We Traced 767 English Words to Their Roots: More Came from French Than from English
2026-09-23 (updated ) · Vocab Learning
GIVE, GIFT, BOTH and TRUST feel as English as words get. Follow their etymology back, though, and all four come from Old Norse, the language the Vikings brought with them.
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 those chains to its end and counted the languages.
Where do English words come from?
The first count uses the deepest stage of each chain, meaning 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% |
Treat the 175 that stop at Middle English with care: the data ends there, but those words' history goes back further.
Does English have more French or Old English words?
The second count looks at every language a word passes through anywhere in its chain, not only the deepest one. The order 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
So in a pile of everyday English words, more have passed through French than through English's own oldest stage. After 1066 the ruling class in England spoke French for close to three centuries, and that period is still visible in the vocabulary.
Of those 260, 129 have Latin behind the French. Those words crossed twice: from Latin into French, and from French into English.
Do the French and Old English sets overlap?
This was the result that surprised me most. I checked the 176 words that pass through Old English against the 260 that pass through French, and not one word appears in both lists. Within this data, every word is either native or borrowed, never both. A few from each side:
| 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 leans abstract and institutional (CAUSE, AWARD, CITY). The right column is mostly bodies, houses and ground (BONE, CHEEK, CLIFF). Roughly speaking, the newcomers brought the vocabulary of law, administration and manners, while the people already living there kept their words for everyday things.
Which English words come from Old Norse?
Only 14 of the 767 come from Old Norse, but they are surprisingly basic words:
ANGER · ASKEW · BOOTH · BOTH · CAST · CLUB · FJORD · GEAR · GIFT · GIVE · LOOSE · SHEER · STEAK · TRUST
Borrowed words usually attach at the edges of a language, naming new objects or new institutions. GIVE and BOTH are core vocabulary that turns up in ordinary sentences all the time. For words like that to cross over, Norse speakers must have settled and lived alongside the English for a long time, not just passed through.
Which English words come from outside Europe?
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 |
Candy and syrup came through Arabic because the medieval Arab world led in sugar refining. The coach came through Hungarian: kocsi means "of Kocs", the village where this kind of carriage was first built.
Which English word took the longest route into English?
Seven chains run a full five stages. Here are two of them.
MATTER: Middle English mater → Anglo-Norman materie → Old French materie → Latin materia → Latin mater
The last step is mater, mother. Latin materia, meaning substance, grew out of it, with the idea that matter is what everything else comes from.
PLANET: Middle English planete → Old English planeta → Latin planeta → Ancient Greek πλανήτης → Ancient Greek πλανάω
πλανάω means to wander. Greek observers saw a handful of points moving against the fixed stars and called them wanderers, and the name stayed with them.
The other five are DEBT, PROOF, CUSTOM, COVEN and IDEAL.
Does knowing word origins help you memorise vocabulary?
Going through 767 chains explained one thing about English that I had only noticed before: it has an unusual number of near-synonym pairs that differ mainly in register. After 1066 the native word and the French one both survived, and they split the work, one for everyday speech and one for formal use.
That also suggests a way to study. Learn a word on its own and you have one word. Learn its root and the other words built on that root come along with it. If you know materia, for example, MATTER and MATERIAL become one thing to remember instead of two.
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.