From A to Z: Arabic Words That Made Their Way to the English Language

Given its status as an official language of the United Nations and one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of the words we use on a daily basis have their origins in the Arabic language.

Arabic has come a long way from its humble origins on the Arabian Peninsula — with the spread of Islam, the language spread as well. Today, it’s the official language of more than 20 countries, many of whom lie thousands of miles away from the peninsula on which the language was born.

Over the course of the last several centuries speakers of many other languages have interacted with Arabic speakers and borrowed words from the language. This is particularly common in languages that are spoken in or near lands that were impacted by Islamic rule — some researchers estimate that about 8% of the words in the Spanish language, for example, are of Arabic origin, due to Muslim rule over the Iberian Peninsula for hundreds of years in the middle ages.

While English vocabulary certainly hasn’t been as influenced by Arabic to the same extent as other languages like Spanish or Persian, the English language has adopted several words from the Arabic language. Interestingly (but perhaps not so surprisingly), many of the Arabic-origin words in English have been filtered through one language or another — for example, the Arabic word “جرّة” (transliterated as “jarra”) first made its way into Spanish and French as “jarra” and “jarre” respectively. 

English speakers borrowed the French variant of the word, which omitted the second syllable present in the original Arabic, hence the English word “jar” (the second syllable is still present in Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese pronunciations though). 

Here’s a list of some Arabic words that we’ve come to use on a pretty regular basis in the English language as well: