List of English words of Arabic origin (C-F)

The following English words have been acquired either directly from Arabic or else indirectly by passing from Arabic into other languages and then into English. Most entered one or more of the Romance languages before entering English.

To qualify for this list, a word must be reported in etymology dictionaries as having descended from Arabic. A handful of dictionaries has been used as the source for the list.[1] Words associated with the Islamic religion are omitted; for Islamic words, see Glossary of Islam. Obsolete and rare words are also omitted. A bigger listing including many words very rarely seen in English is available at Wiktionary dictionary.

Loanwords listed in alphabetical order

C

camphor
كافور kāfūr, camphor. The medieval Arabs imported camphor by sea from the East Indies for aromatic uses and medical uses. Medieval Arabic general-purpose dictionaries say kāfūr is "well-known".[2] Among the Latins the records begin in the late 9th century (with spelling cafora) though records are scarce until the 12th century.[3] . Another imported East Indies wood product which had both aromatic and medical uses in late medieval Europe and had Arabic word ancestry is sandalwood, from Arabic صندل sandal.[4] In Arabic these two words came from the Indies along with the goods.
candy
قند qand + قندي qandī, sugared.[5] Cane sugar developed in ancient India. Medieval Persian qand = "cane sugar" is believed to have probably come from Sanskritic.[6] The plant is native to a tropical climate. The medieval Arabs grew the plant with artificial irrigation and exported some of the product to the Latins. The word candi entered all the Western European languages in the later medieval centuries.[5]
carat (gold purity), carat (mass) 
قيراط qīrāt, a small unit of weight, defined as one-twentyfourth (1/24) of the weight of a certain coin namely the medieval Arabic gold dinar, and alternatively defined by reference to a weight of (e.g.) 3 barley seeds. In medieval Arabic the word was also used with the meaning of 1/24th of the money value of a gold dinar coin. In the Western languages the word was adopted as a measurement term for the proportion of gold in a gold alloy, especially in a gold coin, beginning in Italy in the mid-13th century, occurring soon after some city-states of Italy started new issues of pure gold coins.[7]
caravan 
قيروان qaīrawān, convoy of travelers journeying together, which could be a merchant convoy or military or other convoy. Qaīrawān is in all the main medieval Arabic dictionaries. It is somewhat frequently used in medieval Arabic writings, even though not nearly as frequently as the synonymous Arabic qāfila.[2] In the Western languages the word has records since the 12th century. The early records are in Latin and they include carvana (1190), caravana (1217), caravanna (1219-1225), karavenna (1250).[8] Possibly slightly earlier is Latin caravana (reportedly 1161).[9] From southern Italy, referring to a caravan of sailing ships, is Latin carabana (1240).[10] All of those Latin records use the word with the same meaning as the Arabic word. The word with this meaning has been continuously in use in the Western languages since then. In Italian, late medieval merchants have it in several kinds of applications contexts, spelled carovana | caravana.[11] It is pretty common in late medieval Italy (e.g., is in Boccaccio's Decameron and Pegolotti's Mercatura). It is not common in French and English until the later 16th century, but French does have late medieval caravane and English has late 15th century carvan.[12] The year 1598 Italian-English dictionary of John Florio has Italian caravana translated to English as English caravan. Arabic qaīrawān came from Persian kārwān with same meaning. Back in the context of the 12th and 13th century, any Persian word would necessarily have to have had intermediation through some other language in order to arrive in a Western language, because there was no contact between Persian and Western languages at the time. In practice the intermediary was Arabic. The majority of the 12th and 13th century Latin records of this word involve travellers in Arabic-speaking lands, especially Latin Crusaders in the Levant, and none are in Iranian-speaking lands.
caraway (seed) 
كرويا karawiyā | كراويا karāwiyā, caraway. The word with that meaning is quite common in mid-medieval Arabic. Spelled "caraway" in English in the 1390s in a cookery book. The English word came from Arabic via medieval Romance languages.[13]
carob 
خرّوب kharrūb, carob. Carob beans and carob pods were consumed in the Mediterranean area from ancient times, and had several names in classical Latin. But a name of roughly around carrubia is in Latin from only the 11th or 12th century onward.[14] The late medieval Latin word is the parent of today's Italian carruba, French caroube, English carob.
check, checkmate, chess, exchequer, cheque, chequered, unchecked, checkout, checkbox, checkbook ... 
شاه shāh, king in the game of chess. The many uses of "check" in English are all descended from Persian shah = "king" and the use of this word in the game of chess to mean "check the king". Chess was introduced to medieval Europe through Arabs. The medieval Arabs probably pronounced the last h in shāh harder and more forcefully than how shah is pronounced in English or in today's Arabic.[15][16] The word is in 11th century Catalan-Latin as escac, then 12th century French as eschac, giving rise to 12th century French eschec,[9] which the English "check" derives from. . The "mate" in checkmate is from the medieval Arabic chess term شاه مات shāh māt = "king dies".[17] This too arrived in English through French, starting in French as mat in the 12th century.[9] Italian has scaco mato = "checkmate" in the 12th century.[18] . The English word chess arrived from medieval French esches | eschas = "chess" which was the grammatical plural of eschec | eschac = "check".[19] 11th century Catalan-Latin has grammatical plural escachs = "chess" from grammatical singular escac = "check".[20]
chemistry 
See alchemy.
