Words from Frankish
21 words in Curio passed through Frankish on their way into English.
About Frankish
West Germanic language; Wikidata places it within Low Franconian and Weser-Rhine Germanic · no native speakers today
Where
Lands of the Franks, including Belgium and the Netherlands, and Roman Gaul (Picardy and Île-de-France)
When
Speakers
No reliable count
No census of its speakers exists.
Family path
- Frankish
- Vulgar LatinMedieval LatinOld FrenchLatinLate LatinOld High German
- English
Where it came from
Frankish was the West Germanic language of the Franks, spoken between the 4th and 8th centuries. It is poorly attested and mostly reconstructed from Frankish loanwords in Old French and from Old Dutch. The Bergakker inscription may be a primary record of 5th-century Frankish. Between the 5th and 9th centuries, the Frankish of the Salian Franks in Belgium and the Netherlands evolved into Old Dutch.
Source: Wikipedia
Family
Languages that grew out of Frankish: Old Dutch.
The words, A to Z
- ambush
To wait for someone, you first have to hide in the shrubbery.
- balcony
That railed platform outside your window once had nothing to do with views — it was all about the wooden support underneath.
- barrel
A round wooden container that may have started out as something you simply carried.
- dart
A tiny weapon named for the leap it makes through the air.
- debris
The scattered leftovers of something that used to hold together.
- drab
A word for dullness that started life woven into cloth.
- enamel
That glassy shine on your teeth or your grandmother's saucepan traces back to a word for melting metal.
- espionage
The word for spying got its hissing first sound back after centuries of staying quiet.
- feudal
The system of lords and vassals owes its name, oddly enough, to cows.
- fiasco
A total flop, once upon a time, was just a bottle waiting to be bought.
- grate
That harsh rasp of cheese against metal traces back to a word for scraping, not the thing being scraped.
- heron
This tall wading bird was named for the sound it makes, not the way it looks.
- lodge
A cozy cabin's name once meant nothing more than a leafy shelter.
- mushroom
This fungus got its name from the damp, mossy ground it liked to grow on.
- pocket
The little bag sewn into your clothes started out as a tiny swelling word for something that puffs up.
- pouch
A little bag with a big family tree, stretching back through French and Frankish soil to a Germanic root for a sack.
- rifleman
The soldier's title is really a tool welded to a person.
- scale
One small word secretly hides three unrelated histories — a ladder, a shell, and a bowl all answering to the same name.
- towel
The cloth you dry your hands with carries a very old command: get clean.
- wage
Your paycheck's ancestor was really just a promise someone had to keep.
- warrant
Before it meant legal permission, this word meant someone standing guard over you.