List of Arabic Loanwords in English - S

S

safari

Entered English in late 19th century from Swahili language safari = "journey" which is from Arabic سفر safar = "journey".

safflower

عصفر ʿusfur, safflower; or أصفر ʿasfar, (1) yellow, (2) safflower. The Arabic "fur" or "far" part mutated in Italian to "fiore" which is Italian for flower. The flower was commercially cultivated for use as a dye in the Mediterranean region in medieval times. In medieval Italian the spellings included asfiore, asfrole, astifore, affiore, and saffiore. In medieval Arabic the usual was ʿusfur, a word formally related to ʿasfar = "yellow".

saffron

زعفران zaʿfarān, saffron. The ancient Romans used saffron but called it "crocus". The word saffron is first seen in Latin in 1156. In Arabic zaʿfarān is commonplace from the outset of writings in Arabic. It was common in medieval Arab cookery.

saphena (saphenous vein)

سافين sāfīn or صافن ṣāfin, saphenous vein. The word is first seen in any language in Ibn Sina's The Canon of Medicine, 11th century. The saphenous veins were among the more commonly used veins in medieval bloodletting (a practice The Canon of Medicine endorsed).

sash (ribbon)

شاش shāsh, wrap of muslin. (Crossref muslin which entered English near the same time). The early records in English include this comment from an English traveller in the Middle East in year 1615: "All of them wear on their heads white shashes.... Shashes are long towels of Calico wound about their heads." In Arabic today shāsh means gauze or muslin.

scarlet

* سقيرلاط * saqirlāṭ, "fine cloth" (fine cloth of various colors but red most common). The wordform siqillāṭ also sijillāṭ is well attested in Arabic from the early 9th century onward and it came from a Late Classical Latin and early medieval Greek word sigillatus meaning cloth decorated with seals (from Latin sig-, sign). The mutated form saqirlāṭ is actually unattested in Arabic and it has been theoretically reconstructed from an attestation in Mozarabic language about year 1000. The latter form is believed to be the source of the Latin scarlata, first seen about 1100, meaning fine cloth, expensively dyed bright cloth. The red dye was usually kermes a.k.a. crimson, but today's scarlet is a brighter red than the kermes red was.

sequin (clothing ornament)

صكّة | سكّة sikka, a minting die for coins, and also meaning coinage in general. In its early use in English, sequin was the name of Venetian and Turkish gold coins. "The word might well have followed the coin into oblivion, but in the 19th century it managed to get itself applied to the small round shiny pieces of metal applied to clothing."

serendipity

This word was created in English in 1754 from "Serendip", an old fairy tale place, from سرنديب Serendīb, an old Arabic name for Sri Lanka. Fortified in English by its resemblance to the etymologically unrelated "serenity". The fairy tale was The Three Princes of Serendip.

sheikh

شيخ shaīkh, sheikh. It has been in English since the 17th century meaning an Arab sheikh. In the 20th century it took on a slangy additional meaning of "strong, romantic man". This is attributed to a hit movie, "The Sheik (film)", 1921, starring Rudolph Valentino, and after the movie was a hit the book it was based on became a hit, and spawned imitators.

soda, sodium

Soda first appears in Western languages in late medieval Latin and Italian meaning the seaside plant Salsola soda and/or similar saltwort plants used to make soda ash for use in glassmaking, and subsequently meaning soda ash itself. It is most often said to be from سواد suwwād or سويدة suwayda, one or more species of saltworts whose ashes yielded soda ash, especially the species Suaeda vera. That etymon suffers from a want of documentary evidence at a sufficiently early date. But still an Arabic origin is thought most likely. The name "sodium" was derived from soda in early 19th century.

sofa

صفّة soffa, a bench or dais. The Arabic was adopted into Turkish, and from Turkish it entered Western Europe in the 16th century meaning an oriental-style dais with rugs and cushions. Today's meaning of sofa is dated to late-17th-century French and early-18th-century English.

spinach

إِسبناخ isbinākh in Andalusian Arabic, and إِسفاناخ isfānākh in eastern classical Arabic, from Persian aspanākh, spinach. "The spinach was unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans. It was the Arabs who introduced the spinach into Spain, whence it spread to the rest of Europe," and the same is true of the name as well. The first records in English are around year 1400 (as documented in the Middle English Dictionary).

sugar, sucrose, sucrase

سكّر sukkar, sugar. The word is ultimately from Sanskritic sharkara = "sugar". Cane sugar developed in ancient India originally. It was produced by the medieval Arabs on a pretty large scale. History of sugar. Among the earliest records in English are these entries in the account books of an abbey in Durham: year 1302 "Zuker Marok", 1309 "succre marrokes", 1310 "Couker de Marrok", 1316 "Zucar de Cypr". In other Western languages the word is found roughly a century earlier than in English. The Latin form sucrum | succarum or the French form sucre = "sugar" produced the modern chemistry terms sucrose and sucrase.

sultan, sultana

سلطان soltān, authority, ruler. The first ruler to use Sultan as a formal title was an Islamic Turkic-speaking ruler in Central Asia around the year 1000. He borrowed the word from Arabic. Caliph, emir, qadi, and vizier are other Arabic-origin words connected with rulers. Their use in English is mostly confined to discussions of Middle Eastern history.

sumac

سمّاق summāq, sumac species of shrub or its fruit (Rhus coriaria). In the medieval era, different components of the sumac were used in leather making, in dyeing, and in herbal medicine. Geography writer Al-Muqaddasi (died 1000) mentions summāq as one of the commercial crops of Syria. The word is on record in 10th-century Latin and as such it is one of the earliest loanwords on this list.

Swahili

سواحل sawāhil, coasts (plural of sāhil, coast). Historically Swahili was the language used in commerce along the east coast of Africa, along 2000 kilometers of coast. Swahili is grammatically a Bantu language, with about one-third of its vocabulary taken from Arabic.

syrup, sherbet, sorbet

شراب sharāb, a word with two senses in Arabic, "a drink" and "syrup". Medieval Arabic medical writers used it to mean a syrupy medicinal drink. It was passed into medieval Latin in the 12th century as siroppus, a thickly sweetened drink, a syrupy medicinal drink. The change from 'sh-' to 's-' in going from sharāb to siroppus reflects the fact that Latin phonology did not use an 'sh-' sound natively. The '-us' of siroppus is a carrier of Latin grammar and no more. . Separately from sirup, in the 16th century the same Arabic rootword re-entered the West from Turkish as "sherbet", a sweetened fruity drink . The form "sorbet" is a mutant of "sherbet" and was formed in Italian from the Turkish .