List of English words of Arabic origin (C–F)

The following English words have been acquired either directly from Arabic or else indirectly by passing from Arabic into other languages and then into English. Most entered one or more of the Romance languages before entering English.

To qualify for this list, a word must be reported in etymology dictionaries as having descended from Arabic. A handful of dictionaries has been used as the source for the list. Words associated with the Islamic religion are omitted; for Islamic words, see Glossary of Islam. Obsolete and rare words are also omitted. A bigger listing including many words very rarely seen in English is available at Wiktionary dictionary.

Loanwords listed in alphabetical order

 * List of English words of Arabic origin (A-B)
 * List of English words of Arabic origin (C-F)
 * List of English words of Arabic origin (G-J)
 * List of English words of Arabic origin (K-M)
 * List of English words of Arabic origin (N-S)
 * List of English words of Arabic origin (T-Z)
 * List of English words of Arabic origin: Addenda for certain specialist vocabularies

C

 * camphor: كافور kāfūr, camphor. The medieval Arabs imported camphor by sea from the East Indies for aromatic uses and medical uses. Medieval Arabic general-purpose dictionaries say kāfūr is "well-known". Among the Latins the records begin in the late 9th century (with spelling cafora) though records are scarce until the 12th century. Another imported East Indies wood product which had both aromatic and medical uses in late medieval Europe and had Arabic word ancestry is sandalwood, from Arabic صندل sandal. English "sandalwood" descends from medieval Latin sandalus | sandalum, which is ultimately from Sanskrit čandana = "sandalwood". The sandalwood aromatic wood came from the Indies. In medieval Arabic it was called sandal and was commonly used and well-known (examples). The word is in Greek in Late Antiquity as santalon. Some etymology dictionaries derive the medieval Latin from the Greek with disregard for the Arabic. Others derive the medieval Latin from the Arabic with disregard for the Greek on the grounds that (1) Arabic (especially Yemeni) seafarers were the main providers of sandalwood to medieval Europe; and (2) the 'd' in the Arabic can explain how the Latin has a 'd'; and (3) the Latin emerges too late for a Greek source to be likely: CNRTL.fr cites the 11th-century medical writer Constantinus Africanus for the earliest record of sandalus | sandalum in Latin. The book The Moluccas and the Traffic in Spices up to the Arrival of Europeans, by Robin A. Donkin, year 2003, has some early history for sandalwood in Europe on pages 110, 114, 116, and 122; and some more ancient and medieval history for sandalwood is in the book An Historical Geography of Camphor, by Robin A. Donkin, year 1999. According to these two books, the word's first document in Greek in the 1st century AD in Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, spelled santalinon, and it is present but rare in Greek sources in the early centuries AD, and there is one record in Late Classical Latin as santalium (clearly borrowed from the Greek), but when Constantinus Africanus used it as sandalus | sandalum in the late 11th century the word had been absent in Latin for over six centuries, or more exactly the books' author does not know of a surviving record from all those intervening centuries. Many records are in later medieval Latin. The medieval Arabs used sandalwood in medicine (e.g.) and that was copied by the late medieval Latins (e.g.). As a reflection of the widespread later-medieval use of sandalwood the word is in late medieval English, German, French, Italian and Iberian Romance languages (all spelling it with a 'd'). Dictionaries deriving the Latin & Western name from the Arabic name include ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, and others, while the dictionary at ref sits on the fence on the question. The scientific or New Latin name for the sandalwood tree genus is Santalum, a wordform that arose as a Renaissance-era re-fashioning from the Greek, says CNRTL. Ultimately, camphor is derived from the Sanskrit karpūra, referring to camphor throughout India since ancient times.


