The plot shows English words of Spanish origin and the number of times each appears in English Wikipedia.

Sources:

Spanish-origin English words were obtained from Wikipedia's List of English words of Spanish origin

Number of mentions was derived from an analysis of English Wikipedia's database dump

Tools: Python, Matplotlib

Some of these are used in Spanish, but are definitely not of Spanish origin, like "chocolate" or "potato", which come from languages spoken in the Americas before the Spanish arrived, but I guess English took them from Spanish after Spanish took them from the native languages.

[removed]

Yes. This is true. Some words originated in another language, were then incorporated into Spanish, and then incorporated into English from Spanish.

This actually appears to be at least half of the words listed. And some, like crimson, come from Arabic as well.

Out of all these words, the one I like saying the most is "potato." It rolls of the tongue.

but, still, flotilla has more mentions than potato

[removed]

I was expecting "armada".

And "guerrilla" is a weird one. It came for a Germanic term, and then it was given back to them.

No it doesn't..

>And the Spanish acquired it from the word "kana:wa", used by the Arawakan indians of the Caribbean islands to describe their boats

Yes, there is a Spanish word and French word that ended up in English, but canoe isn't Spanish.

Same with potato. Taíno is an extinct Arawakan language that was spoken by the Taíno people of the Caribbean.

You are using stolen words from colonial Spain, and pretending they are Spanish that ended up in American English, but they were words for stuff they found in the Americas and their native words.

True origins for those interested:

canoe, potato, savannah, tobacco, hurricane = Arawakan (Hayti/Haiti)
cocoa, chocolate = Nahuatl (Aztecan)
adobe, crimson = Arabic
jade, crusade, tornado, plaza = Vulgar Latin

sidenotes:
"platinum" is Latin, not Spanish (known as "platino") lol
"canyon" is only used in formerly-Mexican-held parts of USA (i.e., not in Spain, Mexico, Latin America or elsewhere)

Words like guerilla, flotilla, and plaza come from all romance languages.

I love how you say “cocoa” and we say “cacao”

Indeed, So true no doubt about it

This is because, for some reason that is probably explainable but I don't know, the seed of the cacao tree is the cocoa bean.

I am sorry that any of this is displeasing. I would fully agrees with anyone who claims that many, if not the majority, of the listed words were not invented by people who identify as Spanish speakers. Regarding the chart though, the word "origin" is not intended to mean the inventor of a particular word. The intention is to refer to the most direct source or the source of the most direct parent word. Also, the term "Spanish" is intended to refer to the Spanish Language and not Spain.

But in both of my examples it wasn't any Spanish speaking country, but Spain that took a native word like for potato.

And if you are doing word origin, yes most Spanish words came from Spain.

But this is silly because almost all these same words were adopted by French before becoming English words.

So why the fuck are you arbitrarily stopping in the chain English French Spanish (some Caribbean language)

In this context, origin is not the same thing as originator. I looked up every one of these words, and, in every instance, the references cited usage in the Spanish Language. It could be that the French Language acquired many of them at about the same time and from the same or from another source.

Even then, a few of these words came more directly from different romance languages, like the French "croisade." This is moreso a list of English words whose presence in the English language was influenced by Spanish at some point.

Canyon is cañón

Cocoa, chocolate, canoe, tobacco, and potato, at least, maybe others, are of indigenous origin. Native to the americas. The Spanish colonized them and changed their pronunciation and spelling to match their dialect.

Adobe 1739, American English, from Spanish adobe "unburnt brick dried in the sun," which is said by 19c. Dutch Arabist Reinhart Dozy to be from oral form of Arabic al-tob "the brick," from Coptic tube "brick," a word found in hieroglyphics.

Other sources point to a Spanish adobar "daub, plaster," from the source of English daub (v.) late 14c., dauben, "to smear with soft, adhesive matter, to plaster or whitewash a wall"

canoe (n.) "light boat propelled by hand-held paddle or paddles," 1550s, originally in a West Indian context, from Spanish canoa, a word used by Columbus, from Arawakan (Haiti) canaoua.

French, from New Latin canoa, from Spanish, from Arawakan, of Cariban origin; akin to Carib kana:wa canoe. First Known Use: 1555. The Spanish spelling finally settled down on canoa about 1600.

https://thcc.clubexpress.com/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=496051&module_id=97430

Definitely none are Spanish origin. Potato, etc

Then they are not of Spanish origin.

