List of Arabic Loanwords in English - D-F

D-F

damask (textile fabric), damask rose (flower)

دمشق dimashq, Damascus. The city name Damascus is very ancient and not Arabic. The damson plum – earlier called also the damask plum and damascene plum – has a word-history in Latin that goes back to the days when Damascus was part of the Roman empire and so it is not from Arabic. On the other hand, the damask fabric and the damask rose emerged in the Western languages when Damascus was an Arabic-speaking city; and apparently they referred to goods originally sold from or made in Arabic Damascus.

elixir

الإكسير al-'iksīr, alchemical philosopher's stone. The Arabs took the word from the Greek xērion, then prepended Arabic al- = "the". The Greek had entered Arabic meaning a dry powder for treating wounds. The Arabic alchemy sense entered Latin in the 12th century. Elixir is in all European languages today.

erg (landform), hamada (landform), sabkha (landform), wadi (landform)

عرق ʿerq, sandy desert landscape. حمادة ḥamāda, craggy desert landscape with very little sand. Those words are established in geology including sedimentology. Their entrypoint was in late-19th-century studies of the Sahara Desert.
سبخة sabkha, salt marsh. The word occurs occasionally in English and French in the 19th century. Sabkha with a technical meaning as coastal salt-flat terrain came into general use in sedimentology in the 20th century through numerous studies of the coastal salt flats on the eastern side of the Arabian penninsula.
وادي wādī, a river valley or gully. In English, a wadi is a non-small gully that is dry, or dry for most of the year, in the desert.

fennec (desert fox)

فنك fenek, fennec fox. European naturalists borrowed it in the late 18th century. (In older Arabic writings, fenek also designated various other mammals).

fustic (yellow dye)

فستق fustuq, pistachio. In medieval Spain a dye from the wood of a certain tree was in use. The dye's Spanish name fustet was derived from Arabic fustuq according to most of today's dictionaries. After the discovery of America a better (more durable) yellow dye from a tree wood was found and given the same name. A derived technical term in chemistry is fustin.