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List of English Words from India
The English language comprises a hodgepodge of words borrowed from all over the globe, and a wide variety of those loanwords hail from the languages of India. Many Indian-origin words were adopted into English during the time of British colonialism in India, but some words came from India even earlier after traveling northwest across Asia and Europe through ancient trading routes such as the Silk Road. The following list of English words of Indian origin is not exhaustive; it focuses on words whose Indian roots are less readily apparent or whose etymologies trace illuminating histories of encounter, trade, adoption, and adaptation.
Avatar
From the Sanskrit word avatāra, meaning “descent,” an avatar in Hinduism is a physical embodiment of a Hindu deity, typically Vishnu, who incarnates on earth to counteract evil. This term was adopted and adapted in the modern digital age to mean an online graphic representation of a computer user—a digital avatar. In this sense, the original notion that a god takes on a human form is flipped: A human’s digital alter ego is an avatar in an abstract nonhuman world. Humans become like unto gods in heaven, and the online realm becomes the new world into which they send their avatars. The Avatar series of movies redeploys this concept to describe genetically engineered bodies that allow humans to incarnate as extraterrestrials.
Bungalow
A bungalow is a single-story house with a sloping roof, usually small and often surrounded by a veranda (the word veranda, as discussed below, has a mixed Indian and European heritage). The name derives from a Hindi word baṅgaliyā, meaning “a house in the Bengali style,” and came into English during the era of the British administration of India. The bungalow became a popular residential architectural style in the early 20th century in the United States and took on unique forms in cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles.
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Candy
Candy, the joy of many kids’ (and adults’) taste buds, has an ancient history, and the word has ancient Indian roots. Egyptian hieroglyphics indicate that the art of sugar confectionery was established at least 3,000 years ago. During the Middle Ages the Persians spread sugarcane cultivation, developed refining methods, and began to make a sugar-based candy. The word candy comes from the Sanskrit word khaṇḍa (“piece,” “fragment,” or “candied sugar”), which was then passed north and west through Persian as kand (“a piece of sugar”), and then Arabic as qand, before eventually reaching Europe. The word sugar, too, is from India, as discussed in this list below.
Calico
Calico is an all-cotton fabric woven in plain, or tabby, weave and printed with simple designs in one or more colors. The fabric originated in India in the 11th century, if not earlier, and was mentioned by the Jain scholar Hemachandra in the 12th century. The oldest surviving fragments of calico are from the 15th century and were found in al-Fusṭāṭ, a neighborhood of Cairo, illustrating the extent of the trade in this fabric and style. The word calico is derived from Calicut, the colonial-era name of what is now known as Kozhikode, a city on the western Malabar Coast in Kerala. Kozhikode was highly regarded as a center of cotton weaving. It was acknowledged as the origin of the distinctive calico cloth that became a major export from India to Europe beginning in the 17th century. These prints also lent their name to calico cats.
Cashmere
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the word cashmere, the renowned material for sweaters and shawls, comes from the region of Kashmir (Sanskrit: Kaśmīra) in northwestern India. Cashmere is made from the wool of cashmere goats. Cashmere is expensive because these goats produce a limited amount of this precious fiber, found on their underbellies, and the process of obtaining the wool is labor-intensive. Cashmere wool was initially used for Kashmiri shawls and became popular as a fabric for other sorts of clothing in Europe, such as sweaters. Although the word cashmere is sometimes incorrectly applied to extremely soft wools, only the product of the cashmere goat is true cashmere.
Catamaran
Beloved among many sailing enthusiasts, catamarans are distinctive multihulled sailing boats that owe their name’s origin to Tamil. In Tamil kaṭṭu-maram means “tied wood” and refers to watercraft made of logs tied together. These boats were first developed in Indonesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia and later adopted in southeastern India along the Coromandel Coast. European sailors during the colonial period were intrigued by this unique design that made the sailboats lightweight and quick while still providing stability. In the 20th century shipbuilders in the West refined the technology into modern swift and fancy versions. Catamarans’ speed makes them popular craft for professional sailboat racing.
