A large share of English vocabulary comes from French, mostly after the Norman conquest of England.

The longer version

After 1066 the ruling class spoke a variety of French while ordinary people spoke English, and the two vocabularies fused. Animals kept Germanic names in the field, cow, sheep, swine, while the meat on the table took French ones: beef, mutton, pork. Law, government and fashion borrowed the same way.

The result is a stock of near-doublets where a plain word sits beside a more formal one, as ask sits beside question and help beside aid. Later centuries added more French directly from Paris, so some words entered twice with different senses. Estimates of the borrowed share vary widely depending on whether rare dictionary entries are counted.

Where this entry sits

This category gathers small surprises about the English language, from odd spelling rules to words that quietly hide their own history. Expect palindromes, punctuation oddities, borrowed terms, and the strange ways writing systems record spoken speech. The full list sits on the Words and Language page, where every entry is listed in order.