English words from Japanese
Japanese loanwords in English cover food, art, games and technology, and several of them mean something quite different in Japanese.
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- Atari
Before it was a video game company, "atari" was — and still is — a term from the board game Go, called out when a stone or group of stones is one move from being captured, roughly the Go equivalent of "check" in chess. Nolan Bushnell, an avid Go player…
From the Wed, Aug 5, 2026 roundup → - Emoji
It looks and sounds like it should come from "emotion" or "emoticon," but "emoji" has nothing to do with either — it's a pure coincidence of sound. The word comes straight from Japanese: e, meaning "picture," plus moji, meaning "character" or "letter." The…
From the Wed, Aug 19, 2026 roundup → - Honcho
American soldiers stationed in occupied Japan after 1945, and again in Korea a few years later, picked up the Japanese "hanchō," meaning the leader of a squad or work group, and brought it home as slang for whoever was in charge. "Honcho" was in print in…
From the Sat, Sep 26, 2026 roundup → - Kamikaze
Long before it described WWII fighter pilots, "kamikaze" meant "divine wind," and referred specifically to the typhoons that scattered two Mongol invasion fleets bound for Japan in the 13th century. For centuries the word carried a note of national salvation…
From the Sat, Sep 12, 2026 roundup → - Karaoke
"Karaoke" is a genuinely round-trip word: it combines the Japanese word kara ("empty") with okesutora, itself a Japanese phonetic borrowing of the English word "orchestra." So the word for singing along to a backing track without a live band traveled from…
From the Mon, Aug 17, 2026 roundup → - Nikon
Long before it made a camera, Nikon was an optical-instruments company. The name blends the Japanese words for "Japan" and "optical," reflecting the firm's original business making lenses and binoculars. "Nikon" wouldn't release its first camera for decades…
From the Sun, Sep 13, 2026 roundup → - Ninja
A "ninja" was originally a covert agent trained in espionage, sabotage, and assassination during Japan's feudal era. In just the last few decades, English has stretched the word into casual slang for anyone unusually skilled at a task, coding very much…
From the Sat, Sep 5, 2026 roundup → - Nintendo
Fusajiro Yamauchi founded "Nintendo" in Kyoto in 1889 to make hanafuda, the hand-painted Japanese flower playing cards. The name is usually translated as "leave luck to heaven," though exactly what the founder intended by it is not documented. The company…
From the Tue, Sep 15, 2026 roundup → - Origami
The word origami combines Japanese oru ("to fold") and kami ("paper") — but it's a surprisingly recent label for an old practice. Paper folding in Japan was originally called orikata, "folded shapes," and the word didn't shift to "origami" until around 1880…
From the Mon, Aug 10, 2026 roundup → - Rickshaw
The "rickshaw" is a clipped English version of the Japanese jinrikisha, literally "human-powered vehicle." The most accepted account credits three Tokyo men, Izumi Yosuke, Takayama Kosuke, and Suzuki Tokujiro, with inventing it in 1869; the city licensed them…
From the Tue, Sep 22, 2026 roundup → - Roku
Roku is Japanese for "six" — because it was founder Anthony Wood's sixth company. As Wood tells it, he was at a Japanese restaurant in Palo Alto trying to name his new streaming venture, and asked the waitress for the Japanese word for "five" first (his…
From the Thu, Aug 6, 2026 roundup → - Umami
In 1908, Tokyo chemist Kikunae Ikeda set out to identify what gave kombu seaweed broth its distinctive savory depth, and isolated monosodium glutamate as the answer. He coined "umami" for the taste, from the Japanese "umai," delicious, and "mi," taste, and…
From the Thu, Sep 17, 2026 roundup → - Walkman
When Sony's portable cassette player launched in 1979, it didn't have one name — it had four. Japan got the brand name that eventually went global; the US got "Sound-About"; the UK got "Stowaway"; Sweden got "Freestyle." Co-founder Akio Morita reportedly…
From the Wed, Aug 26, 2026 roundup →