English words from French
After 1066, French became the language of England's courts and kitchens, and it has kept lending English words ever since. Some came straight across the Channel; others passed through French on their way from somewhere else.
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- Ambulance
Napoleon's chief military surgeon, Dominique Jean Larrey, noticed that wounded soldiers left on the battlefield for hours or days were dying of injuries that prompt treatment could have handled. His fix was a light, fast, horse-drawn cart, stocked with…
From the Sun, Aug 16, 2026 roundup → - Avalanche
An "avalanche" gets its English name from a French and Franco-Provençal word for a sudden "descent," ultimately rooted in Vulgar Latin avalare, "to go down." The word crossed into English mountaineering vocabulary in the 18th century, as Alpine travel became…
From the Wed, Aug 26, 2026 roundup → - Avant-garde
French military writers had used the phrase for the troops marching ahead of the main army since medieval times, but its leap into art and politics is usually dated to 1825, when the utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon and his follower Olinde Rodrigues…
From the Sat, Sep 19, 2026 roundup → - Camouflage
In 1915 the French army needed a way to hide artillery, trucks, and observation posts from aerial reconnaissance, so it formed a dedicated Section de Camouflage led by painter Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scevola and staffed almost entirely with working artists…
From the Fri, Sep 18, 2026 roundup → - Chartreuse
The Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery near Grenoble have made their herbal liqueur, from a recipe of some 130 plants that only two monks know at any time, since 1737, with the green version arriving in 1764. The color came second…
From the Tue, Sep 22, 2026 roundup → - Chauffeur
A chauffeur is literally, in French, "one who heats." The word comes from chauffer, "to heat," and the first people called chauffeurs weren't drivers at all — they were the crew members whose job was to keep a steam engine's firebox stoked and running. When…
From the Sat, Aug 15, 2026 roundup → - Chauvinism
Nicolas Chauvin was supposedly a French soldier so devoted to Napoleon that his exaggerated loyalty became a running joke in 19th-century French theater, and eventually a byword for blind, excessive devotion to one's own group. The catch: historians have…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 2026 roundup → - Chauvinist
Chauvinism takes its name from Nicolas Chauvin, a supposed French soldier said to have served under Napoleon, taken 17 wounds in battle, and remained loudly, embarrassingly devoted to Bonapartism long after the empire collapsed and devotion to it had gone out…
From the Thu, Aug 13, 2026 roundup → - Cravat
In 1660, a regiment of Croatian mercenaries serving the French crown arrived wearing distinctive knotted scarves, and French courtiers were charmed enough to start imitating them. The garment got nicknamed after the soldiers' nationality, "Croat," which…
From the Mon, Sep 7, 2026 roundup → - Croissant
The romantic version of the "croissant" story has Viennese bakers shaping the pastry into a crescent to mock a failed 1683 Ottoman siege of Vienna. That story doesn't show up in print until 1938, some 250 years after it supposedly happened, in a French…
From the Sun, Sep 6, 2026 roundup → - Cubism
When Georges Braque submitted a series of landscape paintings reducing buildings and trees to geometric fragments, critic Louis Vauxcelles dismissively described them as full of "little cubes." Braque and Pablo Picasso, the movement's other founder…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 2026 roundup → - Denim
"Denim" gets its name from a French phrase, serge de Nîmes — literally "serge fabric of Nîmes," the southern French city where a particular sturdy twill was originally woven. The phrase got clipped down to just "denim" once the fabric crossed into English…
From the Wed, Aug 26, 2026 roundup → - Encore
"Encore" is simply the French word for "again" or "still." English audiences adopted it wholesale as the shout demanding one more song, with no translation and no changes, which makes it one of the more honest loanwords on this list.