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Chintz
Chintz is a plain-woven, printed or solid-color, glazed cotton fabric, frequently a highly glazed printed calico. Whereas calico derives from a city’s name, chintz derives from the nature of the fabric’s decoration. It ultimately comes from the Sanskrit word chitra, meaning “spotted” or “bright-colored,” which is also found in Hindi. The word chintzy, meaning cheap or gaudy, first appears in a letter written by the English Victorian novelist George Eliot to her sister in 1851. Chintz fabric became so common in England in the 19th century that the material came to be associated with cheap fast fashion.
Cheetah
That the name for these fast felines, which primarily inhabit Africa, comes from India might be surprising (as it was to this Britannica editor). The word cheetah comes from the same root as chintz: Sanskrit chitra, meaning “spotted.” Mughal-era sources mention these cats as cītāhs, and variations of that name are common in modern languages across India. In India cheetahs were used as companions for game hunting, and the Mughal emperor Akbar is said to have had 9,000 cheetahs in stables. Cheetahs once ranged across Asia and Africa, but today they are almost extinct in Asia; only a small pocket remains in northeastern Iran. In India they went from being favored hunting partners to, under the British, being hunted as game. By the 1950s, because of hunting and habitat loss, cheetahs had become completely extinct in India.
Ginger
Ginger’s generic name, Zingiber, is derived from the Greek zingiberis, which comes from the Sanskrit name of the spice, śṛṅgavera (or shringavera; “horn-shaped”) and the Prakrit siṅgabera. Its use in India and China has been known from ancient times, and by the 1st century ce spice traders had taken ginger into the Mediterranean region. By the 11th century it was well known in England. Spanish traders later brought it to the West Indies and Mexico. Now it appears in medicines, foods, and other products. It is a main feature of classic items such as ginger ale and gingerbread.
Juggernaut
The English word juggernaut—referring to a massive and unstoppable force, campaign, movement, or object—comes from the Hindu deity Jagannatha and his Rathayatra, a chariot festival in Puri, Odisha, on the eastern coast of India. Beginning in the 19th century, British colonial rulers and observers regarded Hindu practice as satanic. As the massive chariots of the Rathayatra carrying Jagannatha and his siblings rolled through the streets, they sometimes accidentally crushed devotees, and the British colonial observers wrongly interpreted this act as religious suicide. British writers’ disdainful accounts of the Rathayatra led, metonymically, to a pejorative sense of a juggernaut as a massive crushing vehicle, which was later extrapolated to its present meaning in English usage.
Jungle
The tropical world is full of jungles, but the word jungle itself is from Sanskrit, jaṅgala (through Hindi jaṅgal), meaning a desert or wasteland area. This meaning is somewhat different from the tropical forested area often understood by the term today. By the middle of the 19th century, jungle had been adopted from Hindi into English and had come to mean a tangled collection of trees and vegetation. It later came to include a sense of untamed or lawless land. Rudyard Kipling’s classic collection of stories The Jungle Book (1894) was based partially upon his experiences in British India.
Khaki
Now nearly synonymous with dress-casual men’s pants, khaki means “dust-colored” in Hindi and Urdu (derived from Persian khāk, “dust”). Khaki uniforms were introduced in 1848 for British colonial troops in India and were found to be especially effective for field service and battle. Khaki thereafter served as the official color for uniforms of British armies, native and colonial, in India. The color for clothing later spread across the world under that name in both military and civilian use. Khaki pants became popular menswear in the 1950s, and the style was further developed in the 1980s by Levi Strauss & Co. under the Dockers trade name. English-speakers could have just called the color tan, or maybe beige, but the Hindi-Urdu word, as the idiom goes, has had legs.
