English words from Italian
From opera houses to espresso bars, Italian has lent English its words for music, food and, more than once, disease. Many arrived by way of French, and a few were named after very specific Italian places.
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- Arcade
The word "arcade" comes from the Latin arcus, meaning "bow" or "arch," by way of Italian and French terms for an arched bridge. It first described covered, arch-lined passageways — often lined with shops, a precursor to the modern shopping mall — long before…
From the Thu, Sep 3, 2026 roundup → - Bankrupt
Medieval and Renaissance Italian moneylenders conducted business from a bench — a banca, the same root that gives English "bank" — set up in the market square. When a financier ran out of money and could no longer pay his debts, the Italian phrase for his…
From the Tue, Aug 18, 2026 roundup → - Cappuccino
The milky, foam-capped espresso drink takes its name from the Capuchin friars, a Franciscan order whose brown hooded robes were reportedly the exact shade Viennese coffeehouse patrons were reminded of when they saw the drink. The friars themselves had nothing…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 2026 roundup → - Carnival
The most linguistically supported theory traces carnival to medieval Latin carnem levare — "to remove meat" — describing the last permitted indulgence before Lent's 40 days of fasting and meat abstinence. The phrase contracted through Old Italian…
From the Thu, Aug 13, 2026 roundup → - Confetti
The small paper scraps thrown at parades and celebrations get their name from the Italian word for "confections" — because the original "confetti" really were sugar-coated almonds, thrown during Carnival festivities for centuries. An 1875 Milan businessman…
From the Thu, Sep 3, 2026 roundup → - Espresso
"Espresso" takes its name from the Italian word for "pressed out" or "expressed," describing how hot water is forced through tightly packed, finely ground coffee under pressure — a method Italian café owners perfected in the early 1900s specifically to serve…
From the Wed, Aug 26, 2026 roundup → - Fiasco
A fiasco — Italian for "bottle" — became English shorthand for a spectacular flop by way of 19th-century Italian theater slang, where a failed performance was said to "make a bottle." Nobody is fully certain why; the most repeated (and disputed) theory holds…
From the Thu, Aug 20, 2026 roundup → - Gazette
In the mid-1500s, during Venice's wars with the Ottoman Empire, the city's government circulated handwritten news sheets that could be read for the price of a small copper coin, the gazeta. The coin's name attached itself to the sheet, and "gazette" reached…
From the Sat, Sep 26, 2026 roundup → - Incognito
"Incognito" is Italian for "unknown," borrowed directly into English for anyone traveling or acting under a disguised identity. It has needed no updating since.
From the Sat, Sep 5, 2026 roundup → - Infantry
In medieval Italy, an "infante" was a youth, and by extension one of the young men who marched on foot beside a mounted knight, the low end of a feudal army. Italian "infanteria," via French, reached English in the 1570s as "infantry." The word shares its…
From the Sun, Sep 27, 2026 roundup → - Inferno
"Inferno" traces back to a plain Latin word for the underworld, but it took Dante Alighieri's 14th-century poem, cataloguing hell in exhaustive, circle-by-circle detail, to turn the word into the vivid, fiery image most people picture today, whether or not…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 2026 roundup → - Influenza
Influenza comes from the Italian word for "influence." Eighteenth-century Italians blamed outbreaks on the "influence" of the stars and cold weather — an astrological explanation for what we now know is a virus. The name stuck around long after the theory…
From the Sun, Aug 2, 2026 roundup → - Italics
Italic type, the slanted style used for emphasis, is named directly after Italy. Venetian printer Aldus Manutius introduced it in 1501, designing the compact, cursive-inspired typeface to mimic elegant contemporary handwriting and squeeze more text onto a…
From the Fri, Aug 21, 2026 roundup → - Machiavellian
Niccolò Machiavelli's 16th-century political treatise, arguing that rulers should be willing to lie, betray, and act immorally to hold onto power, so scandalized readers that his own surname became an adjective. "Machiavellian" has described cunning…
From the Sun, Sep 13, 2026 roundup → - Malaria
