List of Arabic Loanwords in English - B

B

benzoin, benzene

Benzoin is a resinous substance from an Indonesian tree. Medieval Arab sea-merchants shipped it to the Middle East for sale as perfumery and incense. The word is a great corruption of لبان جاوي labān jāwī, literally "frankincense of Java". In European chemistry, the 15th-century benzoin resin became the source for the 16th-century benzoic acid, which became the source for the 19th-century benzene.

bezoar

بازهر bāzahr (from Persian pâdzahr), a ruminant bolus. Today in English a bezoar is a medical and veterinary term for a ball of indigestible material that collects in the stomach and fails to pass through the intestines. Goat boluses were recommended by medieval Arabic medical writers for use as antidotes to poisons. That is how the word first entered Latin medical vocabulary.

borax, borate, boron

بورق būraq, various salts (including borax) used as fluxes in metalworking and as cleaning agents. Borax | Baurach was adopted in Latin in the 12th century meaning salts used for fluxing metals. The substance that the word could refer to was varied and unsettled in Europe until the 18th century. Elemental boron was isolated and named from borax in the early 19th. The variant of borax called Tincalconite gets its name from medieval Arabic تنكار tinkār = "borax" conjoined with ancient Greek konis = "powder".