cipher, decipher 
صفر sifr, zero, i.e. the zero digit in the Arabic number system. The use of zero as one of the elementary digits was a key innovation in the Hindu-Arabic number system. Latin cifra was the parent of English cipher (or cypher). The word came to Latin Europe with Hindu-Arabic numbers in the 12th century. In Europe the meaning was originally numeral zero as a positionholder, then any positional numeral, then numerically encoded message. The last meaning, and decipher, dates from the 1520s in English, 1490s in French, 1470s in Italian.[9] But in English cipher also continued to be used as a word for nought or zero until the 19th century.[21]
civet (mammal), civet (perfume) 
زباد zabād, civet perfume, a musky perfume excreted from a gland in قطط الزباد qatat al-zabād = "civet cats". The medieval Arabs obtained civet from the African civet and from various civets of the Indies.[22] The word is in 15th-century Italian as zibetto = "civet perfume".[9] Records of the form civet start in Catalan 1372 and French 1401[9] (cf. e.g. Latin liber -> French livre; Arabic al-qobba -> Spanish alcoba -> French alcove). . Incidentally the botanical genus Abelmoschus got its name from Arabic حبّ المسك habb el-misk = "musk seed", a seed yielding a musky perfume.[23]
coffee, café 
قهوة qahwa, coffee. Coffee drinking originated in Yemen in the 15th century.[24] Qahwa (itself of uncertain origin) begot Turkish kahve. Turkish phonology does not have a /w/ sound, and the change from w to v in going from Arabic qahwa to Turkish kahve can be seen in many other loanwords going from Arabic into Turkish (e.g. Arabic fatwa -> Turkish fetva). The Turkish kahve begot Italian caffè. The latter word-form entered most Western languages in the early 17th century. The Western languages of the early 17th century also have numerous records where the word-form was taken directly from the Arabic, e.g. cahoa in 1610, cahue in 1615, cowha in 1619.[24] . Cafe mocha, a type of coffee, is named after the port city of Mocha, Yemen, which was an early coffee exporter.
cotton 
قطن qutn | qutun, cotton. This was the usual word for cotton in medieval Arabic.[2] The word entered the Romance languages in the mid-12th century[9] and English a century later. Cotton fabric was known to the ancient Romans as an import but cotton was rare in the Romance-speaking lands until imports from the Arabic-speaking lands in the later medieval era at transformatively lower prices.[25]
crimson 
قرمزي qirmizī, color of a class of crimson dye used in the medieval era for dyeing silk and wool.[26] The dye was made from the bodies of certain scale insect species. In Latin in the early-medieval centuries this kind of crimson dye was variously called coccinus, vermiculus, and grana. The Arabic name qirmizī | qirmiz enters the records in the Latin languages in the later-medieval centuries, starting in Italy and initially referring in particular to just one of the dyes of the class, the one called Armenian cochineal today. Italian about year 1300 had carmesi | chermisi | cremesi meaning both the dye itself and the crimson color from the dye. Later in the same century Italian added the suffix -ino, producing cremisino = "dyed with cochineal-type crimson dye", and synonymously about year 1400 there was French cremosyn, Spanish cremesin, English cremesyn, Latin cremesinus, where -inus is a Latin and Latinate suffix.[27] English "crimson" started in the form crimesin then contracted to crimsin and then altered to crimson.[28] Crossref kermes, one of the scale-insect species.
curcuma (plant genus), curcumin (yellow dye), curcuminoid (chemicals) 
كركم kurkum, meaning ground turmeric root, also saffron. Turmeric dye gives a saffron yellow colour. Medieval Arabic dictionaries say kurkum is used as a yellow dye and used as a medicine.[2] Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) said kurkum is (among other things) a root from the East Indies that produces a saffron-like dye. In the West the early records have meaning turmeric and they are in late medieval Latin medical books that were influenced by Arabic medicine.[29]

D

damask (textile fabric), damask rose (flower) 
دمشق dimashq, city of Damascus. The city name Damascus is very ancient and not Arabic. The damson plum – earlier called also the damask plum and damascene plum – has a word-history in Latin that goes back to the era when Damascus was part of the Roman empire and so it is not from Arabic. On the other hand, the damask fabric and the damask rose emerged in the Western European languages when Damascus was an Arabic-speaking city; and apparently at emergence they referred to goods originally sold from or made in Arabic Damascus.[30]

E

elixir 
الإكسير al-iksīr, alchemical philosopher's stone, i.e. a pulverized mineral agent by which you could supposedly make gold (also silver) out of copper or other metals. The Arabs took the word from Greek xēron, then prepended Arabic al- = "the". The Greek had entered Arabic meaning a dry powder for treating wounds, and it has a couple of records in medieval Arabic in that sense.[17] Al-Biruni (died 1048) is an example of a medieval Arabic writer who used the word in the alchemy sense, for making gold.[31] The Arabic alchemy sense entered Latin in the 12th century.[9] Elixir is in all European languages today.
erg (landform), hamada (landform), sabkha (landform), wadi (landform) 
عرق ʿerq, sandy desert landscape. حمادة hamāda, craggy desert landscape with very little sand. Those two words are in use in English in geomorphology and sedimentology. Their entrypoint was in late-19th-century studies of the Sahara Desert.[32]
سبخة sabkha, salt marsh. This Arabic word occurs occasionally in English and French in the 19th century. Sabkha with a technical meaning as coastal salt-flat terrain came into general use in sedimentology in the 20th century through numerous studies of the coastal salt flats on the eastern side of the Arabian peninsula.[33]
وادي wādī, a river valley or gully. In English, a wadi is a non-small gully that is dry, or dry for most of the year, in the desert.

