Loanword

A loanword (or loan word) is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort, while calque is a loanword from French. The terms borrow and loanword, although traditional, conflict with the ordinary meaning of those words because nothing is returned to the donor languages. However, note that this metaphor is not isolated to the concept of loanwords, but also found in the idiom "to borrow an idea." An additional issue with the term loanword is that it implies that the loaning is limited to one single word as opposed to phrases such as déjà vu, an English loanword from French. While this phrase may be used as one lexical item by English speakers, that is to say, an English speaker would not say only déjà to convey the meaning associated with the full term déjà vu, in the donor language (French), speakers would be aware of the phrase consisting of two words. For simplicity, adopt/adoption or adapt/adaption are used by many linguists, either in parallel to, or in preference to, these words. Some researchers also use the term lexical borrowing.