I n last month’s Wordplay article, I listed some of the many loanwords which English has ‘borrowed’ from other countries. Let us look more deeply into the stories behind some of these borrowings.

Attending a party recently, I wondered where the word canapé came from. Obviously it is French, but how did it come to mean a tiny snack on a piece of toast, bread or biscuit? And why does the OED say that it also means a couch?

Canapé is from the same root as canopy, which comes from the Greek word konops meaning a mosquito. A canopy was originally a mosquito net but it could also mean a couch or bed covered with mosquito nets or curtains, and hence came to mean a curtain or covering.

The ‘couch’ sense was prominent in France but canapé was used in Britain as a kind of metaphor to describe a small base with a covering (or ‘canopy’) of food. A similar snack is called in French an amuse-bouche or an amuse-gueule, meaning something that amuses the mouth or gullet!

Another word that we took from French is cravat. Mercenaries from Croatia were employed by France in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) and they had a habit of wearing neck-scarves. These appealed to the fashion-conscious French, who started wearing them and called them cravates — the French word for Croats.

The word bastard comes from Old French bast, which meant a pack-saddle. These saddles were often used by muleteers as beds when they stayed at an inn or slept in the open air: hence a fils de bast was an illegitimate child.

Two wars with Germany had an effect on the English language. We adopted the surname of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin to describe airships of the type he invented before World War I. When that war started, Germans could be heard saying “Gott strafe England” — “God punish England” — and we took up the word strafe, especially to mean attacking with low-flying aircraft.

In the Second World War, British planes encountered flak, a German word for anti-aircraft fire, taken from letters of their word for pilot-defence-gun: FLiegerAbwehrKanone.

It may come as a surprise that the term rainforest originated in Germany as Regenwald, used by Andreas Schimper in a 1898 book, translated in 1903 by W R Fisher as Plant-Geography upon a Physiological Basis. Mind you, the German word may have been predated by the Swedish regnskog and the Danish regnskov.

German also gave us the Rottweiler — a breed of dog named after Rottweil, a town in south-west Germany.

Talking of dangerous dogs, Führer was an innocent German word for ‘leader’ until Hitler chose it as his title when he took over control of Germany in 1934. He actually pinched the idea from Mussolini, who styled himself Duce (the Italian word for ‘commander’) more than a decade earlier.

Italy has given us many more useful words than Duce, including the numerous musical terms I mentioned last month (e.g. adagio = at ease; libretto = little book; prima donna = first lady). Where would we be without Italian ditto (literally meaning ‘said’ or ‘aforesaid’ — from Latin dictus) to save us constantly repeating the same thing? And could we cope with English weather without the Italians’ umbrella, which they originally used to give them shade (Latin umbra) from the hot sun?

There is a widespread belief that the word kangaroo comes from a conversation that someone (perhaps Captain Cook) had with an Aboriginal Australian. The story goes that Cook asked what a particular animal was called and the reply was “kangaroo” which supposedly means ‘I don't know’.

However, the word almost certainly comes from an Aboriginal language and is the actual name given to the animal. This is what Captain Cook and Joseph Banks both noted in their 1770 journals, although they spelt it kangooroo or kanguru.

Another animal whose name we borrowed from its home country is the teddy bear — which we got from the USA. It was named after President Theodore (‘Teddy’) Roosevelt, who went on a famous hunting trip in Mississippi in 1902.

Roosevelt was a keen hunter but, when he did not manage to kill any bears, his guides caught a black bear and tied it to a tree, inviting Theodore to shoot it. Roosevelt refused, saying he would only shoot a bear if it was running free, not tied up.

A cartoon in the Washington Post showed Roosevelt refusing to kill a cute little bear cub, with the caption ‘Drawing the Line in Mississippi’.

Inspired by the cartoon (above), Morris Michtom designed a toy bear which he called ‘Teddy's Bear’. These sold so well that Michtom set up his own toy factory, which was producing more than 100,000 bears by 1938 when Michtom died.

A German firm called Steiff also saw the potential and made ‘teddy bears’ for export. Thus the toy came to Britain and eventually became a collectors’ item.

Someone who loves or collects teddy bears is called an arctophile — from Greek arktos or Latin arctos (= a bear) + the suffix -phile.

Tony Augarde is the author of The Oxford Guide to Word Games (OUP, £14.99) and The Oxford A to Z of Word Games (OUP, £4.99).