F

fennec (desert fox) 
فنك fenek, fennec fox. European naturalists borrowed it in the late 18th century. (In older Arabic writings, fenek also designated various other mammals[34]).

Addendum for words that may or may not be of Arabic ancestry

caliber, calipers 
Excluding an isolated and semantically unclear record in northern France in 1478, the early records are in French in the early and mid 16th century spelled calibre, equally often spelled qualibre, with two concurrent meanings: (1) "the interior diameter of a gun-barrel" and (2) "the quality or comparative character of anything". The source-word for the French is uncertain. A popular idea is that it came from Arabic قالب qālib = "mold" but evidence to support this idea is very scant.[35]
carafe 
It is fair to say that carafe starts in the European languages in the 14th century in Sicily -- in texts in Latin and Sicilian Italian -- spelled carraba, meaning a glass carafe, a glass vase for holding wine.[36] In 1499 it starts in northern Italian as caraffa meaning a carafe made of glass.[9] The word, as carraba and caraffa, looks unprecedented in terms of Latin or Greek. The most popular origin hypothesis is based upon Arabic غرفة gharfa, which in medieval Arabic meant a large spoon or ladle to scoop up water. Gharfa is somewhat off-target semantically and phonetically, and does not have much background historical context to support it.[37]
carrack 
This is an old type of large sailing ship. The word's early records in European languages are in the 12th and 13th centuries in the maritime republic of Genoa in Latin spelled carraca | caraca.[9][38] In descent from the Genoa word, it has records in the late 13th century in Catalan and Spanish, and late 14th in French and English.[39] Today it is most popularly said that the Italian-Latin name was probably somehow adopted from an Arabic word. There are two different propositions for which medieval Arabic word, namely: (1) قراقير qarāqīr = "merchant ships" (plural of qurqūr = "merchant ship") and (2) حرّاقة harrāqa = "kind of warship". There is also a specific alternative proposition that does not involve an Arabic word. The origin remains uncertain and poorly understood.[40] . Another old type of sailing ship with possible, probable or definite Arabic word-origin is the Xebec . Another is the Felucca . Another is the Dhow .
cork 
The earliest records in England are 1303 "cork" and 1342 "cork" meaning bulk cork bark imported from Iberia.[41] It is widely reported today that the word came from Spanish alcorques = "slipper shoes made of cork". This Spanish "al-" word cannot be found in writing in any medieval Arabic author. Most etymology dictionaries nevertheless state that the Spanish word is almost surely from Arabic because of the "al-". However, there is evidence in Spanish supporting the contrary argument that the "al-" in this case was probably solely Spanish and that the corque part of the Spanish word descended from classical Latin without Arabic intermediation (and to repeat, the evidence in Arabic is that there was no such word in Arabic). The ancient Romans used cork and called it, among other names, cortex (literally: "bark"). From that Latin, medieval and modern Spanish has es:Corcho = "cork material". Corcho is definitely not from Arabic. Corcho is the more likely source for the English word, by reason of semantics.[42]
drub 
Probably from ضرب ḍarb, striking or hitting with a cudgel. The word is not in European languages other than English. The English word drub "appears first after 1600; all the early instances, before 1663, are from travellers in the Orient, and refer to the bastinado. Hence, in the absence of any other tenable suggestion, it may be conjectured to represent Arabic ضرب daraba (also pronounced duruba), to beat, to bastinado, and the verbal noun darb (also pronounced durb)."[43]
fanfare, fanfaronade 
English fanfare is from French fanfare, which is probably from Spanish fanfarria and fanfarrón and fanfarronear, meaning bluster, grandstanding, and a talker who is full of bravado. Spanish records also have the lesser-used variant forms farfantón | farfante with pretty much the same meaning as fanfarrón. The origin of the Spanish words is obscure and uncertain. An origin in the Arabic of medieval Spain is possible. One Arabic candidate is فرفر farfar | فرفار farfār | فرفرة farfara which is in the medieval Arabic dictionaries with meanings including "lightness and frivolity", "talkative", and "shouting".[44]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ The dictionaries used to compile the list are these: Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales: Etymologies, Online Etymology Dictionary, Random House Dictionary, Concise Oxford English Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Arabismen im Deutschen: lexikalische Transferenzen vom Arabischen ins Deutsche, by Raja Tazi (year 1998), A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (a.k.a. "NED") (published in pieces between 1888 and 1928), An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (year 1921) by Ernest Weekley. Footnotes for individual words have supplementary other references. The most frequently cited of the supplementary references is Glossaire des mots espagnols et portugais dérivés de l'arabe (year 1869) by Reinhart Dozy.
  2. 1 2 3 4 A number of large dictionaries were written in Arabic during medieval times. Searchable copies of nearly all of the main medieval Arabic dictionaries are online at Baheth.info and/or AlWaraq.net. One of the most esteemed of the dictionaries is Ismail ibn Hammad al-Jawhari's "Al-Sihah" which is dated around and shortly after year 1000. The biggest is Ibn Manzur's "Lisan Al-Arab" which is dated 1290 but most of its contents were taken from a variety of earlier sources, including 9th- and 10th-century sources. Often Ibn Manzur names his source then quotes from it. Therefore, if the reader recognizes the name of Ibn Manzur's source, a date considerably earlier than 1290 can often be assigned to what is said. A list giving the year of death of a number of individuals who Ibn Manzur quotes from is in Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon, volume 1, page xxx (year 1863). Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon contains much of the main contents of the medieval Arabic dictionaries in English translation. At AlWaraq.net, in addition to searchable copies of medieval Arabic dictionaries, there are searchable copies of a large number of medieval Arabic texts on various subjects.
