Here's something I tell every beginner in their first lesson, usually because they've just told me French looks impossibly foreign: you already know thousands of French words. Not because you studied them, but because English quietly absorbed them centuries ago and stopped mentioning it.
Some of these are obvious. Nobody is surprised that déjà vu, rendez-vous or croissant are French. The interesting ones are the words that look completely, unremarkably English: bacon, fashion, curfew, denim, budget, ticket, tennis. Every one of them walked into English through French, and once you can spot the pattern, you get vocabulary for free in both directions.
Why is so much of English actually French?
One date explains most of it: 1066. After the Norman Conquest, French became the language of power in England for roughly three centuries, used in the courts, in administration, in the Church hierarchy and in the households of the new ruling class. English survived as the language of everyday people, but it spent 300 years absorbing the vocabulary of everyone above them.
Estimates of how much of modern English vocabulary comes from French vary a lot depending on the dictionary and the counting method, from roughly 28 to 30 percent in the more conservative analyses, up to figures near 60 percent when you include everything that arrived via French from Latin (Wikipedia, List of English words of French origin, retrieved July 2026). The exact number matters less than the practical consequence: a huge slice of the English you already use has a French relative waiting on the other side.
Ten everyday English words that came through French
These are the ones that surprise students most. All the etymologies below come from the Online Etymology Dictionary (retrieved July 2026).
| English word | Came from | Original sense |
|---|---|---|
| bacon | Anglo-Norman bacun | meat from the back of the pig |
| fashion | Old French façon (12c.) | manner, way of making something |
| curfew | Old French cuevrefeu | cover the fire (evening bell) |
| denim | French serge de Nîmes | serge fabric from the town of Nîmes |
| mushroom | Anglo-French musherun | modern French mousseron |
| budget | Old French bougette | little leather pouch |
| ticket | Old French estiquette | a little note stuck on something |
| tennis | Anglo-French tenetz | tenez, the server's call: take it |
| mortgage | Old French morgage (13c.) | mort + gage, dead pledge |
| toast | Old French toster | to grill, roast, burn |
The stories behind five of them
Bacon: it came through French, even though the root is Germanic
This is the one that always gets a reaction, and it deserves a precise answer. English took bacon from Anglo-Norman bacun, which meant ham or a strip of cured pork, and that Old French word itself came from a Frankish Germanic root meaning "back." So the deep ancestor is Germanic, but the delivery route into English was unmistakably French. Modern French, meanwhile, mostly says le lard or le bacon, having borrowed the English form back.
Fashion: it used to mean "the way something is made"
English fashion comes from Old French façon, recorded from the 12th century with meanings like appearance, pattern, design and manner. The clothing sense only narrowed later, in the late 14th and 15th centuries. That's why modern French façon still means "way" or "manner": de cette façon means "in this way," and de toute façon means "anyway." The clothing meaning in French went to a different word entirely, la mode.
Curfew: literally "cover the fire"
My favourite one to teach, because the image survives intact. Old French cuevrefeu is couvre (cover) plus feu (fire). In medieval towns a bell rang in the evening, typically around 8 or 9pm, telling everyone to bank their hearth fires so the town didn't burn down overnight. English kept the word, generalised it to "you must be indoors by this hour," and forgot the fire completely. French kept the literal compound: le couvre-feu is still the word used for a curfew today.
Denim: a fabric named after a French city
Serge de Nîmes means "serge from Nîmes," a city in the south of France. English compressed the whole phrase into one word around the 1690s, and by 1868 denims meant work trousers. If you ever visit Nîmes, this is a genuinely useful piece of small talk, and it's the kind of detail that makes a word impossible to forget.
Tennis: a French word shouted across a court
The game came before the racket. Players hit the ball with the palm of the hand, which is why the old French name was la paume. The name that stuck in English came from what the server called out before hitting: tenez, the vous form of tenir, meaning roughly "here, take it." English speakers heard the call, turned it into the name of the game, and eventually sold it back to France, where the sport is now simply le tennis.
Words France lent, then borrowed back
This is the loop that fascinates my students. Several words French people now think of as English imports left France in the first place.
- Le sport: from Old French desport, "amusement, diversion," literally carrying the mind away from serious matters. It became English sport, then returned to French in the 19th century.
- Le budget: from bougette, the little pouch, which acquired its financial meaning in English in 1733 from the idea of a treasury minister carrying his plans in a wallet, then came home.
- Le ticket: from estiquette, a small note stuck onto something. French also kept the original as étiquette, which now means "label" as well as "etiquette."
- Le toast: from toster, to grill. Both the bread and the raise-your-glass sense travelled back into French.
When a student tells me they hate how many English words modern French uses, I like showing them this list. A good number of those anglicismes are French words coming home with a new accent.
The beef and cow pattern
One of the most quoted consequences of 1066 is the split between the animal and the meat in English. Cow, pig, sheep and calf are Germanic, from Old English. Beef, pork, mutton and veal come from French: bœuf, porc, mouton, veau.
The traditional explanation is that English speakers raised the animals while French-speaking nobles ate them at table, so the field kept its Old English name and the plate got a French one. Linguists treat the neat class-based version of that story with some caution, since the vocabulary settled gradually over centuries rather than overnight. But the pattern itself is real, and it's a gift for a learner: four French food words you already know, plus the awkward pronunciation of bœuf to practise.
Careful: shared roots are not shared meanings
Here's the warning I always attach to this lesson. A shared origin tells you where a word has been, not what it means today. Words drift, and French and English drifted in different directions for 900 years.
actuellement means currently, not actually
éventuellement means possibly, not eventually
sensible means sensitive, not sensible
librairie is a bookshop, not a library
These are the faux amis, and they catch out advanced learners far more than beginners, precisely because the resemblance is so convincing. I've collected the ones that cause the most damage in exams and conversations in my guide to French false friends and how to avoid them.
How to actually use this as a learner
Etymology is fun, but it only becomes useful when you convert it into a habit. Three that work:
- Trust the long words first. Formal or abstract English vocabulary is overwhelmingly French in origin, which is why comprehension, liberty, necessary and independent map so cleanly onto compréhension, liberté, nécessaire, indépendant. When you're stuck for a French word, reach for the most formal English synonym you know and try it with a French accent. You'll be right more often than you expect.
- Learn the suffix conversions, not the words. English -tion stays -tion. English -ty becomes -té (university, université). English -ly becomes -ment (rapidly, rapidement). English -ous becomes -eux (dangerous, dangereux). Each pattern unlocks hundreds of words at once, which is the fastest vocabulary work you can do, as I explain in my method for learning French vocabulary fast.
- Check the gender and pronunciation anyway. Recognising a word is not the same as being able to use it. Le budget, la fashion? No: French says la mode. And tennis, ticket and toast are all masculine. The vocabulary may be free, but the grammar around it never is.
What I like most about this topic is what it does to a nervous beginner. French stops feeling like a wall of foreign material and starts feeling like a language you've been half-speaking your whole life, in a very strange accent.