Dutch

Dutch workers called their master or employer baas — uncle, overseer — and Dutch settlers in America passed the word to English speakers who needed a word for authority without the European overtones of 'master.'

Dutch sailors used one word for the broad, flat bow of a ship and the broad, flat face of a cliff — and from that nautical shape-word English derived its verb for deception, its adjective for frankness, and its noun for a dramatic landscape feature.

The English bully began as a term of endearment — a sweetheart, a darling, a fine fellow — before it became the name for the person everyone fears on the playground.

Dutch merchants discovered that burning wine to concentrate it for long sea voyages created something better than wine ever was.

The first decoy was not a wooden duck but a cage — Dutch fowlers lured birds into a trap they called de kooi, and the trap's name became the trick.

Named for a small Dutch city built on a canal, Delftware began as an imitation of Chinese porcelain and became so distinctively European that it forgot its own origins.

A Dutch thunder-gun with a flared barrel that scattered shot like a hand grenade gave English its best word for cheerful incompetence.

A thick sauce for dipping — that is what the Dutch word meant, the same word that English transformed into its term for narcotics, stupidity, insider information, and excellence, traveling further from its origin than perhaps any other Dutch loanword.

A Dutch word that meant to bore a hole and to turn something in circles became the English word for military training — because repetition, like a drill bit, works by going around and around in the same place.

The painter's easel is a donkey — Dutch artists named their canvas-bearing frame after the beast of burden that carries loads without complaint.

Hustle began with shaking lots in a hat — Dutch gamblers tossed and jostled for fortune, and the energy of the dice game became the energy of the entrepreneur.

Dutch sailors built fast, light ships called jachten — hunters — for chasing pirates and smugglers, and the English king who received one as a gift gave the world its word for the most leisured form of sailing.

The Dutch named their juniper spirit jenever after the berry that flavored it, and the English shortened it so drastically that the botanical origin vanished into two blunt syllables.

A simple Dutch cabbage salad sailed to America with New Amsterdam settlers and stayed long after their colony changed its name.

Dutch sailors used kruisen — to sail crosswise, to zigzag — for the tactic of sailing back and forth across an area, and the military maneuver that kept warships on station became the word for a leisure voyage with nowhere in particular to go.

Dutch painters invented a word for a painting of land — landschap — and when English borrowed it, they borrowed not just a noun but an entire way of looking at the natural world as a scene to be framed.

A little-man word became the silent body of modern retail desire.

A country that built itself from the sea floor, reclaiming land through centuries of engineering ambition, gave the world a word for the boldest form of human geography: land that was not there until someone decided it should be.

A Dutch word for talking foolishly or raving crossed to England and became the English word for a sustained outburst of passionate speech — the verbal flood that refuses to stop.

The Dutch word for a grid or grating — the lined paper on which soldiers' names were listed — gave English a word for any organized list of people and their duties.

A word for a quick drawing came from the Dutch who borrowed it from Italian who borrowed it from Greek — and the Greek meant improvised, like a poet making verse on the spot.

The Dutch captain of a river barge became the word for every commander who knows their vessel and their waters by heart.

When a new kind of ship slid into Gloucester Harbor, a bystander's exclamation became the vessel's permanent name.

In Dutch the word means crafty, clever, or shrewd — and it is one of the most striking semantic reversals in all of English borrowing: a word for mental sharpness became a word for physical thinness.

A small Dutch vessel that could slip through shallow waters gave English both a warship and a metaphor for nimble, slipping motion.

The Dutch verb snoepen meant to eat sweets on the sly — to steal a treat when no one was looking — and English took the furtive behavior and left the candy behind.

A Dutch word for ghosts crossed the Atlantic with colonial settlers and haunted its way into English, eventually becoming Cold War slang for a spy — because what is espionage if not the art of being invisible?

The decorated rail at a ship's stern began as a wooden panel — and its Dutch name reveals that what we now call functional railing was once a canvas for some of the most elaborate maritime woodcarving in history.

The Dutch word for 'puller' — the lever you pull to fire a gun — became the English word for anything that sets a chain of events in motion.

A Dutch soldier's right to temporary leave from service became the word for every official absence that has a return date attached.

Dutch pirates who plundered under no flag coined the word for every opportunist who takes without permission.