There are spanish words of arabic, germanic and romance origin... and some of amerindian origin

And that hapens to english french and most modern languages

so is it wrong to say that english language loaned a spanish word which is the version of a word loaned by the spanish from latin, amerindian or german that also those amerindians or germans latins or arabs may had made it theirs being loaned from who knows all the way to ancient languages?

Now where the hell did the word "mushroom" come from? That's what I wanna know.

Cocoa in Spanish is chocolate powder. At least where I'm from.

Crimson is of Spanish origin? What word does it come from?

It translates to “carmesí” from Spanish, but it seems like a leap.

Besides what everyone else said, I don't think adobe is even used in the same context as Spanish. Most mentions are probably referring to the company or products of Adobe in some way, shape, or form.

None of these surprise me except for canoe. What did the native Americans call their boats? Can't remember.

Also barbecue: "The English word barbecue and its cognates in other languages come from the Indigenous Taino word barbacoa. Etymologists believe this to be derived from barabicu found in the language of the Arawak people of the Caribbean and the Timucua people of Florida"

Some people think eggs come from chickens. Others buy then from a grocery store.

Hurricane, like many others on this list, are of indigenous not Spanish origin.

Nahuat actually derives from the Maya

Oh no. Now I want to pronounce flotilla as flotiya.

While these words entered English from Spanish, they aren’t of Spanish origin. Hurricane is Taino in origin and many of these words have native origins.

[removed]

I think Hurricane is from Mayan

You mean English and Spanish words of Latin origins ?

I think coyote is another one (probably of náhuatl origin).

Now do one for words originating from Indian languages

I wanna know too

Barbecue isn't on the list.

I know, I just wanted to mention it.

Maybe the English words came from the roman/latin languages of ancient Iberian people should be treated as 'of Spanish Origin'.

The words like tobacco, chocolate, tomato were actually originated from the native American languages, and introduced to English via the Spainish. They should be words of American origin.

===source: wikipedia===

cocoa: The word cocoa comes from the Spanish word cacao, which is derived from the Nahuatl word cacahuatl. The Nahuatl word, in turn, ultimately derives from the reconstructed Proto-Mixe–Zoquean word kakawa.

chocolate: According to the authority on the Spanish language, the Royal Spanish Academy, the Spanish word "chocolate" is derived from the Nahuatl word "xocolatl" (pronounced Nahuatl pronunciation: [ ʃoˈkolaːtɬ]), which is made up from the words "xococ" meaning sour or bitter, and "atl" meaning water or drink. However, as William Bright noted the word "chocolatl" doesn't occur in early central Mexican colonial sources, making this an unlikely derivation. Early sources have cacaua atl meaning "a drink made from cacao". The word xocolatl is not attested; there is a different word xocoatl referring to a drink made of maize. The proposed development x- to ch- is also unexplained. Santamaria gives a derivation from the Yucatec Maya word chokol meaning hot, and the Nahuatl atl meaning water. More recently Dakin and Wichman derive it from an original Eastern Nahuatl form chicolatl, which they relate to the term for a beater or frothing stick, chicoli, hence "beaten drink". Kaufman and Justeson disagree with this etymology (and all other suggestions), considering that the origin of the first element of the name remains unknown, but agree that the original form was likely chicolatl.

tobacco: The English word tobacco originates from the Spanish word "tabaco". The precise origin of this word is disputed, but it is generally thought to have derived, at least in part, from Taíno, the Arawakan language of the Caribbean. In Taíno, it was said to mean either a roll of tobacco leaves (according to Bartolomé de las Casas, 1552), or to tabago, a kind of L-shaped pipe used for sniffing tobacco smoke (according to Oviedo, with the leaves themselves being referred to as cohiba).However, perhaps coincidentally, similar words in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian were used from 1410 for certain medicinal herbs. These probably derived from the Arabic طُبّاق ṭubbāq (also طُباق ṭubāq), a word reportedly dating to the ninth century, referring to various herbs.

tomato: The word tomato comes from the Spanish tomate, which in turn comes from the Nahuatl word tomatl [ˈtomat͡ɬ] pronunciation (help·info), meaning 'swelling fruit'; also 'fat water' or 'fat thing'. The native Mexican tomatillo is tomate. When Aztecs started to cultivate the fruit to be larger, sweeter and red, they called the new variety xitomatl (or jitomates) (pronounced [ʃiːˈtomatɬ]), ('plump with navel' or 'fat water with navel'). The specific name lycopersicum (from the 1753 book Species Plantarum) is of Greek origin (λύκοπερσικων; lykopersikon), meaning 'wolf peach'.