Lac and lacquer
Lac, a resinous substance used for decorations, is made from the secretion of the tiny lac insect, Laccifer lacca. As early as about 1200 bce, lac products were being used in India as plastic and decorative materials. Lacquer is a particular type of varnish that is usually made from lac. The words lac and lacquer come from the Sanskrit for this substance, lākṣā. During the 17th century, after traders had introduced lac dye and, later, shellac to Europe, lac became commercially important there. Eventually, lac products came to be used in most of the industrialized countries of the world.
Loot
A word commonly associated with pirates, loot comes from the Hindi word lūṭ and, before that, from the Sanskrit verb root luṇṭ, meaning “to steal, rob, or plunder.” Loot is among the first words of Indian origin to enter English during the colonial period, beginning in the late 18th century. It became popular at the same time as the British East India Company was, in effect, looting India. As the historian William Dalrymple explains in a 2015 article on loot and colonialism for The Guardian, the East India Company extracted copious amounts of wealth and items of value from India and the Mughal Empire. One world-famous example of an item of value allegedly looted from India is the Koh-i-noor diamond. It has been part of the British crown since 1849, but it has been a source of controversy because of Indian claims and evidence that it was stolen.
Madras print
Like the word calico this popular and colorful plaid design is derived from the name of a city in India: Madras. Madras is now known as Chennai, a major city on India’s southeast coast in Tamil Nadu state. A village called Madraspatnam was settled by English traders in 1639 and eventually grew into the major trading port of Madras. Along the Coromandel Coast, fishermen wear lungis—cotton cloths folded and tied at the waist—that are made of handwoven muslin and dyed in checks of multiple colors. By the 17th century Madras was a major hub of textile production and exporter of textiles in this style. It quickly became popular worldwide. By the 1950s Madras print in the United States had become a popular style for Ivy League students, gentleman’s business attire, and leisurely vacation wear.
Mantra
The modern American uses of the Sanskrit word mantra exhibit slight shifts in meaning that speak volumes about cultural priorities. In Hinduism and Buddhism, a mantra is a sacred utterance (syllable, word, or verse) that is considered to possess mystical or religious efficacy. To utter a mantra is to effect change in the world and invoke, praise, or contemplate upon a deity. But in modern English parlance, mantra has come to mean a person or group’s representative phrase, similar to a slogan or a watchword. Divorced from religion and redeployed in a secular context, a mantra became a phrase that symbolizes a personal or group identity. Alternatively, in self-help or business productivity contexts, a mantra sometimes indicates a positive and effective way of thinking about and achieving a personal or commercial goal.
Mogul
Speaking of business, the word mogul, commonly used to describe wealthy leaders of corporations, comes from the Mughals. The Mughals were a Muslim dynasty of Turkic-Mongol origin that ruled most of northern India from the early 16th to the mid-18th century. The Mongolian word mongyol, the name for a people from what is now Mongolia, became mughul in Persian. The India-based Mughals traced their history to the Mongols, such as Genghis Khan. The height of Mughal power in India coincided with the arrival of European colonizers in India, and the Mughals were admired for their wealth and dominance, leading to their name’s broader application as a term for the rich and powerful.
Mongoose
The mongoose, the classic enemy of snakes, has nothing to do with geese. The word mongoose refers to any of nearly three dozen species of small mammalian carnivores found mainly in Africa but also in southern Asia and southern Europe. The word for these creatures likely comes from the Marathi word for them, muṁgūsa. It developed from the Prakrit word for them, maṁgūsa, and it might even have older Dravidian roots. The mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is a well-known character from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894).
Musk
Musk is a substance obtained from the male musk deer that has a penetrating, persistent odor and is used in perfumes. In India and parts of East Asia, it is thought to be an aphrodisiac. Musk is obtained from the musk pod, a preputial gland in a pouch, or sac, under the skin of the abdomen of the male musk deer. The word musk comes from the Sanskrit word muṣka (“testicle” or “scrotum”), which is a diminutive form of mūṣa (“mouse”); thus muṣka refers to this deer’s body part but literally means “little mouse.” (The same Proto-Indo-European root gives us the word muscle, from the Latin musculus, also a diminutive form of “mouse.”) The word muṣka and the scent it referred to wafted from Sanskrit into Persian, then into Greek, Latin, French, and finally into English by the 14th century.