 * candy: قند qand + قندي qandī, sugared. Cane sugar developed in ancient India. Medieval Persian qand = "cane sugar" is believed to have probably come from Sanskritic. The plant is native to a tropical climate. The medieval Arabs grew the plant with artificial irrigation and exported some of the product to the Latins. The word candi entered all the Western European languages in the later medieval centuries.Many medieval Arabic dictionaries, including the al-Sihāh dictionary dated about 1003, have قند qand defined firstly as the juice or honey of sugar cane. Secondly they define qand as this juice solidified. Arabic qandī = "from qand" or "of qand". In medieval Arabic texts qand is a somewhat frequent word. But qandī is very hard to find. Although qandī is very rare in the texts, qandī is usually preferred to qand as the parent of the European "candy" for phonetic and syntactic reasons. Candy's earliest known dates in the European languages: French candi = 1256; Italian-Latin çucari canti (sugar candy) = soon after 1259; Anglo-Latin candy = 1274; Italian candi = 1310; Spanish cande = 1325–1326; Netherlands Dutch candijt and candi = 2nd half of 14th century; German kandith = probably circa 1400, German zuckerkandyt = 1470; English candy = circa 1420. An English-to-Latin dictionary dated circa 1440 has English sukyr candy translated as Latin sucura de candia. The word is rare in English until the later 16th century. Refs: Baheth.info , CNRTL.fr, MED, TLIO, Vocabolario Ligure, CORDE, Raja Tazi, Egymologiebank.nl, NED, Promptorium parvulorum. See also history of sugar.


 * carat (gold purity), carat (mass) : قيراط qīrāt, a small unit of weight, defined as one-twentyfourth (1/24) of the weight of a certain coin namely the medieval Arabic gold dinar, and alternatively defined by reference to a weight of (e.g.) 3 barley seeds. In medieval Arabic the word was also used with the meaning of 1/24th of the money value of a gold dinar coin. In the Western languages the word was adopted as a measurement term for the proportion of gold in a gold alloy, especially in a gold coin, beginning in Italy in the mid-13th century, occurring soon after some city-states of Italy started new issues of pure gold coins. For the meaning of qīrāt in medieval Arabic see ḳīrāṭ @ Brill's Encyclopaedia of Islam, First Edition, Volume 4 page 1024 and قيراط @ Baheth.info . In the early records of the word carat in medieval French and English, it referred to the purity of gold, most often of gold coins, and is seen additionally as a unit of weight only later on – ref: DMF, ref: MED. The French and English came from Italian. The first known records in the West are in Italian-Latin and Italian in the mid-13th century – CNRTL.fr, TLIO, Minervini anno 2012 pages 20–21. For five centuries before 1250, no State or kingdom in Western Christendom issued gold coins, except for a few short-lived, relatively minor issuances in Iberia and Sicily (for details on the exceptions see Ref). Silver was the metal of choice for money in the West in those centuries. Starting in 1252 in Republic of Genoa, 1252 in Republic of Florence, and 1284 in Republic of Venice, the Italian city-states started issuing 24-carat gold coins. These were well received, and other States soon followed their example, including France in 1290 and England in 1344. During the five centuries prior to 1250, gold coins were almost continually minted by the Arabs and the Byzantine Greeks. During those centuries in both Arabic and Greek the word carat was in use in the sense of 1/24th of a gold coin; i.e., Arabic qīrāt was 1/24th of the Arabic dinar and Greek keration was 1/24th of the Greek bezant. It is possible that the Italians borrowed the word from both Arabic and Greek concurrently. Greater details on the word's history are at English Words That Are Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note #49.


 * caravan : قيروان qaīrawān, convoy of travelers journeying together, which could be a merchant convoy or military or other convoy. Qaīrawān is in all the main medieval Arabic dictionaries. It is somewhat frequently used in medieval Arabic writings, even though not nearly as frequently as the synonymous Arabic qāfila. In the Western languages the word has records since the 12th century. The early records are in Latin and they include carvana (1190), caravana (1217), caravanna (1219-1225), karavenna (1250). Possibly slightly earlier is Latin caravana (reportedly 1161). From southern Italy, referring to a caravan of sailing ships, is Latin carabana (1240). All of those Latin records use the word with the same meaning as the Arabic word. The word with this meaning has been continuously in use in the Western languages since then. In Italian, late medieval merchants have it in several kinds of applications contexts, spelled carovana | caravana. It is pretty common in late medieval Italy (e.g., is in Boccaccio's Decameron and Pegolotti's Mercatura). It is not common in French and English until the later 16th century, but French does have late medieval caravane and English has late 15th century carvan. The year 1598 Italian-English dictionary of John Florio has Italian caravana translated to English as English caravan. Arabic qaīrawān came from Persian kārwān with same meaning. Back in the context of the 12th and 13th century, any Persian word would necessarily have to have had intermediation through some other language in order to arrive in a Western language, because there was no contact between Persian and Western languages at the time. In practice the intermediary was Arabic. The majority of the 12th and 13th century Latin records of this word involve travellers in Arabic-speaking lands, especially Latin Crusaders in the Levant, and none are in Iranian-speaking lands.


