The Latin and Greek inside everything

The plain case, and worth having as a control: aqua came down the family line into every Romance language and changed shape on the way. English did not inherit it — English has Germanic water — so every English aqua- word is a later borrowing from books rather than from speech.

In English: aquarium, aquatic, aqueduct

The best calque story there is. When chemistry needed a name for the element that makes water, French coined hydrogène from Greek. Some languages borrowed the word; others translated it part for part and ended up with the same meaning built from their own material.

In English: hydrogen, hydrant, dehydrated

Geo- is the standard prefix for anything about the planet, and it shows the split cleanly: the languages that borrowed geography kept the Greek, and the languages that calqued it describe the same subject with no Greek in it at all.

In English: geography, geology, geometry

Old enough that it is a cousin in every direction. Latin sōl, Sanskrit sūrya, Russian солнце and German Sonne all come down from the same ancestor, which means Hindi appears here as a relative rather than a borrower — the first time on this page that it does.

In English: solar, solstice, parasol

It gives astronomy, and it also gives disaster — from Italian disastro, 'ill-starred', back when a catastrophe was something the sky did to you. Astronomy itself splits the usual way: borrowed across Europe, rebuilt from scratch in East Asia.

In English: astronomy, astronaut, disaster, asterisk

It meant ORDER first and the universe second — the universe being the orderly thing. Which is why cosmetics are from the same root: κοσμητικός was the skill of arranging, and it was applied to a face long before it was applied to the sky.

In English: cosmos, cosmic, cosmetic, cosmopolitan

Latin pēs and Greek πούς are the same ancient word, which is why English has both pedal and podium and octopus. Watch the Romance forms wear down while the learned borrowings stay crisp: pied and pé are what a thousand years of speaking does; pedestrian is what a dictionary does.

In English: pedal, pedestrian, podium, octopus

A manuscript is something written by hand; a manual is a small handbook; to manufacture was once to make by hand. The root is still fully alive in Romance as the ordinary word for the body part, and fully dead in English, where it survives only inside longer words.

In English: manual, manuscript, manoeuvre, manicure

Medicine is where Greek roots travel furthest, because every country's doctors were reading the same textbooks. Cardio- is borrowed almost everywhere, including into languages that have a perfectly good word for heart and use it in every other context.

In English: cardiac, cardiology, electrocardiogram

One Latin word, and English borrowed it four separate times at four different stages of French — corpse, corps, corset and corpus are all the same word, arriving in different centuries with different amounts of French wear on them.

In English: corpse, corps, corporation, corpulent

Latin dēns, Greek ὀδούς, Sanskrit danta, German Zahn and English tooth are all one word, which becomes obvious only once you know that Grimm's law turns d into t and that Old High German pushed t on to z. The dentist is Latin; the orthodontist is Greek.

In English: dentist, dental, orthodontist, trident

It meant BREATH, and then the thing that leaves when the breathing stops. Psychology is a young word — 19th century — which is exactly why it splits so cleanly: every language on this site had to decide about it within one lifetime.

In English: psychology, psyche, psychic

Biology splits the world neatly in two. Languages in Europe's orbit borrowed the Greek; the East Asian languages built the same word out of their own characters and got 'study of living things', which is what biology means anyway.

In English: biology, biography, antibiotic

Vitamin was coined in 1912 and is the single most widely borrowed scientific word on this site: it reached every language here within a generation, because the thing itself was new everywhere at once. Only Chinese refused it.

In English: vital, vitamin, revitalise

Democracy is δῆμος 'people' + κράτος 'power'. It is a useful test case because it is an idea as much as a thing, and languages are much likelier to translate an idea than to translate an object.

In English: democracy, demographic, epidemic

The word that started comparative linguistics. In 1786 William Jones noticed that Sanskrit pitṛ, Greek πατήρ and Latin pater could not possibly be a coincidence, and the Indo-European family was proposed on the strength of exactly this kind of list.

In English: paternal, patron, patriot, expatriate

The same story as pater, and it reaches one branch further: Russian мать belongs here too. Four branches of the family — Romance, Germanic, Slavic and Indo-Aryan — saying one word, and not one of them borrowed it from any of the others.