  3. ↑ Book An Historical Geography of Camphor by R.A. Donkin, year 1999, 300 pages, includes chapters on the use of camphor by the medieval Arabs and the medieval Latins. See also etymology of French camphre @ CNRTL.fr. The word is in Greek as kaphoura circa 1075 in Simeon Seth, a writer influenced by Arabic medicine. A couple of records exist in Greek that may date from centuries earlier than Simeon Seth though the dating is afflicted with uncertainties. Camphor has no records among the ancient Greeks and Romans under any name.
  4. ↑ English "sandalwood" descends from medieval Latin sandalus | sandalum, which is ultimately from Sanskrit čandana = "sandalwood". The sandalwood aromatic wood came from the Indies. In medieval Arabic it was called sandal and was commonly used and well-known (examples). The word is in Greek in Late Antiquity as santalon. Some etymology dictionaries derive the medieval Latin from the Greek with disregard for the Arabic. Others derive the medieval Latin from the Arabic with disregard for the Greek on the grounds that (1) Arabic (especially Yemeni) seafarers were the main providers of sandalwood to medieval Europe; and (2) the 'd' in the Arabic can explain how the Latin has a 'd'; and (3) the Latin emerges too late for a Greek source to be likely: CNRTL.fr cites the 11th-century medical writer Constantinus Africanus for the earliest record of sandalus | sandalum in Latin. The book The Moluccas and the Traffic in Spices up to the Arrival of Europeans, by Robin A. Donkin, year 2003, has some early history for sandalwood in Europe on pages 110, 114, 116, and 122; and some more ancient and medieval history for sandalwood is in the book An Historical Geography of Camphor, by Robin A. Donkin, year 1999. According to these two books, the word's first document in Greek in the 1st century AD in Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, spelled santalinon, and it is present but rare in Greek sources in the early centuries AD, and there is one record in Late Classical Latin as santalium (clearly borrowed from the Greek), but when Constantinus Africanus used it as sandalus | sandalum in the late 11th century the word had been absent in Latin for over six centuries, or more exactly the books' author does not know of a surviving record from all those intervening centuries. Many records are in later medieval Latin. The medieval Arabs used sandalwood in medicine (e.g.) and that was copied by the late medieval Latins (e.g.). As a reflection of the widespread later-medieval use of sandalwood the word is in late medieval English, German, French, Italian and Iberian Romance languages (all spelling it with a 'd'). Dictionaries deriving the Latin & Western name from the Arabic name include ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, and others, while the dictionary at ref sits on the fence on the question. The scientific or New Latin name for the sandalwood tree genus is Santalum, a wordform that arose as a Renaissance-era re-fashioning from the Greek, says CNRTL.
  5. 1 2 Many medieval Arabic dictionaries, including the al-Sihāh dictionary dated about 1003, have قند qand defined firstly as the juice or honey of sugar cane. Secondly they define qand as this juice solidified. Arabic qandī = "from qand" or "of qand". In medieval Arabic texts qand is a somewhat frequent word. But qandī is very hard to find. Although qandī is very rare in the texts, qandī is usually preferred to qand as the parent of the European "candy" for phonetic and syntactic reasons. Candy's earliest known dates in the European languages: French candi = 1256; Italian-Latin çucari canti (sugar candy) = soon after 1259; Anglo-Latin candy = 1274; Italian candi = 1310; Spanish cande = 1325–1326; Netherlands Dutch candijt and candi = 2nd half of 14th century; German kandith = probably circa 1400, German zuckerkandyt = 1470; English candy = circa 1420. An English-to-Latin dictionary dated circa 1440 has English sukyr candy translated as Latin sucura de candia. The word is rare in English until the later 16th century. Refs: Baheth.info, CNRTL.fr, MED, TLIO, Vocabolario Ligure, CORDE, Raja Tazi, Egymologiebank.nl, NED, Promptorium parvulorum. See also history of sugar.
  6. ↑ An ancient Sanskrit text called Arthashastra has word khanda meaning cane sugar made in a certain way – The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914, by J.H. Galloway, year 1989, page 20. Khanda in Sanskritic has a broad meaning of "broken" and is used as a qualifier on sugars in India still today – Yule & Burnell, year 1903. It has the potential to have been the parent of the Persian qand = "sugar". In subtle contrast, medieval Arabic qand more often meant "the juice or honey of sugar cane" (www.Baheth.info). The Arabic qand was probably from the Persian qand, in view of the historical diffusion evidence that sugar cultivation spread from India into Iran and then went from Iran into the Arabic-speaking countries. The historical diffusion evidence is reported in the chapter "The Origin and Expansion of Sugar Production in the Islamic World" in the book Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam, by Tsugitaka Sato, year 2014; and reported likewise in J.H. Galloway's book page 24.