 * caraway (seed) : كرويا karawiyā | كراوياء Krāwyāʼ, caraway. The word with that meaning is quite common in mid-medieval Arabic. Spelled "caraway" in English in the 1390s in a cookery book. The English word came from Arabic via medieval Romance languages. Al-karawiyā = "caraway" is in medieval general-purpose dictionaries in Arabic (www.Baheth.info), and it is mentioned multiple times by the author of the 10th century Nabataean Agriculture (ref), and dozens of times in the cookery book of Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq (flourished 10th century) (ref), and it occurs in the medical books of Al-Razi (died c. 930) (ref) and Ibn Sina (died 1037) (ref), and in the geography book of Ibn Hawqal (died 988) (ref), and in the agriculture book of Ibn al-'Awwam (died not long after 1200) (ref), and other medieval Arabic writers (ref). Ibn al-'Awwam in Andalusia in the late 12th century described how to grow a crop of caraway seeds. An Arabic cookery book from 13th century Andalusia has dozens of recipes that use caraway seeds as a spice (ref, ref). From the Andalusian Arabic, medieval Spanish and Catalan had alcarahueya | alcarauia | alcarauea = "caraway" (starting year 1250 per Corominas). Modern Spanish is alcaravea. Medieval Sicilian Italian had caruya | caruye = "caraway" with date before 1312 (ref: Caracausi) and its word-form shows it is undoubtedly from the Arabic. Medieval Latin carui | carvi = "caraway" appears to have come at least in part from the same Arabic, but there is a question and lack of clarity about this because classical Greek karo | karon | karos, classical Latin careum and medieval Latin caruum | carea designated various aromatic seeds, among different writers, and in most cases it is not clear what species the writer was referring to. In the classical records the name is uncommon and the species it names is never clear. For example Dioscorides in Greek in the 1st century AD said "Karo[s] is a... little seed.... It has much the same nature as anise. The boiled root is edible as a vegetable." – ref, ref. Many aromatic seeds (including caraway) can be fitted to that statement within the botanical family Apiaceae. The book A History of the Principal Drugs of Vegetable Origin (year 1879) reports about caraway: "It is not noticed by St. Isidore, archbishop of Seville in the 7th century, though he mentions fennel, dill, coriander, anise, and parsley [all in the family Apiaceae]; nor is it named by St. Hildegard in Germany in the 12th century. Neither have we found any reference to it in the Anglo-Saxon Herbarium of Apuleius, written circa A.D. 1050, or in other works of the same period, though cumin, anise, fennel, and dill are all mentioned. On the other hand, in two German medicine-books of the 12th and 13th centuries... and in a Welsh medicine book of the 13th century... the seeds appear to have been in use [medicinally]. Caraway was certainly in use in England at the close of the 14th century [culinarily]." – ref. Carui = "caraway" occurs more than a dozen times in the influential Latin medical writer Constantinus Africanus (died c. 1087) who took the bulk of his content from Arabic medical sources – ref. The records for caraway in Christian Western Europe grow briskly from the 12th century onward while being absent in Latin in the medieval centuries before Constantinus. This can be taken as one sign that the word arrived from the Arabic. As another sign, late medieval English has it as caraway, also carwy, and the first record in English is carewy (1282), and these English wordforms do not exhibit Latin parentage: The letter 'w' was created to represent a sound that does not occur in Latin (Latin texts do not use the letter 'w' except in some Germanic names) and the words of the English language with the letter 'w' are rarely of Latin descent. Middle English Dictionary has a set of examples of caraway in late medieval English.