Any typhoon is Japanese. Is there an English origin word for hurricane/typhoon? Tropical storm?

The word 'typhoon' in Japanese came from Chinese.

But even Chinese may be not the origin of this word.

Chinese scholars found the origin of this word blurry, maybe related to Arabian or Hindustani, first used by the Arabian or Indian merchants who travelled from south and south-western Asia crossing the violent South China Sea.

I doubt that the English language took platinum from Spanish, when it’s extremely common to take element names from Latin.

What a misleading diagram... at least half of the words aren't of spanish origin...

[removed]

It’s only displeasing because it’s just incorrect

Sorry, OP, but a lot of this is just plain etymologically wrong.

What’s a potato?

> Word Count in Thousands

So 60.9k x 1000 = 6 million times ?

Or did you make a mistake ?

I'm learning Spanish in a snails pace. I just learned position es cargo.

[deleted]

Hurricane is actually a survivor from the natives of Haiti, the Taino. It’s the only survivor of their culture and language as far as I know.

Yes it is old carmesi but its origin is even older from arabic kirmiz so I would not say it is of spanish origin

Platinum is a Latin word. How is Spanish involved?

Typhoon was an originally greek word from what i remember

Like guerra (and guerriglia) in Italian, from the Germanic warra.

In mainland Spain they say caca /s

Interesting. It seems to indicate that in ages past, someone fucked up.

No, Taino or Arawak

[removed]

Proof it

It proofed

Mustang comes from Spanish??

Prove? Anyway, a lot of those words come from Nahuatl which is an indigenous language from the Uto-Aztec family. How do I know? The part where I was an undergrad archaeologist who went to Mexico for research a couple times. You can also just look it up pretty easily. Someone linked to it in this post even.

Next time I am in Spain I'm going to make sure I ask where I can find some good caca.

ABV QED

I'd like to see one of these for English words with Hindi origins.

Thanks, confirms my initial feeling that this has a lot of wrong info

Alligator should be on that list.

Cargo Space? No, cargo ground.

Is it Spanish? Or is it Latin?

Thank you, I’ve actually been curious of it’s origin too (love language history!), and for some reason assumed it was French/Latin.

Misinfo for everyone! 🥳

Sure thing, water proof or fire proof?

By your standards no word is of any origin. There is always a prior language from where a words comes. So by this, English doesn’t have words of French origin, because most of them come from Latin (some from Germanic , or Gaulish) which come from Italic, which come from Ítalo-Celtic, which come from Indo-European which come from whatever prior language etc. the same for Arabic words, or any other language’s words, which come from previous or adjacent languages from where they took them. So, “beauty”, according to your reasoning, is not a word of French origin (beauté) but of pre-pre-pre Indo European origin, isn’t it? And French didn’t have anything to do with it.

Those words come from Spanish as it is the language that took them and transformed them and made them evolve with its own idiosyncrasy, its own sounds and its own ways, and from which English took them. As examples of the words in the post, Potato comes from Spanish “patata” (a mixture of two words, one from Quechua “papa” and other from Taino “batata”), Adobe is from Arab Al-tub which come from Egyptian “dbt”. And this from where? Chocolate from Nahuatl “Xocoalt”. Similar, but not the same, and if English had taken them directly from those languages they would be very different as they are now in English. And at the same time, those words undoubtedly come from other languages prior to them or in contact with them. And so on.

So, the words in the post come from Spanish, that’s how it works in philological terms.

And by the way: Platinum comes directly from Spanish “Platino”, not the other way around. Romans didn’t know the metal as it was identified and described in 1735, and given the name for its similarity to Silver…”plata” in Spanish (Latin: “argentum”). Platinum is a latinization of Platino, not the opposite

And Canyon is veeeeery used in Spain. Its geography is full of “cañones” (“cañón” is phonetically pronounced “canyon”). Not as big as the Grand Canyon, that’s why the Spaniard that saw it for the first time as a European called it Gran Cañón, as he had seen many (smaller) in his homeland
https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ca%C3%B1%C3%B3n_de_A%C3%B1isclo

https://www.xn--caondelriolobos-zqb.com/

There's more flotillas than potatoes?

Weird metric, then.

But then wouldn't like 90% of English just come from Proto-Indo-European? Since that's where most of French, Latin, Greek, Spanish, Germanic, Celtic... comes from?