  7. ↑ For the meaning of qīrāt in medieval Arabic see ḳīrāṭ @ Brill's Encyclopaedia of Islam, First Edition, Volume 4 page 1024 and قيراط @ Baheth.info. In the early records of the word carat in medieval French and English, it referred to the purity of gold, most often of gold coins, and is seen additionally as a unit of weight only later on – ref: DMF, ref: MED. The French and English came from Italian. The first known records in the West are in Italian-Latin and Italian in the mid-13th century – CNRTL.fr, TLIO, Minervini anno 2012 page 20-21. For five centuries before 1250, no State or kingdom in Western Christendom issued gold coins, except for a few short-lived, relatively minor issuances in Iberia and Sicily (for details on the exceptions see Ref). Silver was the metal of choice for money in the West in those centuries. Starting in 1252 in Republic of Genoa, 1252 in Republic of Florence, and 1284 in Republic of Venice, the Italian city-states started issuing 24-carat gold coins. These were well received, and other States soon followed their example, including France in 1290 and England in 1344. During the five centuries prior to 1250, gold coins were almost continually minted by the Arabs and the Byzantine Greeks. During those centuries in both Arabic and Greek the word carat was in use in the sense of 1/24th of a gold coin; i.e., Arabic qīrāt was 1/24th of the Arabic dinar and Greek keration was 1/24th of the Greek bezant. It is possible that the Italians borrowed the word from both Arabic and Greek concurrently. Greater details on the word's history are at English Words That Are Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note #49.
  8. ↑ Caravanna @ Du Cange's Glossary of Medieval Latin (in Latin). Also caravana @ Niermeyer's Glossary of Medieval Latin.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 More details at CNRTL.fr Etymologie in French language. Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales (CNRTL) is a division of the French National Centre for Scientific Research.
  10. ↑ Arabismi Medievali di Sicilia, by Girolamo Caracausi, year 1983 on page 157 (in Italian).
  11. ↑ Carovana @ Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (TLIO).
  12. ↑ Caravane @ Dictionnaire du Moyen Français, Caravane @ Godefroy's Dictionnaire de l'Ancienne Langue Française, Carvan @ Middle English Dictionary. See also Les emprunts arabes et grecs dans le lexique français d’Orient (XIIIe-XIVe siècles), by Laura Minervini, year 2012, on pages 21-22.
  13. ↑ Al-karawiyā = "caraway" is in medieval general-purpose dictionaries in Arabic (www.Baheth.info), and it is mentioned multiple times by the author of the 10th century Nabataean Agriculture (ref), and dozens of times in the cookery book of Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq (flourished 10th century) (ref), and it occurs in the medical books of Al-Razi (died c. 930) (ref) and Ibn Sina (died 1037) (ref), and in the geography book of Ibn Hawqal (died 988) (ref), and in the agriculture book of Ibn al-'Awwam (died not long after 1200) (ref), and other medieval Arabic writers (ref). Ibn al-'Awwam in Andalusia in the late 12th century described how to grow a crop of caraway seeds. An Arabic cookery book from 13th century Andalusia has dozens of recipes that use caraway seeds as a spice (ref, ref). From the Andalusian Arabic, medieval Spanish and Catalan had alcarahueya | alcarauia | alcarauea = "caraway" (starting year 1250 per Corominas). Modern Spanish is alcaravea. Medieval Sicilian Italian had caruya | caruye = "caraway" with date before 1312 (ref: Caracausi) and its word-form shows it is undoubtedly from the Arabic. Medieval Latin carui | carvi = "caraway" appears to have come at least in part from the same Arabic, but there is a question and lack of clarity about this because classical Greek karo | karon | karos, classical Latin careum and medieval Latin caruum | carea designated various aromatic seeds, among different writers, and in most cases it is not clear what species the writer was referring to. In the classical records the name is uncommon and the species it names is never clear. For example Dioscorides in Greek in the 1st century AD said "Karo[s] is a... little seed.... It has much the same nature as anise. The boiled root is edible as a vegetable." – ref, ref. Many aromatic seeds (including caraway) can be fitted to that statement within the botanical family Apiaceae. The book A History of the Principal Drugs of Vegetable Origin (year 1879) reports about caraway: "It is not noticed by St. Isidore, archbishop of Seville in the 7th century, though he mentions fennel, dill, coriander, anise, and parsley [all in the Apiaceae family]; nor is it named by St. Hildegard in Germany in the 12th century. Neither have we found any reference to it in the Anglo-Saxon Herbarium of Apuleius, written circa A.D. 1050, or in other works of the same period, though cumin, anise, fennel, and dill are all mentioned. On the other hand, in two German medicine-books of the 12th and 13th centuries... and in a Welsh medicine book of the 13th century... the seeds appear to have been in use [medicinally]. Caraway was certainly in use in England at the close of the 14th century [culinarily]." – ref. Carui = "caraway" occurs more than a dozen times in the influential Latin medical writer Constantinus Africanus (died c. 1087) who took the bulk of his content from Arabic medical sources – ref. The records for caraway in Christian Western Europe grow briskly from the 12th century onward while being absent in Latin in the medieval centuries before Constantinus. This can be taken as one sign that the word arrived from the Arabic. As another sign, late medieval English has it as caraway, also carwy, and the first record in English is carewy (1282), and these English wordforms do not exhibit Latin parentage: The letter 'w' was created to represent a sound that does not occur in Latin (Latin texts do not use the letter 'w' except in some Germanic names) and the words of the English language with the letter 'w' are rarely of Latin descent. Middle English Dictionary has a set of examples of caraway in late medieval English.
