Loanword

Uncommon card · No. 112594

A loanword is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Loan and borrow are here metaphorical terms that are well established in linguistics despite their acknowledged descriptive flaws: nothing is taken away (from the donor language) and there is no expectation of returning anything (from the recipient language). Loanwords may be contrasted with calques, in which a word is borrowed into the recipient language by being directly translated from the donor language rather than being adopted in, or in an approximation of, its original form. They must also be distinguished from cognates, which are words in two or more related languages that are similar because they share an etymological origin in the ancestral language, rather than because one borrowed the word from the other.

Read on Wikipedia · Image Nandaro, CC BY-SA 4.0