From the Sat, Sep 5, 2026 roundup → - Escape
Vulgar Latin "excappare" is literally "out of the cape": to slip free of your cloak and leave your pursuer holding it. The image is of a captive wriggling out of a garment someone has grabbed. French wore it down to "eschaper," and "escape" reached English…
From the Wed, Sep 30, 2026 roundup → - Espadrille
The rope-soled shoe takes its name from the Catalan word espardenya, itself rooted in espart, the tough esparto grass its sole was traditionally woven from. "Espadrilles" have been worn in the Pyrenees for centuries, long before they became a summer wardrobe…
From the Fri, Sep 4, 2026 roundup → - Espionage
"Espionage" comes from French espionnage, from espionner, "to spy," from espion, "a spy" — and that French chain eventually traces back to the same ancient Germanic root that gave English the word "spy" directly. Two words for the same shady profession…
From the Sat, Aug 22, 2026 roundup → - Etiquette
Before it meant "proper behavior," étiquette meant something far more mundane in French: a little card or label, the kind stuck on a bag to note its contents. At the court of Louis XIV in Versailles, small printed cards — étiquettes — were posted around the…
From the Fri, Aug 14, 2026 roundup → - Exchequer
Under the Norman kings, England's revenue was reckoned on a table covered with a cloth ruled into squares, like a chessboard, with counters moved between the squares to add up what each sheriff owed. The Anglo-French word for such a board was "escheker," a…
From the Tue, Sep 29, 2026 roundup → - Fauvism
At the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris, a room of paintings by Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, and their circle used color so unnaturally, violent pinks for skin, green for a face, that critic Louis Vauxcelles walked past a lone Renaissance-style bronze statue…
From the Fri, Sep 18, 2026 roundup → - Fraternité
"Liberté, égalité, fraternité" is the motto of France, but it wasn't handed down whole from the Revolution's opening days. The three ideas — liberty and equality especially — circulated separately throughout the Enlightenment, showing up in Rousseau and Locke…
From the Fri, Aug 14, 2026 roundup → - Gargoyle
A gargoyle — those grotesque carved figures jutting off cathedral rooflines — takes its name from the Old French gargouille, "throat," describing its original job as a functional rain spout that let water gurgle out through its mouth, well clear of the…
From the Fri, Aug 21, 2026 roundup → - Guillotine
Contrary to popular belief, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin did not invent the guillotine. In 1789, early in the French Revolution, he proposed to the National Assembly that France adopt a single, swift, mechanical method of execution for everyone sentenced to…
From the Fri, Aug 21, 2026 roundup → - Hazard
"Hazard" traces back to an Arabic word for a die — az-zahr — by way of a medieval European dice game reportedly picked up during the Crusades. The game itself was notorious for wrecking fortunes on a single unlucky roll, which is presumably how the word ended…
From the Fri, Aug 28, 2026 roundup → - Hearse
The hearse's etymology runs through an unexpected animal. It likely starts with the Oscan word hirpus, "wolf," used by ancient Italian farmers for a spike-toothed harrow that resembled a wolf's bared teeth. That became Latin hirpex ("harrow"), then Old French…
From the Tue, Aug 11, 2026 roundup → - Helicopter
The helicopter gets its name from two Greek building blocks — one meaning "spiral" or "screw," the other meaning "wing" — stitched together by French inventor Gustave de Ponton d'Amécourt, who coined the term in 1861 for a small, steam-powered rotary-wing…
From the Sun, Aug 23, 2026 roundup → - Impressionism
When a group of independent French painters held their own exhibition in 1874 — a direct response to being repeatedly rejected by the official Paris Salon — a skeptical critic wrote a scathing review mocking one painter's hazy, unfinished-looking harbor…
From the Mon, Aug 31, 2026 roundup → - Impromptu
"Impromptu" comes from the Latin phrase in promptu, "in readiness" or "at hand," which French speakers fused into one word before English borrowed it whole in the 1660s. Samuel Pepys used it in his diary as early as 1663, describing a speech made impromptu…
From the Sun, Sep 6, 2026 roundup → - Ivory
Ivory traveled from Old French ivoire, from Latin ebur, and — by one widely cited (if not universally settled) theory — all the way back to an ancient Egyptian word for "elephant." If the chain holds, it's one of the oldest loanwords in this list, riding…
