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Word for Wednesday: Origami

In this weeks insight into our ever-growing lexis we’ll take a look into an ancient yet hugely popular craft, which originated in the Far East. The invention of paper is widely attributed to the Chinese political official Tsai Lun in the first century. Although paper can be traced to as early as 200BC, he is traditionally credited for the standardization of a papermaking process. It is said that Buddhist monks brought paper to Japan, although paper was still very valuable. It is after this that the Japanese were able to perfect the beautiful and delicate practice of paper folding now known as ‘Origami’. The word Origami is a compound of two shorter and rather obvio...

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Five Japanese Loanwords

What is a loanword? A loanword is the term given to a word which is directly borrowed from another language and used in the recipient language without being translated first. One of the reasons why English is such a difficult language to learn (and why its spellings are so inconsistent!) is because the language is full of loanwords. Some loanwords are obvious, such as words used to describe food traditionally from other countries (such as ‘tsatsiki’ or ‘chow mein’), whereas others were borrowed so long ago that you might be surprised to discover they are loanwords at all (such as: ‘pyjamas’ or ‘breeze’). Last week we shared a list of Japa...

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