 * carob : خرّوب kharrūb, carob. Carob beans and carob pods were consumed in the Mediterranean area from ancient times, and had several names in classical Latin. But a name of roughly around carrubia is in Latin from only the 11th or 12th century onward. The late medieval Latin word is the parent of today's Italian carruba, French caroube, English carob.


 * check, checkmate, chess, exchequer, cheque, chequered, unchecked, checkout, checkbox, checkbook ... : شاه shāh, king in the game of chess. The many uses of "check" in English are all descended from Persian shah = "king" and the use of this word in the game of chess to mean "check the king". Chess was introduced to medieval Europe through Arabs. The medieval Arabs probably pronounced the last h in shāh harder and more forcefully than how shah is pronounced in English or in today's Arabic. The word is in 11th century Catalan-Latin as escac, then 12th century French as eschac, giving rise to 12th century French eschec, which the English "check" derives from. The "mate" in checkmate is from the medieval Arabic chess term شاه مات shāh māt = "king dies". This too arrived in English through French, starting in French as mat in the 12th century. Italian has scaco mato = "checkmate" in the 12th century. The English word chess arrived from medieval French esches | eschas = "chess" which was the grammatical plural of eschec | eschac = "check". 11th century Catalan-Latin has grammatical plural escachs = "chess" from grammatical singular escac = "check".


 * chemistry : See alchemy.


 * cipher, decipher : صفر sifr, zero, i.e. the zero digit in the Arabic number system. The use of zero as one of the elementary digits was a key innovation in the Arabic number system. Latin cifra was the parent of English cipher (or cypher). The word came to Latin Europe with Arabic numbers in the 12th century. In Europe the meaning was originally numeral zero as a positionholder, then any positional numeral, then numerically encoded message. The last meaning, and decipher, dates from the 1520s in English, 1490s in French, 1470s in Italian. But in English cipher also continued to be used as a word for nought or zero until the 19th century.


 * civet (mammal), civet (perfume) : زباد zabād, civet perfume, a musky perfume excreted from a gland in قطط الزباد qatat al-zabād = "civet cats". The medieval Arabs obtained civet from the African civet and from various civets of the Indies. The word is in 15th-century Italian as zibetto = "civet perfume". Records of the form civet start in Catalan 1372 and French 1401 (cf. e.g. Latin liber -> French livre; Arabic al-qobba -> Spanish alcoba -> French alcove). Incidentally the botanical genus Abelmoschus got its name from Arabic حبّ المسك habb el-misk = "musk seed", a seed yielding a musky perfume.


 * coffee, café : قهوة, coffee. Coffee drinking originated in Yemen in the 15th century. Qahwa (itself of uncertain origin) begot Turkish kahve. Turkish phonology does not have a /w/ sound, and the change from w to v in going from Arabic qahwa to Turkish kahve can be seen in many other loanwords going from Arabic into Turkish (e.g. Arabic fatwa -> Turkish fetva). The Turkish kahve begot Italian caffè. The latter word-form entered most Western languages in the early 17th century. The Western languages of the early 17th century also have numerous records where the word-form was taken directly from the Arabic, e.g. cahoa in 1610, cahue in 1615, cowha in 1619. Cafe mocha, a type of coffee, is named after the port city of Mocha, Yemen, which was an early coffee exporter.


 * cotton : قطن qutn, qutun, cotton. This was the usual word for cotton in medieval Arabic. The word entered the Romance languages in the mid-12th century and English a century later. Cotton fabric was known to the ancient Romans as an import but cotton was rare in the Romance-speaking lands until imports from the Arabic-speaking lands in the later medieval era at transformatively lower prices.


 * crimson : قرمزي qirmizī, color of a class of crimson dye used in the medieval era for dyeing silk and wool. The dye was made from the bodies of certain scale insect species. In Latin in the early-medieval centuries this kind of crimson dye was variously called coccinus, vermiculus, and grana. The Arabic name qirmizī | qirmiz enters the records in the Latin languages in the later-medieval centuries, starting in Italy and initially referring in particular to just one of the dyes of the class, the one called Armenian cochineal today. Italian about year 1300 had carmesi | chermisi | cremesi meaning both the dye itself and the crimson color from the dye. Later in the same century Italian added the suffix -ino, producing cremisino = "dyed with cochineal-type crimson dye", and synonymously about year 1400 there was French cremosyn, Spanish cremesin, English cremesyn, Latin cremesinus, where -inus is a Latin and Latinate suffix. English "crimson" started in the form crimesin then contracted to crimsin and then altered to crimson. Crossref kermes, one of the scale-insect species.


