The rich variety of the English vocabulary reflects the vast number of words it has taken from other languages. These range from Latin, Greek, Scandinavian, Celtic, French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian to, among others, Hebrew, Maori, Malay, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, and Yiddish. Philip Durkin's full and accessible history reveals how, when, and why. He shows how to discover the origins of loanwords, when and why they were adopted, and what happens to them once they have been.

List of Contents: Introduction C. P. BIGGAM: Old English colour lexemes used of textiles in Anglo-Saxon England Julie COLEMAN: Slang terms for money: a historical thesaurus Fiona DOUGLAS and John CORBETT: 'Huv a wee seat, hen': evaluative terms in Scots Philip DURKIN: Lexical splits and mergers: some difficult cases for the OED