Orange
Nothing rhymes with orange, but if you peel it back etymologically, you end up with a Sanskrit seed. The word orange comes from the Sanskrit word nāraṅga, which then entered Persian as nārang, Arabic as nāranj, Spanish as naranja, Old Occitan as auranja, and from there the word reached English and first appeared in 1532. Oranges originated in ancient times in Asia in the region of northeastern India, southern China, and the Malay Peninsula. Cultivation of citrus spread across this region and reached Africa, Arabia, and southeastern Europe through trade routes as early as the Roman Empire for the lemon (Citrus limon), and the sour orange (C. aurantium) variety came to Europe with Arab traders beginning in the 10th century. The sweet orange (C. sinensis) arrived in Europe by the 15th century. The color followed the fruit: One of the earliest records of orange as a color in English is from an English statute on the manufacture and sale of woolen cloth dated 1557–58.
Pariah
The word pariah is an offensive term in India, but in American and British English it is often used to refer to a person or entity (such as a state) that has been ostracized from a group. The term derives from a Tamil name for members of a particular lower-caste group within Hindu Indian society. These lower-caste groups were formerly known as “untouchables” but are now called Dalits or Scheduled Castes. The word pariah is derived from the Tamil word paraiyar, “drummer,” and once referred to the Paraiyans, a Tamil caste group of laborers and village servants of low caste. The term was then extended to include multiple groups outside the upper castes. The word pariah in English maintains the sense of social exclusion informed by a negative ethical judgment of social value. But, because pariah refers pejoratively to a specific caste group that has faced oppression, it is generally suggested that the word should be avoided, especially in India where its caste-related origin is more proximate.
Pepper
The pepper trade between Europe and India has an ancient history dating back to the time of ancient Greece and Rome. According to researchers, the word pepper ultimately derives from Sanskrit pippali, which refers to a long pepper (Piper longum) and was later conflated with black pepper (P. nigrum), both of which were grown in India. These peppers are attested to in Greek texts from as early as the 4th century bce, where they appear as péperi. During the Age of Discovery, Europeans brought back from the Americas species of capsicum peppers and chili peppers. They mistook them for the similarly spicy Indian peppers and gave them the same name. Christopher Columbus brought Capsicum annuum seeds back with him from Hispaniola in 1494, thinking he had found Indian pepper. Because of the Columbian Exchange, these peppers that originated in the Americas have become staples of Indian cuisine. As a result of this nomenclature mix-up, red pepper and black pepper are not at all in the same plant family, or even the same taxonomic order, but they share a name derived from Sanskrit—and a great spicy taste.
Punch
Punch, the classic fruit drink, has nothing to do with physical violence, and an Indian origin of the term is often proposed. Some historians suggest that punch is derived from the Hindi word pāñch (from Sanskrit pañcha) for “five,” because it had five ingredients. The association of punch with an Indian origin is attested to in English as early as the 17th century. However, beverage historian David Wondrich, who wrote the book Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl (2010), pokes some holes in this argument and finds the evidence of the origin of the term inconclusive. Either way, let’s not fight about this one—better to drink punch than throw one.
Pajamas
In the United States and England, pajamas are worn to sleep, but in India they are just loose trousers. The word is originally from Persian pā (“leg”) and jāma (“garment”) and was adopted from Persian into Hindi and Urdu in South Asia. About 1870, pajamas surfaced in the Western world as sleeping attire for men, after returning British colonials brought back with them the pajamas worn in India. At the beginning of the 20th century, pajamas were introduced as women’s sleepwear and about 1920 as at-home evening wear. Starting in 1930 English-speakers sometimes used the abbreviated form pj’s, which is nearly an acronym of the original Persian word.
