A reborrowed word is a loan word that goes from language A to language B and then back to language A. I think they’re neat.

A classic example is pidgin. A pidgin is a grammatically simple proto-language that emerges when two groups from different places have to learn to communicate. The word pidgin originally described a simplified form of English spoken by Chinese business people, with pidgin being approximately the Chinese pronunciation of the English word “business”. So “business” was borrowed by Chinese, and then borrowed back by English as pidgin.

Another reborrowed word is anime—Japanese animation. The word comes from Japanese, where it was originally borrowed from the English word “animation”.

I find it interesting how the definition of a reborrowed word is not the same as the definition of the word it came from. Consider waifu, which is the Anglicized pronunciation of the Japanese pronunciation of the English “wife”. But a waifu isn’t a wife; a waifu is a fictional character who a lonely man pretends is his wife. (Or a lonely lesbian woman.) There’s also the husbando which, if I’m not mistaken, is a pure English word that never went through Japanese.1

In each of these cases, the reborrowed word is more specific than the original—much like how in English, salsa describes a Mexican spicy sauce made with tomatoes and peppers, whereas in Spanish, salsa just means “sauce”.

My fourth example of a reborrowed thing isn’t a word. English schools classically use a grading system that goes A > B > C > F, or sometimes A > B > C > D > F. Japan borrowed this system, except that—for reasons that are lost to time—there is another rank, S, which is even better than A. Japan’s ranking system made its way back into English via tier lists, which work like letter grades except with S tier at the top.

A related phenomenon happens when a word’s meaning is generalized and then goes back to the original meaning:

source. alt text: Achilles was a might warrior, but his Achilles’ heel was his heel.

(A commenter on Facebook reported that a friend once asked them, “What’s Superman’s kryptonite?”)

Another fun thing is a doublet, where two words with two distinct meanings share a single root word. For example, the Latin fortis evolved into the Italian forte as well as the French fort. Both words were then borrowed by English, but the French-derived forte (pronounced like “fort”2) means “strong point”, and the Italian-derived forte means “loud”. Wikipedia has many more examples of doublets.

Posted on Nov 29, 2025

Notes

  1. I couldn’t find concrete evidence on the origin of “husbando”, but it doesn’t make sense as a Japanese word. The Japanese pronunciation of “husband” would be more like “hasubendo”. My source is Urban Dictionary so take that with a grain of salt, but it fits with my limited understanding of how Japanese pronunciation works. ↩

  2. Nearly everyone gets this wrong. I learned the correct pronunciation from George Carlin, who included this in one of his lists of pet peeves. ↩