Made in Russia

Made in Russia

There are heaps of English words that come from Russian. Most those words are no surprise at all:

borzoi         cosmonaut babushka 

Bolshevik ruble balalaika 

tundra         commisar stroganoff 

samoyed vodka            tsar 

pogrom       Kalashnikov    gulag

Then there are Russian words that made their way through Yiddish before arriving in English:

The Russian word blinyets — meaning little pancake — became the Yiddish word blintze, which in 1903 became the English word blintz.

The Russian word knysh — a type of cake — became the Yiddish word knish, which arrived unchanged in English in 1930.

The Russian word latka — a patch — was figuratively used to refer to a pastry. This figurative meaning made its way into Yiddish, then became the English word latke in 1925.

Some words made it to English from Russian in other ways:

Parka made its way to English in 1780 through Aleut from Russian.

The Sanskrit word sramana-s referred to a Buddhist ascetic. By the 1690s it landed in English as shaman, but not before a wild linguistic road trip through Prakrit, Chinese, Tungus, and — of course — Russian. 

Yurt — a house or hut — came from one of the Turkic languages, then spent centuries in Russian before getting to English in 1784.

Last but not least, etymologists are pretty sure the word hamster — first appearing in English in 1600, & replacing the inelegant term German rat — comes from a mash-up of the Russian word for the Asian rodent cricetini & the Lithuanian word for ground squirrel.

Which of these sounds least Russian to your ear? 

My thanks go out to this week’s sources, Merriam Webster, Collins Dictionary,  Etymonline,  & Wordnik.