In English: maternal, matrix, matriculate, material

Theology is the obvious one. Enthusiasm is the good one: ἔνθεος meant 'having a god inside you', so to be enthusiastic was originally to be possessed. The word has calmed down considerably.

In English: theology, atheist, enthusiasm, pantheon

Nation, native, nature and naive are one word. A nation was a group born in the same place; nature was what a thing was born as; naive meant natural, and only later meant too natural for your own good.

In English: nation, native, nature, naive, innate

The best word-history on this page. Greek παραβολή meant a comparison. Latin took it as parabola for a figure of speech, church Latin used it for Jesus's parables, and in the mouths of ordinary speakers it drifted until it meant simply an utterance — and then a WORD. The everyday Romance word for 'word' is a Greek geometry term.

In English: parable, parabola, parole

Originally 'to scratch' — you scratched letters into wax. It is now the standard suffix for any kind of recording, and it is one of the few Greek roots that made it into Japanese and Chinese as a sound rather than a translation, in the word for graph.

In English: graph, photograph, calligraphy, graffiti

Telephone is 'far-voice', and it arrived everywhere in the 1870s and 80s — late enough that we can watch each language decide what to do about it. The split is almost perfectly geographic, and it is the same split as hydrogen.

In English: telephone, phonetics, symphony, megaphone

Named after Byblos, the Phoenician port that shipped the papyrus. Almost every language in Europe calls a library a bibliothēkē, a 'book-store' — and English is the odd one out, having gone to Latin instead and taken librarium. Which is why an English library sounds like nothing else on the continent.

In English: bible, bibliography, bibliophile

The organ and the thing it produces, under one word — which most languages here also do, including English if you count 'mother tongue'. Latin originally had dingua and changed it under the influence of lingere, 'to lick'.

In English: language, linguist, bilingual

Another cousin word, and it reaches every branch on this site that is in the family at all. Greek ὄνομα supplies the other half of English: synonym, anonymous and pseudonym are Greek, while noun, nominate and nomenclature are Latin, and they are the same word.

In English: noun, nominate, synonym, anonymous

A photograph is 'light-writing'. The short form photo is borrowed almost universally, while the full compound is exactly the kind of two-part word that invites calquing — and Japanese produced one of the most quietly beautiful ones on this site.

In English: photo, photograph, photosynthesis

Video is literally 'I see' — a first-person Latin verb sitting in every language on earth as a noun. It is the most recent root here to travel, and it travelled as sound almost everywhere, because it arrived as a brand-new object with a brand-new name.

In English: video, vision, evident, supervise

The best-disguised word on the page. ἐπίσκοπος was an 'overseer', a supervisor. Latin took it as episcopus, and then every language in Europe wore the front of it away until the overseer became a BISHOP. Telescope and bishop are the same root.

In English: telescope, microscope, periscope, bishop, sceptic

Micro- attaches to anything, which makes it a good measure of how a language handles new compounds. The microscope was named in 1625 and gives the cleanest three-way split on this page: borrowed whole, calqued entirely, or borrowed and then clipped.

In English: microscope, microphone, microwave, micro

The metre was defined in revolutionary France and named from Greek, and it spread with the measuring system itself. China is the interesting one: it took the unit and gave it a native character rather than a transcription.

In English: metre, thermometer, symmetry, diameter

Alive in Romance as the everyday word for time AND for weather — a merger that catches every learner, because tiempo, tempo and temps all do both jobs. English kept only the borrowed abstractions.

In English: temporary, tempo, contemporary, temporal

A thermometer is a heat-measurer, and the word is a compound of two Greek roots both of which already appear on this page. Compounds like this are where calquing is most tempting, because every part has an obvious local equivalent.

In English: thermometer, thermal, thermos, hypothermia

This single word cuts the family in half. Latin centum starts with /k/; Sanskrit śatam starts with a sibilant, and so does Avestan satəm. Linguists split the whole Indo-European family into CENTUM and SATEM languages on exactly this sound, in exactly this word.

In English: century, percent, centipede, cent

Low numbers are the most conservative words a language has — they are said constantly and almost never replaced, so they preserve the family resemblance better than anything else. Two is two in every branch here.

In English: duo, dual, double, duet, dubious

Latin novus and Greek νέος are the same word, which is why English has both novel and neo-. And it is another cousin across the whole family: new, neu, नया, но́вый.

