We Traced 767 English Words to Their Roots: More Came from French Than from English
2026-09-23 · Vocab Learning
GIVE. GIFT. BOTH. TRUST.
It is hard to find words that feel more English than those. None of them is. The Vikings left them here — they are Old Norse.
The word pages on WordMaster carry an etymology chain for 767 words: a step-by-step record of which languages a word passed through on its way to its present shape. I followed every one of them to the end.
Where the 767 come from
This counts the deepest stage of each chain — the furthest-back ancestor the data records.
| Language | Words | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Latin | 217 | 28.3% |
| Middle English | 175 | 22.8% |
| Old English | 169 | 22.0% |
| Old French | 68 | 8.9% |
| Ancient Greek | 48 | 6.3% |
| Anglo-Norman | 29 | 3.8% |
| French | 15 | 2.0% |
| Old Norse | 14 | 1.8% |
| Middle French | 10 | 1.3% |
| German, Arabic, Italian and others | 22 | 2.9% |
The 175 that stop at Middle English are a limit, not a finding: the data ends there, not the history.
More French than Old English
Count instead by every language a word passes through anywhere in its chain, and the picture changes.
- French family (Old French, Anglo-Norman, Middle French, French): 260 (34%)
- Latin: 254 (33%)
- Old English: 176 (23%)
- Ancient Greek: 48 · Old Norse: 14
Take a pile of everyday English words and trace their roots, and more of them come from French than from English itself. Three centuries of French-speaking rule after 1066 are still sitting in the vocabulary.
Of those 260, 129 have Latin behind the French — words that crossed twice, Latin to French to English.
The two sets never overlap
This is the cleanest thing in the data.
Of the 176 words that pass through Old English and the 260 that pass through French, not one appears in both.
A word is either native or it crossed. Put the lists side by side and you can see it.
| French family | Old English |
|---|---|
| ADAPT, AGREE, ARMOR, AVOID | APPLE, ARROW, BONE, BOOK |
| CAUSE, CHAIN, CHASE, CITY | BRAIN, BREAK, BRING, CLIMB |
| ALTER, ARGUE, AWARD, VOICE | BENCH, BLADE, CHEEK, CLIFF |
The left column is abstract and institutional; the right is bodies, houses and ground. The arrivals brought law, administration and manners. The people already there kept bone, apple and cliff.
The fourteen the Vikings left
Only 14 of the 767 come from Old Norse, and the list is startling.
ANGER · ASKEW · BOOTH · BOTH · CAST · CLUB · FJORD · GEAR · GIFT · GIVE · LOOSE · SHEER · STEAK · TRUST
Borrowed words usually attach to the edges of a language — new objects, new institutions. GIVE and BOTH are not that kind of word. When the scaffolding of a sentence changes, the speakers were not raiding. They were living there.
The long-distance ones
A few chains run past Europe entirely.
| Word | Route |
|---|---|
| CANDY | Old French sucre candi → Arabic قندي |
| SYRUP | Old French sirop → Arabic شراب |
| COACH | Middle French coche → German Kutsche → Hungarian kocsi |
| DOLLAR | Dutch daler → German Taler |
| ANIME | Japanese アニメ |
Sugar and syrup came through Arabic because the medieval Arab world held sugar refining; the carriage came through Hungarian because kocsi is the Hungarian town that built them. The routes words take are the routes goods took.
The longest journeys
Seven chains run a full five stages. Two of them:
MATTER — Middle English mater → Anglo-Norman materie → Old French materie → Latin materia → Latin mater
That last step is mater, mother. Materia — matter, substance — grew out of it: the stuff everything else comes out of.
PLANET — Middle English planete → Old English planeta → Latin planeta → Ancient Greek πλανήτης → Ancient Greek πλανάω
πλανάω means to wander. The Greeks watched a handful of points drift against the fixed stars, called them the wanderers, and the name stuck for good.
The other five are DEBT, PROOF, CUSTOM, COVEN and IDEAL.
What this is good for
After 767 chains, one feature of English stops being a curiosity and starts making sense: the unusual number of near-synonym pairs that differ only in register. After 1066 the native word and the borrowed word both survived, and the pair split — one for everyday speech, one for formal use.
So learning a word on its own leaves you with one word. Learning its root brings the others attached to that root along with it: know materia and MATTER and MATERIAL arrive together.
Etymology data: Etymological Wordnet (Gerard de Melo, CC BY-SA 3.0). The counts above cover the 767 chains published on WordMaster word pages, not English as a whole.