  14. ↑ Regarding "carob", medieval Arabic had two spellings, kharrūb and kharnūb. Both spellings are listed by medieval Arabic dictionaries. A medical encyclopedia in Latin by Matthaeus Silvaticus dated 1317 listed the Latin spellings karnub, carnub, karubia, carrubia, currubia – ref. A very early Latin record, from the 11th century, is reported at CNRTL.fr. The Arabic kharrūb has predecessors in ancient Assyrian and early medieval Syriac as ḫarūbu | ḥarūb = "carob" – ḫarūbu @ Assyrian (Akkadian) Dictionary and ḥrwb @ Aramaic (Syriac) Dictionary.
  15. ↑ When borrowing a word from Persian whose last letter was ـه h, medieval Arabic tended to change the last letter to q or j. Some medieval examples are in Lammens, year 1890 page 103. This is evidence that Persian terminal ـه h was pronounced "hard" in Arabic.
  16. ↑ Reported in "An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language" by Walter W. Skeat (year 1888). Downloadable at Archive.org.
  17. 1 2 Glossaire des mots espagnols et portugais dérivés de l'arabe by R. Dozy & W.H. Engelmann. 430 pages. Published in 1869.
  18. ↑ Medieval Italian sacco documented in Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (TLIO).
  19. ↑ Dictionnaire du Moyen Français has a collection of examples from late medieval French.
  20. ↑ Documentos lingüisticos catalanes, s. X-XII, by Luis Rubio García, year 1979, word escachs. Date of the first record of escac is 1045, per Diccionari.cat (in Catalan).
  21. ↑ Nathan Bailey's English Dictionary in year 1726 defined zero as "a word used for cypher or nought especially by the French" – ref. Samuel Johnson's English Dictionary in 1755 and 1785 did not include the word zero at all. The usual names for zero in English from the late medieval period until well into the 19th century were "nought" and "cifre" | "cipher" – ref1a, ref1b, ref2a, ref2b, ref3. Meanwhile, the use of "cipher" & "decipher" to mean "encrypt" & "decrypt" started in English in the 16th century, borrowed from French – ref.
  22. ↑ The geography book of Al-Masudi (died 956) said the perfume zabād was taken from a cat-like animal in India. The geography book of Shams al-Din al-Ansari al-Dimashqi (died 1327) said the African civet produced better zabād than the Indies' civets. Those statements by Al-Masudi and al-Dimashqi were noted in Remarques sur les mots français dérivés de l'arabe, by Henri Lammens, year 1890. Zabād is closely related in form to the Arabic زبد zabad = "foam" but is not necessarily derived from it.
  23. ↑ The "musk seed" or "abelmosk" plant is native to tropical Asia and requires a long growing season (ref). It was in irrigated cultivation in Egypt in the late 16th and early 17th centuries and that was when European taxonomists got specimens of it from Egypt and adopted the name from Egypt – ref: Etymologisches Wörterbuch der botanischen Pflanzennamen, by Helmut Genaust, year 1996. The Latin botanist Prospero Alpini (died 1617) visited Egypt in the 1580s. He called the plant "Abelmosch", "Aegyptii Mosch", and "Bammia Muschata", where بامية bāmiya is Arabic for okra, aka Abelmoschus esculentus, mosch is Latin for musk, Aegypti is Latin for Egypt, and Abel is an Italian-Latin representation of Arabic habb el- = "seed" – De Plantis Exoticis, by Prospero Alpini (in Latin, published 1629). It is written "hab el mosch " in De Plantis Aegyptiis Observationes et Notae ad Prosperum Alpinum, by Johann Veslingius, in Latin, year 1638.
  24. 1 2 Book: All About Coffee, by William H. Ukers (year 1922), chapter 1 "Dealing with the Etymology of Coffee" and chapter 3 "Early History of Coffee Drinking". According to this book, coffee-drinking as we know it has its earliest reliable record in mid-15th-century Yemen. It arrived in Cairo in the early 16th, and became widespread in the Ottoman Empire during the 16th. It arrived in Western Europe in the early 17th. The earliest European importers were Venetians who used the word caffè (1615), from Turkish kahve. The predominance of Venetians in the seaborne trade between the Ottoman Empire and the West helped this word (and derivations from it) prevail in the West. Most dictionaries say English coffee (and Dutch koffie) is from the Venetian/Italian but some judge it to be independently from the Turkish.
  25. ↑ Book The Italian Cotton Industry in the Later Middle Ages, by Maureen Fennell Mazzaoui (Cambridge University Press 1981), Chapter I: "Cotton cultivation in the ancient and medieval world" and Chapter II: "The Mediterranean cotton trade 1100–1600".
  26. ↑ Examples of قرمز qirmiz and قرمزي qirmizī in medieval Arabic writers meaning cochineal crimson dye or a thing dyed with this dye: Texts by Al-Razi (died c. 930), Ibn Duraid (died c. 933), Al-Istakhri (died c. 957) (قرمز on page 40), Al-Biruni (died 1048), Ibn Sida (died 1066), Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) (قرمز on page 664).
  27. ↑ Early 14th century Italian carmesi | chermisi | cremesi came directly from Arabic qirmizī in the Eastern Mediterranean in the late 13th and early 14th century. Most early records in Italian explicitly involve the Eastern Mediterranean, including trade with the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia. The word in all other European languages came from Italian. This is demonstrable from the chronological order of the records, and the various wordforms found, and the words' usages. In late medieval usages in Europe there was a close association between the word and the crimson-dyed silk cloths made in Italy. The word appears in several word-forms. The documentation of the word-forms and the dating of when they start to show up in the late medieval Latinate languages is reviewed in detail in English Words Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note 59.
