Vol. 09 · Loanwords ·South Asia ·1770s
Jungle
from jaṅgal (Hindi)
- Meaning
- Uncultivated ground, wasteland — not specifically forest.
- Source word
- jaṅgal (Hindi)
- Route into English
- British travellers in India misapplied it to dense tropical forest, and that sense became the export version; the original "wasteland" sense is rare in English.
- Arrived
- 1770s
From South Asia
Three centuries of British colonial contact — East India Company, Raj, military, domestic life — deposited a distinct Hindi/Urdu/Bengali/Sanskrit layer in everyday English.
English borrows.
Browse the full loanword atlas or explore another source language.