__NOTOC__ 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.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. 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 List of English words of Arabic origin (A–B) List of English words of Arabic origin (C–F) List of English words of Arabic origin (G–J) List of English words of Arabic origin (K–M) List of English words of Arabic origin (N–S) List of English words of Arabic origin (T–Z) List of English words of Arabic origin: Addenda for certain specialist vocabularies
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". Among the Latins the records begin in the late 9th century (with spelling cafora) though records are scarce until the 12th century.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. 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.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. Ultimately, camphor is derived from the Sanskrit karpūra, referring to camphor throughout India since ancient times.
candy قند qand + قندي qandī (), sugared. Cane sugar developed in ancient India. Medieval Persian qand = "cane sugar" is believed to have probably come from Sanskritic.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. 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.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.
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.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 pages 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.