Rice
It is not surprising that the word rice is likely from South Asia since rice (Oryza sativa) is a staple of Indian cuisine. The first known use of rys (as a predecessor of rice) is in Middle English in the 13th century. It likely came from French ris, after Old Italian riso (e.g., risotto), from Greek oryza, a word that was first mentioned by the philosopher Theophrastus, the successor of Aristotle. Greek writers likely encountered the crop through Alexander the Great’s expeditions in India. The Greek word for rice likely came from an Indo-Iranian word. It either derived from a language in eastern Iran or directly from India, the languages of both regions being closely related. The Sanskrit word for rice is vrīhi, and in Dravidian and Old Tamil the term arici is used for husked but uncooked rice. There is also the Proto-Dravidian *war-iñci, which is close to other linguistic reconstructions of eastern Iranian words for rice. Tracking rice forward in time in Europe, after the initial mentions of rice in ancient Greek sources, rice cultivation likely first took firm root in the Iberian peninsula beginning in the 12th and 13th centuries, and the crop quickly spread across the continent.
Shampoo
Whether you use it daily or weekly (or not at all), shampoo is generally an essential item for modern hair care, and the word has nothing to do with either a sham or poo. The word shampoo is derived from the Hindi and Urdu word chāṁpo, an imperative form of the verb chāṁpnā, meaning “to press or knead.” It in turn derives from the Sanskrit verb root chap, which can mean “to caress or soothe” or “to pound or knead.” Closely related etymologically and thematically is the champaka flower (Magnolia champaca), which is used in hair and massage oils as well as perfumes in India and beyond.
Sugar
Despite its derision by dietitians and dentists, it is difficult to deny the delicious satisfaction of sugar. Sugar and sugarcane were likely first domesticated in New Guinea about 8000 bce and then spread through trade routes across Asia. The Sanskrit word for sugar, śarkarā, is akin to the Sanskrit word for gravel or pebble, śarkara, which suggests that the granular form of sugarcane was known from at least the early centuries of the Common Era, with possible cultivation of sugar in India even earlier. The word (and commodity) then passed into Persian as šakar and Arabic as sukkar and then from Arab traders to various European languages. And of course, along with sugar, came the word candy.
Thug
Although “thug life” in modern culture might be most associated with Tupac Shakur, the word thug comes from Hindi ṭhag (“thief”) and, before that, Sanskrit sthaga (“cunning,” “sly,” or “a rogue”). The word refers particularly to thugs, a confederacy of professional assassins who traveled in gangs and practiced thuggee (Hindi: ṭhagī, “robbery”) throughout India for several hundred years. The thugs would insinuate themselves into the confidence of wayfarers and, when a favorable opportunity presented itself, strangle them by throwing a handkerchief or noose around their necks. The British government in India considered these bands of bandits to be a scourge, and in the 1830s they effectively outlawed and eliminated the groups and their thuggish practices. But the word thug as a term for rogues and thieves lived on in English.
Veranda
The last word on this list is itself a hodgepodge of origins possibly combining both Indian and Iberian predecessors. A veranda is an open-walled, roofed porch attached to the exterior of a home and usually surrounded by a railing. The word possibly came into English through the Hindi varandā or baraṇḍā (roofed gallery), but it is also related to the Spanish baranda, meaning “railing,” and possibly entered Hindi via Portuguese explorers of India. It has also been suggested that it might derive from the Sanskrit words varaṇḍa and varaṇḍaka, which can mean a mound of earth or a wall. (That being said, the Sanskrit word for a veranda is niśkāsa.) The full story of this term is unclear, but it appears possible that veranda began as a Spanish or Portuguese word, merged with a Hindi word that had a related architectural meaning, and then was exported back to Europe as a specific architectural style during the colonial era.
Not unlike a veranda with its open railings just outside of a structure—a liminal space neither indoors nor outdoors—languages, too, are permeable and liminal at their outer edges. During moments of cultural encounter, words can be invited onto a new language’s welcoming veranda and sometimes even move into the main home permanently. As this list reveals, English has been a welcoming recipient—though at times also a looter—of many words, commodities, and ideas from India that have transformed daily lives and speech in the Anglophone world.