 * curcuma (plant genus), curcumin (yellow dye), curcuminoid (chemicals) : كركم kurkum, meaning ground turmeric root, also saffron. Turmeric dye gives a saffron yellow colour. Medieval Arabic dictionaries say kurkum is used as a yellow dye and used as a medicine. Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) said kurkum is (among other things) a root from the East Indies that produces a saffron-like dye. In the West the early records have meaning turmeric and they are in late medieval Latin medical books that were influenced by Arabic medicine.  The word is ultimately derived from the Sanskrit kuṅkuma, referring to both turmeric and saffron, used in India since ancient times for religious ceremonies, pigment dyeing and medicine.

D

 * damask (textile fabric), damask rose (flower) : دمشق dimashq, city of 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 era 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 European languages when Damascus was an Arabic-speaking city; and apparently at emergence they referred to goods originally sold from or made in Arabic Damascus. In French, Italian and Spanish the word for damask is the same as the word for Damascus. In late medieval English the city name Damascus was often written Damask. Some history for the English words "damask", "damask rose", "damaskeen", etc., and "damson", is in A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (year 1897). The late medieval European "damask" fabric was a costly decorated fabric which was usually but not necessarily of silk. The fabric-name damask is present in the 14th century in French, English, Catalan, Italian, and Latin, and it seems to be absent earlier than the 14th – ref, ref, ref, ref (and ref cf.). The term "damask steel", "damascus steel" and "damascening (metals)" has a 16th-century introduction date and it is a metaphorical extension from the damask textile fabric, notwithstanding that Damascus had a reputation for steel-making with a prior history; "Damascus Steel in Legend and in Reality" (year 1965). With regard to the textile fabric, the city of Damascus in the later medieval centuries had a reputation for high-quality silk brocades (e.g.: quote from year 1154). In Europe, probably starting in Italian, "traders fastened the name of damascen or damask upon every silken fabric richly wrought and curiously designed, no matter whether it came or not from Damascus" []. A word for plain silk that is in most of the Arabic medieval dictionaries is dimaqs. The Arabic medieval dictionaries do not have dimashq (Damascus) for any kind of fabric. At least one of them does have dimashq for the damask rose. See دمقس and دمشق @ Baheth.info.

E

 * elixir : الإكسير al-iksīr, alchemical philosopher's stone, i.e. a pulverized mineral agent by which you could supposedly make gold (also silver) out of copper or other metals. The Arabs took the word from Greek xēron, then prepended Arabic al- = "the". The Greek had entered Arabic meaning a dry powder for treating wounds, and it has a couple of records in medieval Arabic in that sense. Al-Biruni (died 1048) is an example of a medieval Arabic writer who used the word in the alchemy sense, for making gold. 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 hamāda, craggy desert landscape with very little sand. Those two words are in use in English in geomorphology and sedimentology. Their entrypoint was in late-19th-century studies of the Sahara Desert.  سبخة sabkha, salt marsh. This Arabic 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 peninsula.  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.

F
fennec fox. European naturalists borrowed it in the late 18th century. (In older Arabic writings, fenek also designated various other mammals such as rabbits, which are still called "fenek" in Maltese ).
 * fennec (desert fox) : فنك fenek

