Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%.

Some words are adopted from other languages some are mixtures of existing words ( portmanteau words), and some are new creations made of roots from dead languages.Ī computerized survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd ed.) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff (1973) that estimated the origin of English words as follows: While some new words enter English as slang, most do not. The influence of Latin in English, therefore, is primarily lexical in nature, being confined mainly to words derived from Latin roots. A portion of these borrowings come directly from Latin, or through one of the Romance languages, particularly Anglo-Norman and French, but some also from Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish or from other languages (such as Gothic, Frankish or Greek) into Latin and then into English. Estimates of native words (derived from Old English) range from 20%–33%, with the rest made up of outside borrowings. Ī significant portion of the English vocabulary comes from Romance and Latinate sources. Moreover, the grammar is largely Old English. As a statistical rule, around 70 percent of words in any text are Old English. The bulk of the language in spoken and written texts is from this source. The core of the English language descends from the Old English language, brought from the 500s with the Anglo, Saxon, and Jutish settlers to what would be called England. Latin (including words used only in scientific / medical / legal contexts): ~29% According to one study, the percentage of modern English words derived from each language group are as follows:

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