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It comes from the Old French “persone,” which is itself a French borrowing of the Latin “ persona.”Ĩ.

Person: “Person” is another English word with both Latin and French origins. War: According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “war” comes from the Old North French word “werre.” Prior to this borrowing, “Old English had many poetic words for “war” (wig, guð, heaðo, hild, all common in personal names), but the usual one to translate Latin bellum was gewin “struggle, strife.”ħ. French, in turn, borrowed the word from the Latin “scientia,” meaning “knowledge.”Ħ.

Science comes to English directly from Old French. They, their and them: These pronouns come from the Old Norse “þeir,” and replace older the older plural pronouns hie, hire and heora.ĥ. Sky, from an Old Norse word meaning “cloud,” replaced the Anglo-Saxon “heofon” around 1300.Ĥ. Leg : If English hadn’t borrowed the Old Norse “ leggr,” we might still call our lower limbs “shanks.”Ģ. Some loanwords are easy to spot, like “entrepreneur.” Others have become so embedded in the English language that you might be surprised to learn they were borrowed. Latin is the largest source of loanwords overall, but French is the most significant source of new loanwords. Latin and French are the most important sources of loanwords. We English speakers like to pretend that English is the center of the universe, but do you know how many of the words we use every day were borrowed from other languages?Īccording to, if you open up an English dictionary, approximately 80 percent of the words inside were originally borrowed from another language.