Addendum for words that may or may not be of Arabic ancestry

 * caliber, calipers : Excluding an isolated and semantically unclear record in northern France in 1478, the early records are in French in the early and mid 16th century spelled calibre, equally often spelled qualibre, with two concurrent meanings: (1) "the interior diameter of a gun-barrel" and (2) "the quality or comparative character of anything". The source-word for the French is uncertain. A popular idea is that it came from Arabic قالب qālib = "mold" but evidence to support this idea is very scant. The idea that Western calibre = "gun-barrel size" comes etymologically from Arabic qālib = "mold" is an old idea which can be found in Gilles Ménage's Dictionnaire Etymologique year 1694. Most dictionaries still adhere to this idea today and the majority of them say the transmission to the West was through Italian. That has the weakness that the word is not attested in Italian until 1606 whereas it is in French as calibre or qualibre in 1523 (ref: page 73), 1546 (ref), 1547 (ref), 1548 (ref), 1549 (ref), 1550 (ref: page 77), 1552 as qualibrée meaning "calibrated" (ref), 1553 (ref), and a large and growing number of times later in the 16th century in French; and in English in 1567, 1588, 1591 and onward (ref); and in German starting in 1603 (ref). The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology by Robert K. Barnhart says "Italian calibro (1606) and Spanish calibre (1594) appear too late to act as intermediate forms between Middle French and Arabic qalib", but goes on to say Middle French calibre probably did come from the Arabic somehow. Likewise the Spanish Diccionario RAE and the Catalan Diccionari.cat say their word calibre is from the French which in turn is, or perhaps is, from Arabic qālib. Evidence is very scant for transmission of Arabic qālib = "mold" to French calibre by any route. Hence the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles says the French word is "of uncertain origin". English Words Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note #168 has many details about the early history of the French word, and argues that the word did not come from Arabic and instead probably came from Latin qua libra = "of what weight, of what balance".


 * carafe : It is fair to say that carafe starts in the European languages in the 14th century in Sicily—in texts in Latin and Sicilian Italian—spelled carraba, meaning a glass carafe, a glass vase for holding wine. In 1499 it starts in northern Italian as caraffa meaning a carafe made of glass. The word, as carraba and caraffa, looks unprecedented in terms of Latin or Greek. The most popular origin hypothesis is based upon Arabic غرفة gharfa, which in medieval Arabic meant a large spoon or ladle to scoop up water. Gharfa is somewhat off-target semantically and phonetically, and does not have much background historical context to support it. Gharrāf meaning a carafe or jug is on record in Arabic in the later 19th century – ref: Henri Lammens, year 1890. But that Arabic word has to be suspected as borrowed from Europe because there is no known record in Arabic at a sufficiently early date. Gharāfa is not documented in Arabic until the 19th century, which is around 500 years after the start of documents for the Sicilian Italian carraba = "carafe" in 1330, and around 350 years after the start of the northern Italian caraffa in 1499. There is a well-documented medieval Arabic verb غرف gharf meaning to scoop up water for a drink, which you can do by cupping your hands together or by using any scooping or lifting tool. The name of the tool has medieval records in Arabic meaning a large spoon or ladle, spelled as a noun gharfa. The meanings of the medieval rootword غرف gharaf and words derived from it are given in Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon Volume 6 and the abbreviations used by Lane's Lexicon are expanded and dated in Volume 1, pages xxx - xxxi, year 1863. Additional old records for gharf and words derived from it are in Dozy's Supplement aux Dictionnaires Arabes Volume 2 and abbreviations used by Dozy's Supplement are expanded and dated in Volume 1 pages xvii - xxix, year 1881. The possibility that Arabic gharfa was the source for European "carafe" is discussed in Dozy's Glossaire, year 1869.