Which also derives from the latin "canno".

It was pretty clear by the “um” suffix that platinum was Latin.

But that’s the same word though right? I mean the word is said the same in both languages it’s just the spelling that changes. Contrast that for example with chocolate which is spelt the same but has a considerable difference in pronunciation.

In this case it actually derives from Spanish. The Spanish first found the metal and called it "platina" in the 18th century. In the early 19th century they gave the metal its now latin sounding name.

You could also go back further in history and say that platina is a deriviation of the french word "plate".

You know what’s most fascinating is the word crocodile

From Greek kroke + drilos To Latin crocodilus And then english went crocodile But Spanish went cocodrilo

Thought platinum didn't sound Spanish. But I failed Spanish class. No habar Espanol.

I didn’t know! That’s interesting, thanks!

Ah, thank you. Either way not Spanish!

Isn’t chocolate indigenous in origin?

one is Uto-Aztecan, one is of the Mayan family.

[removed]

Yes, the brown thing which is sticky on your hands so you prefer to mix it in a shaker and drink it

There is some difference in the interpretation of the word "origin." The posts gives the most recent origin rather than the complete known history of the word. I don't think recognition of indigenous languages should be neglected. At the same time, claiming that the terms were not introduced by way of Spanish speakers is like claiming "컴퓨터" is of Latin origin and not English. The term "컴퓨터" translates to "computer," and an audio recording can be found here:

https://ko.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EC%BB%B4%ED%93%A8%ED%84%B

I had actually been considering this. These kinds of posts seem to stir up controversy though.

Great explanation. Thx

Spanish is the vessel that may have brought them to the other side, somewhat bastardized, but they're not Spanish words. They never were. They're indigenous proper nouns.

The number is 60,900.

Oh okay, then if you put "Word Count in Thousands" don't add the k after the number, it's one or the other. The redundancy here makes the reader believe the numbers are in thousands of thousands! :)

I'm don't following the part about proper nouns, but words are just the sounds that come out of your mouth. Hence the reason "computer" is a Korean word, or "bus stop" is a Hindi term, or "coffee" is an Icelandic word.

It is hilarious that you keep tripping over my point and yet thinking that it's not the point. You are factually wrong. Those words are not spanish. You are also wrong about the words computer and coffee, neither of those have the origins you have ascribed them. You really need to just Google the word etymology with words you think you know where they came from. You clearly are pulling all of this out of your ass.

As with so many words it has its roots in Latin and entered middle English from old French.

Yep the etymology of cocoa is a spelling error that produced a word that was easier to say. No more or less.

Do you have an idea in your head of how to define what a word is? How do you determine what is and what is not a word in a given language?

For the record, I am not claiming that computer and coffee originated in those languages, only that they are words within those languages.

You absolutely have tried to argue origin. You have zero idea what you're talking about and are asserting opinions about words that are not in alignment with centuries of documentary evidence. Evidence I personally studied as an undergrad archaeology and anthropology major with a focus on Mesoamerica. Your title is bad, and so are your arguments.

Since there is no typhoon in the Mediterranean and aegean sea, I think this word would not have a greek origin.

This may also be a proof that this word is originated from south or southwest Asia, where there had frequent trades and communications with greece for milleniums.

Yeah. It wasn't a mistake, per say, but, maybe, a bit unclear.

I think any argument would necessitate that we have a common understanding of the term "origin." I don't think that we do.

>You have zero idea what you're talking about and are asserting opinions about words ...

It sounds like your saying that if someone is speaking in Korean and they use "컴퓨터" (pronounced like "computer") in a sentence, then the sounds coming out of their mouth aren't Korean words. Am I following that right?

>Your title is bad

So are you saying that I should have used a different title?

[removed]

I obtained much of the data from Wikipedia's List of English words of Spanish origin. I think the answer here may depend, at least in part, on how the term "origin" is interpreted. Unfortunately, my usage of this term seems to have resulted in a lot of misunderstanding.

sure and some other have latin origin and some other arab origin and some others germanic.. guess spanish language doesnt exit

These words aren’t of Spanish origin, it’s factually wrong. Many languages borrow from other languages, including a majority of English words, but you would say that the words have an origin in English.

You being threatened by acknowledging those words are actually of native origin is racially/culturally insensitive. You’re being defensive about word origins having native roots and not acknowledging it when you’re trying to promote those words being used in a third language.