How Languages Secretly Borrow From Each Other

Before ketchup ever met a tomato, it had already crossed two languages and an ocean.

A fish sauce becomes a condiment

Ketchup traces back to kê-tsiap, a fermented fish-and-spice sauce in the Hokkien Chinese language of southern China. Traders carried the word (and something like the sauce) into Malay as kicap, and from there British and Dutch traders picked it up in the 17th century. English ketchup spent its first century as a catch-all word for savory, vinegary sauces — made from mushrooms, walnuts, oysters, anything — long before tomatoes entered the picture at all. The tomato-based version we know today is a 19th-century American invention that simply kept the well-traveled name.

English is mostly borrowed

Ketchup is not an exception — it’s the norm. English is famously promiscuous, having pulled vocabulary from more than 350 languages over its history. A few favorites:

• Sofa — from Arabic ṣuffah, a raised platform or bench, via Turkish and French.
• Shampoo — from Hindi chāmpo, meaning “to press” or “to massage,” brought back by British colonists in India.
• Tycoon — from Japanese taikun (“great lord”), picked up by American sailors and diplomats in the 1850s and later applied to powerful businessmen.
• Robot — a Czech coinage, from robota (“forced labor”), that entered English wholesale from a 1920 play (see our piece on that one).

None of these words feel foreign anymore. That’s the point: successful loanwords don’t stay loans for long. Within a generation or two, they’re just words.

Borrowing follows contact, not logic

Loanwords are a rough map of history — they cluster wherever trade, conquest, migration, or colonization put two languages in the same room for long enough. English absorbed huge waves of French after the Norman Conquest, Latin through the Church and scholarship, and a steady trickle of everything else through empire and global trade. The specific word that survives is often accidental — ketchup could just as easily have stayed a forgotten regional sauce name — but the fact that some word crosses over almost never is. Wherever two languages sit next to each other long enough, words leak through the wall.