 * carrack : This is an old type of large sailing ship. The word's early records in European languages are in the 12th and 13th centuries in the maritime republic of Genoa in Latin spelled carraca | caraca. In descent from the Genoa word, it has records in the late 13th century in Catalan and Spanish, and late 14th in French and English. Today it is most popularly said that the Italian-Latin name was probably somehow adopted from an Arabic word. There are two different propositions for which medieval Arabic word, namely: (1) قراقير qarāqīr = "merchant ships" (plural of qurqūr = "merchant ship") and (2) حرّاقة harrāqa = "kind of warship". There is also a specific alternative proposition that does not involve an Arabic word. The origin remains uncertain and poorly understood. Another old type of sailing ship with possible, probable or definite Arabic word-origin is the Xebec. Another is the Felucca. Another is the Dhow.
 * cork : The earliest records in England are 1303 "cork" and 1342 "cork" meaning bulk cork bark imported from Iberia. It is widely reported today that the word came from Spanish alcorques = "slipper shoes made of cork". This Spanish "al-" word cannot be found in writing in any medieval Arabic author. Most etymology dictionaries nevertheless state that the Spanish word is almost surely from Arabic because of the "al-". However, there is evidence in Spanish supporting the contrary argument that the "al-" in this case was probably solely Spanish and that the corque part of the Spanish word descended from classical Latin without Arabic intermediation (and to repeat, the evidence in Arabic is that there was no such word in Arabic). The ancient Romans used cork and called it, among other names, cortex (literally: "bark"). From that Latin, medieval and modern Spanish has es:Corcho = "cork material". Corcho is definitely not from Arabic. Corcho is the more likely source for the English word, by reason of semantics. Since the English "cork" meant bulk cork bark from its earliest records (ref: MED), the parent of English "cork" can have been the medieval Spanish corcho = "cork bark", and not the medieval Spanish alcorque = "slipper shoe made of cork". Spanish alcorque never meant "cork" – ref (pages 66-67). Looking at it phonetically there is not much to prefer between CORTCH-O and AL-COR-GAY as a parent for English CORK. The classical Latin cortex (cortic-) = "bark of any tree" produced today's Spanish corteza = "bark of any tree" and also produced today's Portuguese cortiça = "bark of the cork tree exclusively", while the classical Latin suber meaning exclusively "cork bark" produced today's Portuguese súber = "bark of any tree". Spanish pancho is from Latin pantex, Spanish ocho and dicho from Latin octo and dictus, Spanish percha from Latin pertica, Spanish capacho from Latin capax, Spanish mucho from Latin multus, all without Arabic intermediation, and corcho is adjudged to be similarly evolved from cortex by Dozy, Diez, Corominas, DRAE, and other Spanish experts. The Spanish almadreña = "wooden clog shoes" has no precedent in Arabic writings, and instead it is purely Spanish madreña | madereña, from Spanish madera = "wood", from a classical Latin word for wood, with "al-" prefixed in Spanish alone – Dozy and Engelmann page 372. The same may be the case with Spanish alcorques = "cork slipper shoes" in view of its absence in medieval Arabic writers. An Arabic–Latin dictionary written in Spain by an anonymous native Spanish speaker during the late 13th century (estimated date) contains an Arabic قرق qorq translated as Latin sotular (English "shoe") – Vocabulista in Arabico. But the medieval writings by native-Arabic-speakers have huge numbers of records for shoes, sandals, slippers and boots, and have no qorq shoe. An Etymological Dictionary of the Romance Languages, by Freidrich Diez, year 1864, has the minority view that alcorque derives from the classical Latin cortex by a Spanish-only path on which the letter 't' was deleted. In Catalan the usual word for "bark of any tree" is escorça, which comes with deletion of 't' from the classical Latin cortex and/or classical Latin scortea = "tough outer skin, or leather". After 't' is deleted, comparable evolutions would include today's Spanish pliegue from classical Latin plex, Spanish pulga from classical Latin pulex, Spanish estoraque from Latin storax, Spanish bosque from Latin boscus.


 * drub : Probably from ضرب ḍarb, striking or hitting with a cudgel. The word is not in European languages other than English. The English word drub "appears first after 1600; all the early instances, before 1663, are from travellers in the Orient, and refer to the bastinado. Hence, in the absence of any other tenable suggestion, it may be conjectured to represent Arabic ضرب daraba (also pronounced duruba), to beat, to bastinado, and the verbal noun darb (also pronounced durb)."


 * fanfare, fanfaronade : English fanfare is from French fanfare, which is probably from Spanish fanfarria and fanfarrón and fanfarronear, meaning bluster, grandstanding, and a talker who is full of bravado. Spanish records also have the lesser-used variant forms farfantón | farfante with pretty much the same meaning as fanfarrón. The origin of the Spanish words is obscure and uncertain. An origin in the Arabic of medieval Spain is possible. One Arabic candidate is فرفر farfar | فرفار farfār | فرفرة farfara which is in the medieval Arabic dictionaries with meanings including "lightness and frivolity", "talkative", and "shouting".