  28. ↑ Cremesin + crimsin @ Middle English Dictionary, and crimson @ New English Dictionary on Historical Principles.
  29. ↑ Ibn al-Baitar said كركم kurkum is a root that is brought from the East Indies and produces a saffron-like yellow dye; he also said kurkum can alternatively mean the yellow root of the Mediterranean plant Chelidonium majus – ref, ref. An early record of the word in Latin is in a medical dictionary dated 1292, Synonyma Medicinae by Simon of Genoa, where curcuma is said to be a yellow root that can be used to dye clothes and is said to come from a Chelidonium-type plant – ref. A mix-up in meaning between Curcuma root and Chelidonia root was present in the definition of the name "curcuma" in late medieval Latin. The mix-up was noted in the early-16th-century Latin pharmacy book Antidotarium by Pseudo-Mesué – ref. In English the early records are in medical books and two examples from at or before 1425 are in the Middle English Dictionary: Example 1, Example 2.
  30. ↑ In French, Italian and Spanish the word for damask is the same as the word for Damascus. In late medieval English the city name Damascus was often written Damask. Some history for the English words "damask", "damask rose", "damaskeen", etc., and "damson", is in A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (year 1897). The late medieval European "damask" fabric was a costly decorated fabric which was usually but not necessarily of silk. The fabric-name damask is present in the 14th century in French, English, Catalan, Italian, and Latin, and it seems to be absent earlier than the 14th – ref, ref, ref, ref (and ref cf.). The term "damask steel", "damascus steel" and "damascening (metals)" has a 16th-century introduction date and it is a metaphorical extension from the damask textile fabric, notwithstanding that Damascus had a reputation for steel-making with a prior history; "Damascus Steel in Legend and in Reality" (year 1965). With regard to the textile fabric, the city of Damascus in the later medieval centuries had a reputation for high-quality silk brocades (e.g.: quote from year 1154). In Europe, probably starting in Italian, "traders fastened the name of damascen or damask upon every silken fabric richly wrought and curiously designed, no matter whether it came or not from Damascus" (1911 Encyclopædia Britannica). A word for plain silk that is in most of the Arabic medieval dictionaries is dimaqs. The Arabic medieval dictionaries do not have dimashq (Damascus) for any kind of fabric. At least one of them does have dimashq for the damask rose. See دمقس and دمشق @ Baheth.info.
  31. ↑ An Arabic technical dictionary entitled Mafātīḥ al-ʿulūm ("Keywords of the Sciences"), dated 10th century (ref for date), defined al-iksīr as "a preparation which, when cooked together with a molten body, turns the molten body into gold or silver or into some other body of white or yellow color" – ref (in Arabic), ref (in Arabic). The same word is defined in the same way in the 11th century Book of Precious Stones by Al-Biruni – مكتبة-المصطفى.com. More examples of al-iksīr in medieval Arabic are in Ref and Ref.
  32. ↑ Etymology at: Erg and Hamada (in French). Definition of hamada in a geology dictionary at ref (in English).
  33. ↑ An Intro to Sabkhas. Also A Proposed Formal Definition for Sabkha.
  34. ↑ In medieval Arabic fenek | fanak could be any mammal species whose pelts were used to make fur coats for humans and most often these were species of the weasel family. CNRTL.fr, Devic, Dozy & Engelmann.
  35. ↑ The idea that Western calibre = "gun-barrel size" comes etymologically from Arabic qālib = "mold" is an old idea which can be found in Gilles Ménage's Dictionnaire Etymologique year 1694. Most dictionaries still adhere to this idea today and the majority of them say the transmission to the West was through Italian. That has the weakness that the word is not attested in Italian until 1606 whereas it is in French as calibre or qualibre in 1523 (ref: page 73), 1546 (ref), 1547 (ref), 1548 (ref), 1549 (ref), 1550 (ref: page 77), 1552 as qualibrée meaning "calibrated" (ref), 1553 (ref), and a large and growing number of times later in the 16th century in French; and in English in 1567, 1588, 1591 and onward (ref); and in German starting in 1603 (ref). The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology by Robert K. Barnhart says "Italian calibro (1606) and Spanish calibre (1594) appear too late to act as intermediate forms between Middle French and Arabic qalib", but goes on to say Middle French calibre probably did come from the Arabic somehow. Likewise the Spanish Diccionario RAE and the Catalan Diccionari.cat say their word calibre is from the French which in turn is, or perhaps is, from Arabic qālib. Evidence is very scant for transmission of Arabic qālib = "mold" to French calibre by any route. Hence the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles says the French word is "of uncertain origin". English Words Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note #168 has many details about the early history of the French word, and argues that the word did not come from Arabic and instead probably came from Latin qua libra = "of what weight, of what balance".
  36. ↑ Arabismi Medievali di Sicilia by Girolamo Caracausi, year 1983 (in Italian), on pages 160-161. Documents the medieval Sicilian carraba = "glass carafe", which has records in 1330, 1340, 1348, 1373, 1380, 1450, 1455, and 1459. With regard to the origin of the Sicilian carraba, Girolamo Caracausi invokes a Persian word قرابه qarāba meaning a carafe-like vessel. But the Persian word is not documented in Arabic, and it would need be in Arabic to be the source for the Sicilian carraba. Another hypothesis is Arabic قربة qirba = "large bottle made of leather", well documented in medieval Arabic, which conceivably might have had an oral variant form قربة qaraba | qiraba, but is semantically somewhat off-target.