For most of recorded history, nobody suspected mosquitoes had anything to do with the periodic, debilitating fevers that plagued people living near swamps and wetlands. The prevailing theory, especially in Italy, was that the illness rose directly from foul…
From the Tue, Aug 18, 2026 roundup → - Monte Carlo
In the 1860s, the ruling Grimaldi family of Monaco had a problem: their tiny principality had just lost its two richest towns to France and desperately needed a new source of income. Prince Charles III backed a casino venture on a scrubby, unglamorous plateau…
From the Sun, Aug 16, 2026 roundup → - Montenegro
"Montenegro" is the Venetian Italian for "black mountain," and it is a loan-translation: the locals already called the place Crna Gora, which means the very same thing in their own Slavic language. Venetian sailors and traders who worked the Adriatic coast…
From the Tue, Sep 15, 2026 roundup → - Negroni
As the story goes, Count Camillo Negroni walked into a Florence bar in 1919 and asked the bartender to strengthen his usual cocktail by swapping the soda water for gin. The bartender obliged, marked the new drink with an orange garnish to distinguish it from…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 2026 roundup → - Nepotism
"Nepotism" comes from the Latin word for "nephew," and the story behind it is a masterclass in polite fiction. Catholic popes throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance were, officially, celibate — so when they wanted to hand powerful positions to their own…
From the Tue, Aug 18, 2026 roundup → - Opera
Opera is, grammatically, a mistake that stuck: it's the Latin plural of opus ("a work"), but Italian speakers in the 1600s adopted it as a singular noun meaning a staged musical drama, and every language that borrowed the word from Italian — including English…
From the Sun, Aug 9, 2026 roundup → - Paparazzi
When director Federico Fellini needed a name for the aggressive, opportunistic celebrity photographer character in his 1960 film La Dolce Vita, he landed on "Paparazzo" — and later said the surname just sounded right to him, evoking the buzzing, darting…
From the Tue, Aug 18, 2026 roundup → - Porcelain
Marco Polo gets credit for naming "porcelain" after encountering Chinese ceramics on his travels: he thought the glossy white dishware resembled the polished surface of a cowrie shell, porcellana in Italian. That word itself traces back to a Latin term for…
From the Sun, Sep 6, 2026 roundup → - Rocket
Italian "rocchetta" is a little bobbin, the spindle a thread winds around, and the early gunpowder devices of the 1500s had exactly that shape: a cylinder tapering to a point. English borrowed "rocket" in the 1610s for fireworks and signal flares. The salad…
From the Mon, Sep 28, 2026 roundup → - Salvo
A salvo — whether it's cannon fire or a burst of applause — traces back to Latin salve, "hail," the standard Roman greeting. Italian salva extended that into a ceremonial gun-volley fired to greet an important visitor, and English borrowed the word in the…
From the Thu, Aug 13, 2026 roundup → - Tarantella
This fast, whirling folk dance from southern Italy takes its name from Taranto, a port city in the region where, between roughly the 15th and 17th centuries, locals believed the bite of a wolf spider caused a frenzied condition called "tarantism" — curable…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 2026 roundup → - Tarantula
The wolf spider tarantula takes its name from Taranto, a port city in southern Italy where the species was common. Between the 15th and 17th centuries, the region saw waves of "tarantism" — a supposed hysteria triggered by the spider's bite, whose sufferers…
From the Fri, Aug 14, 2026 roundup → - Umbrella
An "umbrella" is, at its linguistic root, just a portable patch of shade — the word traces through Italian ombrello back to the Latin umbra, "shadow." That origin lines up with how the device was mostly used around the Mediterranean for centuries: blocking…
From the Mon, Aug 17, 2026 roundup → - Villanelle
The villanelle — a tightly structured 19-line poem built from just two rhymes and two refrains that repeat and recombine down to a final quatrain — is best known today through Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night," his 1951 plea to his dying…
From the Wed, Aug 19, 2026 roundup → - Volcano
The word "volcano" comes from Vulcano, a small, perpetually smoking island off the coast of Sicily. Ancient Romans believed it was the chimney of the forge belonging to Vulcan, their god of fire and metalworking, and that the island's smoke and eruptions were…
From the Wed, Aug 19, 2026 roundup →