English words from Portuguese
Portuguese sailors and traders carried words between Asia, Africa, South America and Europe, and English picked several of them up along the route.
- Casablanca
Casablanca's name has been through three languages before landing in English. Portuguese traders built a new town on the site of a Berber settlement called Anfa in 1515 and named it "Casa Branca" — "white house." When the Spanish took over regional trade…
From the Wed, Aug 5, 2026 roundup → - Indigo
Before synthetic dyes existed, the deep blue pigment now called "indigo" reached Europe as an expensive import extracted from the leaves of a flowering plant grown mainly in India. Greek traders, naming the substance after its point of origin rather than its…
From the Wed, Aug 19, 2026 roundup → - Lacquer
Lacquer has one of the longer paper trails in today's set: English picked it up from French lacre, which came from Portuguese laca, which came from Arabic and Persian lakk, which traces all the way back to the Sanskrit lākshā — the reddish resin secreted by a…
From the Fri, Aug 21, 2026 roundup → - Monsoon
Arab sailors called the season when the Indian Ocean's winds reversed by the plain word for "season," "mawsim." Portuguese navigators who arrived in the 1500s heard it as "monção," and English took it from them as "monsoon" in the 1580s. The word has since…
From the Mon, Sep 28, 2026 roundup → - Rio de Janeiro
Portuguese explorers sailing with Gaspar de Lemos entered Guanabara Bay on January 1, 1502, and — despite there being no actual river — mistook the wide bay entrance for a river mouth. They named it accordingly: Rio de Janeiro, "River of January." No one ever…
From the Sun, Aug 9, 2026 roundup →