  37. ↑ Gharrāf meaning a carafe or jug is on record in Arabic in the later 19th century – ref: Henri Lammens, year 1890. But that Arabic word has to be suspected as borrowed from Europe because there is no known record in Arabic at a sufficiently early date. Gharāfa is not documented in Arabic until the 19th century, which is around 500 years after the start of documents for the Scilian Italian carraba = "carafe" in 1330, and around 350 years after the start of the northern Italian caraffa in 1499. There is a well-documented medieval Arabic verb غرف gharf meaning to scoop up water for a drink, which you can do by cupping your hands together or by using any scooping or lifting tool. The name of the tool has medieval records in Arabic meaning a large spoon or ladle, spelled as a noun gharfa. The meanings of the medieval rootword غرف gharaf and words derived from it are given in Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon Volume 6 and the abbreviations used by Lane's Lexicon are expanded and dated in Volume 1, pages xxx - xxxi, year 1863. Additional old records for gharf and words derived from it are in Dozy's Supplement aux Dictionnaires Arabes Volume 2 and abbreviations used by Dozy's Supplement are expanded and dated in Volume 1 pages xvii - xxix, year 1881. The possibility that Arabic gharfa was the source for European "carafe" is discussed in Dozy's Glossaire, year 1869.
  38. ↑ Lexicon of medieval Ligurian-Latin, Vocabolario Ligure Parte 1, by Sergio Aprosio, year 2001, has 12th & early 13th century Ligurian-Latin carraca | caraca on page 222 (abbreviations defined on page 25).
  39. ↑ That the carrack sailing-ship name originated in maritime Italy is noted by the Spanish carraca @ Diccionario RAE and the French carraque @ CNRTL.fr. In England one of the earliest known records, year 1383, says in Latin: "a certain big ship, called Carrak of Genoa" – carike @ Middle English Dictionary.
  40. ↑ Classic Ships of Islam, by Dionisius Agius, year 2007, says there is insufficient evidence to reach any conclusion about whether a ship-name in use in medieval Arabic was the parent of the medieval Latinate carraca ship-name. Carrack @ Yule & Burnell (year 1903) mentions three possibilities for the origin of the medieval Latinate carraca and says each is possible. Carrack @ NED says the medieval word is "of uncertain origin".
  41. ↑ "Cork" in the Middle English Dictionary.
  42. ↑ Since the English "cork" meant bulk cork bark from its earliest records (ref: MED), the parent of English "cork" can have been the medieval Spanish corcho = "cork bark", and not the medieval Spanish alcorque = "slipper shoe made of cork". Spanish alcorque never meant "cork" – ref (pages 66-67). Looking at it phonetically there is not much to prefer between CORTCH-O and AL-COR-GAY as a parent for English CORK. The classical Latin cortex (cortic-) = "bark of any tree" produced today's Spanish corteza = "bark of any tree" and also produced today's Portuguese cortiça = "bark of the cork tree exclusively", while the classical Latin suber meaning exclusively "cork bark" produced today's Portuguese súber = "bark of any tree". Spanish pancho is from Latin pantex, Spanish ocho and dicho from Latin octo and dictus, Spanish percha from Latin pertica, Spanish capacho from Latin capax, Spanish mucho from Latin multus, all without Arabic intermediation, and corcho is adjudged to be similarly evolved from cortex by Dozy, Diez, Corominas, DRAE, and other Spanish experts. The Spanish almadreña = "wooden clog shoes" has no precedent in Arabic writings, and instead it is purely Spanish madreña | madereña, from Spanish madera = "wood", from a classical Latin word for wood, with "al-" prefixed in Spanish alone – Dozy and Engelmann page 372. The same may be the case with Spanish alcorques = "cork slipper shoes" in view of its absence in medieval Arabic writers. An Arabic–Latin dictionary written in Spain by an anonymous native Spanish speaker during the late 13th century (estimated date) contains an Arabic قرق qorq translated as Latin sotular (English "shoe") – Vocabulista in Arabico. But the medieval writings by native-Arabic-speakers have huge numbers of records for shoes, sandals, slippers and boots, and have no qorq shoe. An Etymological Dictionary of the Romance Languages, by Freidrich Diez, year 1864, has the minority view that alcorque derives from the classical Latin cortex by a Spanish-only path on which the letter 't' was deleted. In Catalan the usual word for "bark of any tree" is escorça, which comes with deletion of 't' from the classical Latin cortex and/or classical Latin scortea = "tough outer skin, or leather". After 't' is deleted, comparable evolutions would include today's Spanish pliegue from classical Latin plex, Spanish pulga from classical Latin pulex, Spanish estoraque from Latin storax, Spanish bosque from Latin boscus.
  43. ↑ "Drub" in New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (year 1897).
  44. ↑ The medieval Arabic dictionaries' definitions of farfār | farfara are at فرفر | فرفار @ Baheth.info and Lane's Lexicon page 2357. This proposed Arabic source-word for the Spanish fanfarria and fanfarrón was reported by Gilles Ménage in his Dictionnaire Etymologique back in year 1670 – ref. Today it is contemplated but not fully endorsed at fanfarrón @ RAE.es , farfante @ RAE.es , fanfaron @ CNRTL.fr , fanfaronade @ American Heritage Dictionary and fanfare @ Etymonline.com.
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