The results of my search fall into three categories: there are of course the dozens of Webster words, which are borrowings from Philippine languages and Spanish, but there are also hundreds of words that may not be entirely characteristic of Philippine English, but are illustrated by quotations taken from Philippine sources, ranging from the very old to the very new. As soon as I started working at OUP, I scoured the OED for all evidence of the Philippines. I was very interested to find out if all this still holds true. Bolton and Butler also consulted the Oxford English Dictionary and found the same prevalence of Webster words, and an even more limited coverage of Philippine words than Merriam-Webster.

These authors compared Yap’s list with the then-current online edition of Merriam-Webster (2003), and found that the Philippines was still mainly represented in this dictionary by the same somewhat archaic words identified by Yap more than thirty years before. Kingsley Bolton and Susan Butler, reviewing Yap’s list over three decades later, called this type of vocabulary “Webster words”-words of mostly botanical, zoological and anthropological interest dating back to the American colonial period. As can be seen from the following selection from the first three letters of the alphabet, Yap’s list seem to be limited to three semantic groups: native flora and fauna, household and cultural items, and names of Philippine ethnic groups.Īeta, anahau, Apayao, apitong, Bagobo, balete, banga, Bisayan, calesa, camagon, carabao, cogon

I’m hardly the first person to have this idea: back in 1970, Fe Yap published a study entitled Pilipino loan words in English, which featured a list of Philippine words that appeared in Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language (1961) and Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (1968). This one is a bit more difficult to answer, but to do so, the most obvious step seems to be to consult a dictionary. So this word is evidently one that Americans picked up in the Philippines and took back home to the United States.Īnother interesting question, though, is which Filipino words have made it into the English language, not because they were used by Americans in the U.S., but by Filipinos in the Philippines. It began to be used in the 1940s, around the time that American soldiers were fighting the Japanese in our boondocks. It’s a perfectly valid response, as the term comes directly from the Tagalog word bundok (mountain), and is an American slang term for rough country, now frequently shortened to boonies. When asked which Filipino word has made it into the English language, most Pinoys will answer with the word boondocks.

Gay lingo words list tagalog