From the Fri, Aug 21, 2026 roundup → - Jolly Roger
The name first appears in print in 1724, in Captain Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates, which reports that Bartholomew Roberts and Francis Spriggs each called their flag the "Jolly Roger." Neither flag was a skull and crossbones; Roberts's…
From the Tue, Sep 29, 2026 roundup → - Lacrosse
French colonists in 17th-century North America watched Indigenous communities play a fast, physical game using a long stick with a small net on one end, and the curved shape reminded them of a bishop's ceremonial staff — a crosier. They called the game "la…
From the Wed, Aug 19, 2026 roundup → - Lavalier
The small microphone that clips to a collar or hangs around the neck borrows its name from Louise de La Vallière, a mistress of King Louis XIV in the 1660s who was known for her elegant pendant necklaces. Her name attached itself to that style of jewelry for…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 2026 roundup → - Leotard
Jules Léotard was a 19th-century French acrobat credited with popularizing the flying trapeze act, performing his death-defying routine in a snug, one-piece garment of his own design that let him move freely without extra fabric catching on the equipment. He…
From the Wed, Aug 19, 2026 roundup → - Lieutenant
"Lieutenant" is Old French for "place-holding": someone who holds a superior's place when the superior is absent. That's why a lieutenant governor stands in for a governor, and why the military rank sits just below a captain. Nobody has ever fully explained…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup → - Limousine
According to the most commonly told (if slightly disputed) explanation, "limousine" comes from Limousin, a rural region in central France whose shepherds traditionally wore long, hooded cloaks to stay warm and dry. Early enclosed automobiles, with their…
From the Wed, Aug 19, 2026 roundup → - Louvre
Even historians can't fully agree on where the Louvre's name comes from. Competing theories point to an Old French word for a wolf-hunting den (*louveterie*), a Latin word for the reddish, sandy soil the fortress was originally built on, or simply an old term…
From the Tue, Aug 25, 2026 roundup → - Margarine
The story behind "margarine" runs through two different scientists. In 1813, French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul isolated a fatty acid he named "margaric acid," from the Greek word for pearl, for its lustrous, pearly deposits. When Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès…
From the Sun, Sep 13, 2026 roundup → - Marionette
Marionette is French for "little Mary," a double diminutive built from "Marion" (itself a diminutive of "Marie") plus the affectionate suffix "-ette." The word started out meaning small devotional figurines of the Virgin Mary, then extended to the string…
From the Wed, Aug 12, 2026 roundup → - Mauve
During his 1856 Easter break from London's Royal College of Chemistry, 18-year-old William Perkin was trying to synthesize quinine from coal-tar aniline, hoping to ease Britain's dependence on imported anti-malarial drugs. Instead, oxidizing the aniline left…
From the Fri, Sep 18, 2026 roundup → - Mayday
"Mayday" sounds like it should be an acronym, but it isn't. Frederick Stanley Mockford, a senior radio officer at London's Croydon Airport, was asked in 1923 to come up with a distress word that pilots and ground crews on both sides of the English Channel…
From the Tue, Sep 8, 2026 roundup → - Mayonnaise
The most popular story behind mayonnaise holds that in 1756, the Duke de Richelieu's chef, besieging Port Mahon on the Spanish island of Menorca during the opening battle of the Seven Years' War, needed a victory feast sauce but had no cream on hand. He…
From the Mon, Aug 10, 2026 roundup → - Napkin
A napkin is literally a "little tablecloth": French nappe ("cloth" or "tablecloth," ultimately from Latin mappa) plus the Middle English diminutive suffix -kin, the same ending found in "lambkin" or "bumpkin." The word shrank a full tablecloth down to…
From the Wed, Aug 12, 2026 roundup → - Napoleon
The delicate, many-layered French pastry known in English as a "Napoleon" is called mille-feuille ("thousand leaves") in its home country, where it has nothing to do with the emperor at all. Food historians trace the English name to Napolitain — French for "a…
From the Wed, Sep 2, 2026 roundup → - Narcolepsy
French physician Jean-Baptiste-Édouard Gélineau coined "narcolepsy" in 1880 to describe a patient experiencing dozens of sudden sleep attacks a day, combining Greek narke ("numbness") with lepsis ("seizure") — the same "-lepsy" ending found in "epilepsy."
