Words from Portuguese
11 words in Curio passed through Portuguese on their way into English.
About Portuguese
Western Romance language of the Indo-European family, in the Ibero-Romance group · spoken today
Where
Portugal and the Azores → official language in eight countries across Europe, South America, Africa and Asia
When
Dates unknown
Speakers
254.3M
as of 2019
Native speakers, Wikidata figure for 2019
Family path
- Latin
- Vulgar Latin
- Portuguese
- SpanishDutchIndian English
- English
Where it came from
Portuguese belongs to the Ibero-Romance group, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia and the County of Portugal. Wikidata gives its parent as Galician-Portuguese, and it has kept some Celtic phonology. Its vocabulary is largely Latin, with loanwords from Celtic, Germanic, Arabic, African, Amerindian and Asian languages, brought by wars, trade and colonization.
Source: Wikipedia
Family
Portuguese grew out of Vulgar Latin.
The words, A to Z
- amok
There's a word for the moment someone stops holding back entirely, and it sailed into English from across the sea.
- atoll
A ring-shaped reef with a story that sailed from the Maldives to Portugal before landing in English.
- molasses
This thick, dark syrup carries the sweetness of honey right in its name, even though there's no honey in the jar.
- monsoon
A wind pattern named not for water, but for time itself.
- mulatto
A word for a person that comes, unsettlingly, from the word for a mule.
- sago
This starchy staple carried its own name across oceans before it ever reached an English table.
- savvy
A word for street smarts that started out as someone else's way of saying "I know."
- sepoy
A soldier's title that marched from Persian courts to British colonial armies, changing hands with every empire it served.
- tapioca
That pearly pudding starch carries a name straight from the Amazon.
- typhoon
A giant Pacific storm that may have circled the globe linguistically before landing in English.
- veranda
A covered porch that stepped into English by way of colonial India.