Exotic words in the OED

As you sit on the sofa in your pyjamas stirring sugar into your coffee or cocoa, puzzling over the Scrabble board and searching through your mind for one of those useful exotic words like qi, mu, or xebec, do you ever stop to wonder where they originated? And does it ever occur to you that for some of us this isn't just a game, but the stuff of our working day?

We are a small team of people at the OED, backed up by a large number of specialist language consultants throughout the world, who work on words which have come into English directly or indirectly from outside the core area of Germanic, Romance, Classical, and Celtic languages. We call ourselves the non-European group because most of the words we edit come from the indigenous languages of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific, but we also cover some European languages such as Russian, Yiddish, and Romani.

Foreign words enter English either directly from their source language or via other European languages. The most common route into English for early exotic words was via explorers and missionaries who spoke Germanic or Romance languages. Most of these words have been part of our language for so long now that we forget they were once from exotic languages. For example, the word chocolate came from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, in 1604 via the famous Spanish missionary José de Acosta. Sugar (1299) and magazine (1583) came from Arabic via Romance languages, and coffee (1598) came from Arabic via Germanic languages. The word potato came from Haitian and was first introduced into English via the Spanish of Columbus in 1492. Haitian gave us other words such as canoe (1555) and barbecue, which was brought directly into English by the British explorer William Dampier in 1697.

Verification of etymologies such as these may involve reading original diaries of explorers and early wordlists compiled by missionaries in addition to our usual sources. For example, the word Nootka has been traced to Captain Cook's Journal, and it was misunderstood by him to be the local North American Indian people's name for the bay where they lived, whereas it may actually have been the Nootka word for to circle about, perhaps referring to a circle dance that was being performed to welcome Cook's party, or perhaps indicating that his ships should circle about to come into the harbour. This was how one ethnonym (name for a people) arose.

In fact, ethnonyms account for a significant proportion of our work; in the letters M and N alone we have dealt with about 200 of them (compared with about 50 in the Second Edition of the OED). Many of these words, if included in the Second Edition at all, were given relatively little space (with a single definition and quotation paragraph for the people and language, or with the noun and adjective treated together) and most were given no etymology except [Native name.]. In the new edition we have provided a fuller treatment, with separate senses for people and language, a linguistic classification for the language, sections for both noun and adjective, and a full etymology. The lexical range of the words we edit is very wide — from plants, birds, animals, and other natural phenomena through trade goods such as fabrics and foods, to currencies, political, religious, and cultural terms. The grammatical range tends to be narrower: most of our words are nouns or adjectives.

World events play a part in bringing exotic words into English. Just as Marco Polo's explorations to China were credited with bringing pasta to Italy, so could recent events be credited with bringing words like taliban, loya jirga, and al-Qaeda to Western attention; we are now preparing new entries for inclusion in the OED. Of course, these words existed in English before the millennium, but recent events have highlighted them and brought them into wider usage.

Some words are translations, or calques, of expressions in the original language. For example, in the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein used the Arabic phrase umm al-ma'rik the mother of all battles. English speakers have since made it their own expression by substituting other words for battles, such as the mother of all writer's blocks, or the mother of all recessions.

We work on all aspects of these words, describing not only their etymology and how they came into English, but also their pronunciation, spelling variants, meaning, and use in English, illustrating this with quotations. The quotations show how and when a word starts to be assimilated into English; in early quotations it may be italicized, in inverted commas, or followed in the sentence by an explanation of its meaning, then the explanation is dropped, and finally it appears in roman with no special treatment.

The information provided by our consultants is invaluable, and ranges from etymological verification, through detailed advice on pronunciation, definitions, and spellings, to a seemingly encyclopaedic knowledge of the literature of the field which sometimes results in substantially earlier quotations in English. Normally it would be invidious to single out any particular consultant for mention, but, as he has recently decided to retire from this work, we would like to record our thanks to Professor J. Derek Latham for the wonderful support he has provided for many years on all aspects of Arabic and the Islamic world.

So far we have contributed to about two thousand revised and new entries in OED Online. If the letters M and N are any gauge, then the new edition will have twice as many words with non-European connections as the last. This will help you win at Scrabble — if you use OED Online!