Quechua

This carrot-shaped root reached Spanish with its highland name still attached.

The 'vine of the dead' — a ritual brew whose Quechua name encodes both the plant and the journey it carries drinkers through — has traveled from Amazonian shamanic practice to global medical research in less than a century.

The fundamental unit of Andean social organization — part family, part corporation, part cosmic category — is named by a Quechua word that has no equivalent in any European language and has defeated the efforts of anthropologists to translate it for over a century.

A corn snack gave Spanish one of its most useful words for space.

Spanish borrowed one Andean word for corn because maize was already a civilization.

Bird droppings once financed states and renamed global fertilizer.

The Inca sun god — whose name is simply the Quechua word for 'sun' — gave his name to the empire's most spectacular ceremony, and his golden image was among the first objects melted down by the Spanish for bullion.

The Inca Empire administered millions of people without a written alphabet — using knotted strings whose complex grammar of fiber, color, and knot-type may have encoded not just numbers but narrative.

Quinine is the bitter alkaloid extracted from the bark of the cinchona tree — the first effective treatment for malaria — and its name traces to the Quechua word for bark, kina, the bark of a tree that Andean peoples had used for centuries before European medicine stumbled upon it.

Coca is the sacred leaf of the Andes, chewed for millennia at altitude by Quechua-speaking people as a mild stimulant and ritual offering — a plant so ordinary in its homeland that its name simply meant 'plant,' and so extraordinary in European hands that it eventually produced cocaine.

The Andean bird that carries souls to the sun—its name flew from Inca temples to California skies.

A tuber from the Andes kept its mountain name almost unchanged.

The Andean earth goddess — whose name joins 'time' and 'earth' into a deity that is also a cosmological principle — has become the most globally recognized Quechua concept, appearing in constitutions, ecology movements, and tattoos on people who have never been near the Andes.

Pampa is the word for the great treeless grasslands of South America — one of the simplest and most precise geographical words ever borrowed into English, meaning nothing more and nothing less than 'flat plain.'

The Peruvian brandy whose name means 'bird' — and causes endless arguments with Chile.

The Inca word for their sacred mountain lion now sells sneakers worldwide.

The high treeless plain of the Andes — cold, wind-scoured, breathtaking in both senses — gave English a word for an ecosystem found nowhere else on earth, and gave the people who live there an adaptation that still puzzles biologists.

One of the Andes' oldest flutes reached English through Spanish spelling.

The guinea pig — domesticated in the Andes some 5,000 years before Europeans arrived — is neither from Guinea nor a pig, but it carries a Quechua name that gives it back its proper origin.

Altitude sickness acquired its South American name from a Quechua word for antimony ore — the toxic mineral extracted from Andean mines at such elevations that even hardened miners were felled by the thin air.

A reed built boats, islands, roofs, and a word across the Andes.

This tuber crossed an empire and still never conquered the supermarket.

The wild ancestor of the llama — lean, wary, and superbly adapted to altitude — gave the Inca their most important domestic animal, and gave the English language a word that most people mispronounce.

The vicuña is the wild camelid of the high Andes whose fleece is the finest natural fiber on earth — a word taken directly from Quechua into Spanish and English with minimal alteration, the animal's name as unchanged as the animal itself.

The Inca creator deity — whose name may mean 'sea of fat' or 'lake of origin' — became one of the most consequential misunderstandings in history when the Spanish mistook the word as a term of address for themselves, and for a time, it worked.