From the Wed, Aug 26, 2026 roundup → - Negligee
A "negligee" takes its name directly from the French négligée, "neglected" or "carelessly done" — the feminine past participle of négliger, "to neglect." It originally described an entire genre of deliberately unstructured, informal at-home dress in…
From the Sat, Aug 22, 2026 roundup → - New Orleans
French colonists founded "New Orleans" in 1718 and named it in tribute to Philippe II, the regent then ruling France on behalf of the young Louis XV. The French name wasn't an accident of sentiment so much as a marketing decision — colonial officials worried…
From the Wed, Sep 2, 2026 roundup → - Nice
Few English words have had a stranger journey than "nice,” which started life in the 1200s as a fairly harsh insult, built from a Latin phrase meaning "not knowing," essentially calling someone clueless or foolish. From there it drifted through a remarkable…
From the Mon, Aug 17, 2026 roundup → - Nicotine
Nicotine is named after Jean Nicot, France's ambassador to Portugal in the late 1550s, who learned about tobacco's supposed medicinal properties while stationed in Lisbon and sent seeds and powdered leaves back to the French court. Catherine de' Medici…
From the Fri, Aug 14, 2026 roundup → - Nocturne
The "nocturne" — a lyrical, dreamlike piece of music meant to evoke nighttime — is popularly associated with Frédéric Chopin, but he didn't invent the form. Irish composer John Field published the first pieces to use the name in this modern sense back in…
From the Mon, Aug 31, 2026 roundup → - Nougat
The chewy candy's name traces to a now-largely-forgotten language: Old Occitan, once spoken across southern France, had a word meaning roughly "nutty," itself descended from the Latin word for walnut. French absorbed and modernized it, and English borrowed…
From the Tue, Sep 8, 2026 roundup → - Nuance
A "nuance" — a subtle shade of difference in meaning, tone, or color — comes from French nuer, "to shade or vary in color," which traces back to Latin nubes, "cloud." The connection makes more sense once you picture clouds: endless subtle gradations of gray…
From the Wed, Aug 26, 2026 roundup → - Nuisance
A "nuisance" comes from an Old French verb, nuire, "to harm," which traces back to the Latin nocere — the same root buried inside "innocuous" (literally "not harmful") and "noxious" (unambiguously harmful). Three words, wildly different registers, one shared…
From the Sat, Aug 22, 2026 roundup → - Pamphlet
A "pamphlet" owes its name to an unlikely source: Pamphilus, seu de Amore, a wildly popular 12th-century Latin love poem. Copies of it — cheap, thin, unbound — circulated so widely across medieval Europe that people started using its title, shortened and…
From the Tue, Sep 1, 2026 roundup → - Ransom
"Ransom" shares a Latin root with a much gentler-sounding word: "redemption." Both trace back to Latin redemptio, "a buying back," which passed into Old French as rançon before arriving in English. The kidnapping-and-payment sense and the spiritual sense…
From the Thu, Aug 27, 2026 roundup → - Rayon
Manufacturers had been selling regenerated cellulose fiber as "artificial silk" since the 1880s, and the name made it sound like a knockoff. In 1924 the National Retail Dry Goods Association convened a committee to find a better one. "Glos" was proposed and…
From the Tue, Sep 22, 2026 roundup → - Renaissance
Nobody living through the "Renaissance" called it that. The period name, meaning "rebirth," was coined in 1855 by French historian Jules Michelet for the title of one volume of his sprawling history of France. It didn't really catch on until Swiss historian…
From the Tue, Sep 8, 2026 roundup → - Rendezvous
"Rendezvous" is a French imperative, literally "present yourselves." It entered English in the 1590s as a term for a designated troop-assembly point, decades before it softened into the far less martial sense of a planned meeting, romantic or otherwise.