In English: novel, novice, innovate, neon

Time as duration, as against καιρός, time as the right moment. Greek had two words and every language on this page has to make do with one — which is why chronic, chronological and anachronism all had to be borrowed rather than built.

In English: chronic, chronology, anachronism, synchronise

Tele- is the prefix of the modern world: telegraph, telephone, television. Television is half Greek and half Latin, which purists complained about bitterly in the 1900s and which nobody has minded since.

In English: telescope, telegraph, television, telepathy

Everything gets carried: imports in, exports out, transport across, and a porter carries your bags. The Portuguese verb is the one that matters for the rest of this page, because it is the ships that did the carrying.

In English: transport, export, portable, porter

It came into Latin as machina, and in two languages on this site the general word for 'machine' narrowed until it meant one specific machine: the car. A Russian gets into a маши́на and a Georgian into a მანქანა, and both are literally saying 'the device'.

In English: machine, mechanic, machination

An automobile is a self-mover, and it is the compound that best shows the calque instinct, because 'self-moving-vehicle' is easy to say in any language that builds compounds. Chinese declined the whole premise and named it after steam instead.

In English: automatic, automobile, autonomy, autograph

A wheel, and then anything that goes round: rotate, rotary, and a rota because the duty comes round again. Portuguese roda went to Malacca with the machinery it belonged to.

In English: rotate, rotary, rota, control

It meant LEISURE. Free time was what you needed in order to sit and discuss things, so the place where discussion happened took the name, and by the time Latin borrowed it as schola the leisure was gone for good. Then Portuguese ships carried escola to Malacca, which is why Malay children go to sekolah.

In English: school, scholar, scholastic

It was a civic word before it was a religious one: the assembly of citizens summoned to decide something. Christianity took it for the congregation, then for the building, and Portuguese missionaries took igreja to Southeast Asia along with the thing it named.

In English: ecclesiastical, ecclesiology

A vaulted chamber. Latin took it as camera for a room, and it went two ways: into Romance as the word for a room, and into English as the camera obscura — the 'dark room' — which was shortened to camera when it became a box. Hindi's everyday word for room came the other route, off a Portuguese ship at Goa.

In English: camera, chamber, comrade, bicameral

From arma, 'tools' or 'arms' — a cupboard was where you kept your equipment. This is the root that this site found by accident: the /family page measures how much vocabulary two languages share, using no etymology whatsoever, and it reported that Hindi's closest match in Portuguese was अलमारी against armário. It had picked up a 16th-century Goa loanword out of pure sound.

In English: armoury, armadillo

The door of the house, named for Janus, the two-faced god of doorways — who also gave us January, the month that looks both ways. Portuguese made a diminutive, janela, for a small opening: a window. That is the form that sailed.

In English: January, janitor

Not Greek and not grand, but it makes the point better than any abstraction. Japanese for bread is パン, and it is not from English — it is Portuguese pão, landed at Nagasaki in the 1540s and never dislodged, even after four centuries of contact with English-speaking bakers.

In English: pantry, companion, accompany

The city as a political unit, not as a set of buildings — which is why πόλις gives politics rather than any word about streets. It survives inside place names all over the map: Naples is Neapolis, 'new city'; so is Nablus.

In English: politics, metropolis, police, cosmopolitan

The longest journey on this page. Latin sāpō went into Arabic as ṣābūn, and Arabic carried it east along the trade routes into Persian, Hindi and Malay. Meanwhile Portuguese sabão went by sea to Nagasaki. The same Latin word reached Japan and India by two completely different routes, centuries apart.

In English: soap, saponify

Spanish and Portuguese kept mesa as the ordinary word for a table, and the Portuguese one sailed. Malay had no need of a foreign word for a table and took one anyway, which is what happens when the furniture arrives with the vocabulary attached.

In English: mesa, commensal

It became Latin charta, then paper, then a written sheet, then a letter, then a playing card — and every one of those meanings survives somewhere. Portuguese carta reached Japan as a deck of cards and stayed there under that name.

In English: chart, card, charter, cartography

Late Latin rather than classical — the word for a bud, which is what a button looks like. It is here because of where it ended up: Japanese ボタン is not from English 'button', it is from Portuguese botão, which means it has been in the language since before England had a navy worth mentioning.

In English: button, bud