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About this tool
Trace 61 everyday English words back to Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali and Odia, with the route, era and how settled each etymology is.
Indian English Loanword Finder traces 61 ordinary English words back to the Indian-subcontinent languages they came from, showing the original word, its literal meaning, the route it travelled, and roughly when it first appears in English. The span runs from 'pepper', in English before 900 AD through Greek and Latin, to 'cushy', picked up as army slang around the First World War. Where an etymology is genuinely disputed — 'punch', 'verandah', 'opal' — the entry is labelled as disputed instead of stating a guess as fact.
Open Indian English Loanword Finder on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Type into 'Look up an English word' — it opens on shampoo, and searching a source language such as Tamil or a meaning such as boat matches too.
Read the Word origin card: Source language, Original word, Literal meaning, Route into English, First English use, Field and Etymology status, with a note underneath.
Narrow the table below with the Source language, Field and Etymology status menus — entries scholars argue over carry a 'disputed' tag — then press Copy origin to copy the featured entry.
Each entry shows the chain — Sanskrit to Persian to Arabic to Old French for 'orange' — rather than a single hop.
Etymologies that scholars argue over carry a 'disputed' flag, so you never quote a folk theory as settled fact.
Approximate first-use years let you see the spice-trade wave, the Portuguese wave and the colonial-army wave separately.
Common ones include shampoo, jungle, bungalow, pyjamas, loot, thug, cheetah, chutney, curry, mango, catamaran, bandana, khaki, cot, dinghy, guru, karma and yoga. Older layers include pepper, ginger, sugar, candy, orange and crimson, which reached English through Greek, Arabic and French long before direct contact.
It comes from the Hindi चाँपो chāṁpo, the imperative of chāṁpnā, 'to press or knead'. English borrowed it in the 1760s meaning to massage, and only in the 1830s did it narrow to washing the hair.
Portugal held the Malabar coast trade for most of the 16th century, so Malayalam and Tamil words for goods it shipped — mango, teak, coir, copra, curry — reached Europe in Portuguese form first. Direct Hindi and Urdu borrowings mostly come later, through 18th and 19th-century British administration and the army.
It is the traditional explanation — pāñc, five, for the drink's five ingredients — but it is not proven, and this tool marks it as disputed. Etymologies passed around as folklore are exactly the ones worth checking before you repeat them.