Vol. 09 · Loanwords ·Indigenous languages ·1750s
Kayak
from qayaq
- Meaning
- A small, covered boat used by Arctic peoples for hunting.
- Source word
- qayaq
- Route into English
- Inuktitut → Danish (via Greenland contact) → English. The recreational sporting sense is a 20th-century European development; the original design is thousands of years old.
- Arrived
- 1750s
From Indigenous languages
A loose group: Nahuatl, Taino, Algonquian, Guugu Yimithirr, and others. Colonial contact produced many loans; the speakers were often systematically dispossessed of the land the loanwords described.
English borrows.
Browse the full loanword atlas or explore another source language.