an Aboriginal Australian language): kangaroo, from gangurru

The stories that aren't true

Etymology attracts tidy fake stories, so treat any word history that sounds too clever with suspicion.

• Kangaroo does not mean "I don't know." It was the real local name for the animal.
• Posh is not short for "port out, starboard home" (the shady side of a ship to India). That story first appears in print around 1932, decades after the word, and no major dictionary accepts it. The real origin is unknown.
• OK, which sounds made up, really does have a strange origin. Its earliest known use is in the Boston Morning Post of 23 March 1839, as a jokey abbreviation of "oll korrect." It was part of a newspaper fad for comic misspelled initials, and linguist Allen Walker Read tracked it down in the 1960s.

The pattern is useful: "it was an acronym" is almost always wrong for any word older than the 20th century.

The takeaway

English is a layered language: a Germanic core (Old English plus Old Norse) for the everyday words, a French layer for power, law and food, a Latin and Greek layer for learning and science, and borrowings from every language English met on its travels. That is why it has so many near-synonyms with different feelings. The plain, short words are usually the oldest, and the long, formal ones usually came later and from further away.

Try this: take the last paragraph you wrote and look up three of its words in an etymology dictionary. Note which layer each came from. Then try swapping one long Latin word for its short Old English cousin and see how the sentence feels.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Vocabulary proportions (French about 28%, Latin about 28%, Germanic about 25%, Greek about 5%) are from Finkenstaedt and Wolff's 1973 survey of dictionary entries, as summarized in Wikipedia's "Foreign language influences in English." They count dictionary words, not how often words are used.
- The top-100 figure and its four Latin-rooted exceptions are from the Oxford English Corpus, via Wikipedia's "Most common words in English" (citing a study reported by Robert McCrum).
- Individual word histories (sky, window, egg, ugly, law, they/them, shirt/skirt, beef/cow, royal/regal, ask/question/interrogate, robot, kangaroo, tea, shampoo, algebra) were checked against Wiktionary's sourced etymologies, which draw on the OED and the Middle English Dictionary.
- Caxton's "egges or eyren" passage is from his prologue to the Eneydos (1490). On Ivanhoe and the meat words: Christian Science Monitor, "They're 'cows' in the field, but 'beef' on the table" (2021). On the inkhorn controversy: the Folger Shakespeare Library's Shakespeare & Beyond blog. On "posh": Phrases.org.uk and Grammarphobia. On "OK": Allen Walker Read's articles in American Speech (1963–64).

Go deeper
- 🌐 Etymonline.com: the free Online Etymology Dictionary, the quickest way to look up any word's history
- 🎧 The History of English Podcast: Kevin Stroud's long, careful, episode-by-episode history of the language
- 📘 The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth: a playful chain of word histories, each leading to the next
- 📘 The Stories of English by David Crystal: the full history, including the dialects the standard story leaves out
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: The Family Tree of Languages (this category) for where English sits among its cousins, and How Language Changes for why words keep shifting