Reach for a bottle of shampoo tomorrow morning, and you are, without realising it, saying a Hindi word.
Nearly two centuries before it became a fixture on bathroom shelves worldwide, champo simply meant kneading and pressing the scalp with oil.
On 14 September, India marks Hindi Diwas, the day in 1949 when the Constituent Assembly adopted Hindi in the Devanagari script as an official language.
It is a fitting moment to notice something rarely taught in classrooms: hundreds of everyday English words, spoken from London to Los Angeles, were quietly borrowed from Hindi. Here are ten worth knowing.
Words that walked in through trade and travel
1. Shampoo, meaning to wash the hair, comes from champi, meaning head massage. Sake Dean Mahomed, born in Patna in 1759, later opened Hindoostane Coffee House in London, Britain’s first Indian restaurant. In 1814, in Brighton, he opened a bathhouse offering the massage, and the word travelled with the service, later shifting to the liquid product.
Sake Dean Mahomed introduced champi massage to Britain, helping the word evolve into “shampoo”. Photograph: (StyleCaster)
2. Bungalow, meaning a single-storeyed house, comes from bangla, meaning in the Bengal style. British colonial officials adopted both the word and the architecture wholesale, and it now describes any low, standalone home across the English-speaking world.
3. Jungle, meaning dense, tangled forest, traces to the Sanskrit-Hindi jangal, which originally meant wasteland or uncultivated ground, not trees at all. The meaning shifted only after British foresters began using it to describe thick undergrowth.
4. Pyjamas, meaning loose sleepwear, comes directly from the drawstring trousers worn across South Asia for centuries. British residents in colonial India adopted them for comfort at home and carried the word back to England in the nineteenth century.
British residents in colonial India adopted pyjamas and later carried the word back to England. Photograph: (AI-Generated image)
5. Cot, meaning a light portable bed, comes from khat, a simple woven bed found in Indian homes, traditionally strung with jute or cotton rope across a wooden frame.
6. Chutney, meaning a spiced fruit or vegetable condiment, comes from chatni, meaning to lick or crush. The British exported jarred versions to Australia and North America during the nineteenth century, fixing the word permanently into English kitchens.
Words with darker histories
7. Juggernaut, meaning an unstoppable force, comes from Jagannath, a name for Vishnu worshipped at the Jagannath Temple in Puri, Odisha, where devotees still pull enormous wooden chariots through the streets each year during Puri’s Rath Yatra. Early British travellers, misreading festival accidents as ritual sacrifice, turned the deity’s name into this English word.
The English word “juggernaut” comes from Jagannath, worshipped at Puri’s famous temple. Photograph: (Chardham Yatra)
8. Loot, meaning stolen goods or to plunder, entered English from the Hindi lut, meaning to rob, a word barely used outside north India until the eighteenth century, when it crossed over through colonial military accounts.
9. Thug, meaning a violent criminal, comes from thag, meaning swindler, and originally described organised gangs who preyed on travellers across colonial India before the word broadened into its modern sense.
10. Cushy, meaning easy or comfortable, comes from khushi, meaning happiness, and entered British Army slang during the First World War to describe a safe, undemanding posting.
Linguists have tracked this exchange formally for over a century. The Oxford English Dictionary already listed around 900 words identified as distinctive to Indian English, and its editors continue adding more each year, including recent entries such as jugaad, dadagiri and chai.
Danica Salazar, the OED’s World English Editor, has noted that four centuries of shared history between Britain and India left behind a legacy of loanwords that enriched the English vocabulary considerably, a process that continues today rather than belonging only to the colonial past.
“Loot” entered English from the Hindi word lut, meaning to rob. Photograph: (ThoughtCo)
That is, in many ways, the real story Hindi Diwas invites people to notice. Language does not move in one direction, and English, often assumed to be doing the lending, has spent centuries quietly borrowing instead.
Every time someone showers with shampoo, describes a company as a juggernaut, or complains about a cushy job, they are using words shaped in Indian streets, temples and bathhouses long before they reached a dictionary.
Hindi Diwas exists to honour the language within India’s own borders, but its influence, it turns out, has already made itself at home well beyond them.