From the Sat, Sep 5, 2026 roundup → - Restaurant
In 18th-century Paris, a "restaurant" was a thing you drank: a concentrated meat broth, from the French for "restoring," sold to the delicate as a health food. The story that a soup seller named Boulanger opened the first sit-down establishment in 1765, under…
From the Sun, Sep 27, 2026 roundup → - Reveille
"Reveille," the bugle call that wakes a military camp, comes from the French command réveillez, "wake up," itself built from a Latin root meaning to keep watch. The tune has called American troops to muster since at least 1812.
From the Sat, Sep 5, 2026 roundup → - Roquefort
"Roquefort" takes its name from Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, a village whose own name means "strong rock" in Occitan, fortified by shepherds after the barbarian invasions of the 4th century. The cheese has been aged in the village's limestone caves ever since…
From the Sat, Sep 5, 2026 roundup → - Rotisserie
In December 1979, magazine editor Daniel Okrent wrote down a scoring system for a fantasy baseball league. His group held its first draft the following April, meeting regularly at a Manhattan restaurant called La Rotisserie Française, and named the format…
From the Fri, Sep 4, 2026 roundup → - Roulette
"Roulette" is simply French for "little wheel" — a straightforward name for what is, underneath all the casino theatrics, a spinning wheel with numbered pockets. The game reached its modern form in 18th-century France, though wheel-based gambling devices in…
From the Thu, Aug 27, 2026 roundup → - Sabotage
The popular story says striking French workers threw their wooden sabots into machinery to jam the gears — a satisfying mental image, and almost certainly not what actually happened. Linguists trace sabotage instead to saboter, a French verb originally…
From the Mon, Aug 10, 2026 roundup → - Silhouette
Étienne de Silhouette was France's finance minister for all of eight months in 1759, appointed during the Seven Years' War to fix a brutal budget crisis. His fix was brutal too — steep new taxes and slashed pensions, aimed even at the nobility — and the…
From the Mon, Aug 3, 2026 roundup → - Surrealism
The poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined "surrealism" in 1917, using it in a program note for Parade, the Jean Cocteau ballet with sets by Picasso and music by Satie, and again in the subtitle of his own play Les Mamelles de Tiresias. Apollinaire died the…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup → - Turquoise
The blue-green gem now called "turquoise" was actually mined near Nishapur in Persia, but Europeans first encountered it through Turkish traders moving the stone along Silk Road routes in the 13th century. The name that stuck, from an Old French phrase for…
From the Mon, Sep 7, 2026 roundup → - Umpire
An umpire is, etymologically, someone who is "not equal" to either side of a dispute — which is exactly the point. The word comes from Old French nonper ("not equal," from non + per), which entered Middle English as "noumpere." Over time, "a noumpere" got…
From the Thu, Aug 6, 2026 roundup → - Usher
An usher is, by name, a doorkeeper: the word traces through Old French ussier back to Latin ostiarius, from ostium ("door" or "entrance"), itself rooted in os ("mouth"). The specific modern sense — someone who walks you to your theater or church seat — only…
From the Thu, Aug 13, 2026 roundup → - Velcro
Swiss engineer George de Mestral got the idea for "Velcro" after picking burrs off his dog's fur — and his own trousers — following a hike in the Alps in the 1940s, and spent years figuring out how to manufacture a fabric version of the tiny hooks he saw…
From the Mon, Aug 24, 2026 roundup → - Yellowstone
The Hidatsa called the river "Mi tsi a-da-zi," roughly "yellow rock river," most likely for the sandstone bluffs along its lower reaches rather than the canyon walls in the park. French trappers translated it as "Roche Jaune," and Lewis and Clark wrote down…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup →