Lesson 3 Stories of English Words and Expressions
English Words of Foreign Origin
English has often borrowed ____ from other cultures or languages.
Here are some examples with ____ stories.
shampoo
The word ____ comes from the Hindi word chāmpo, which means “to press.”
In ____, the word was used for a head massage.
____ traders in India experienced a bath with a head massage and introduced it to Britain in the 18th century.
The meaning of the word shampoo changed a few times after it first entered English around ____.
In the 19th century, shampoo got its present meaning of “____ the hair.”
Shortly after that, the word began to be ____ used for a special soap for the hair.
robot
The word robot comes from the ____ R.U.R., which was written in 1920 by a Czech writer Karel Čapek.
In the ____, robots are machines that look like humans.
They are designed to work for ____ and are produced in a factory.
It is interesting that the idea of ____ the word robot didn’t come from Karel Čapek himself.
He originally called the ____ in his play labori from the Latin word for “work.”
However, his brother suggested ____, which means “slave workers” in Czech.
Karel Čapek liked the idea and decided to use the word ____.
In 1938, the ____ was made into a science fiction show on television in Britain.
hurricane
The word hurricane comes from the Spanish word huracán, which originates from the name of a ____ god.
In the Mayan creation ____, Huracán is the weather god of wind, storm, and fire, and he is one of the three gods who created humans.
However, the first humans angered the gods, so ____ caused a great flood.
The first Spanish contact with the Mayan ____ was in 1517.
Spanish explorers who were passing ____ the Caribbean experienced a hurricane and picked up the word for it from the people in the area.
In English, one of the early ____ of hurricane was in a play by Shakespeare in 1608.
hamburger
The word hamburger originally comes from Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest ____.
Hamburger means “people or things from ____” in German.
The origin of the first hamburger is not ____.
However, it is believed that the hamburger was invented in a small ____ in Texas, USA, sometime between 1885 and 1904.
A cook placed a Hamburg-style steak between ____ slices of bread, and people started to call such food a hamburger.