How Indigenous American words came into English

I’ve been deep in the OED documentation of borrowings and loanwords for my look at “tramlines” [see my previous post, and look out for a few more to come] and OED’s treatment of foreign, about to be naturalized, and naturalized words.

I got curious about some of the Indigenous American words in my dataset, and it occurred to me that I could use some of the etymology data to produce an infographic (!) showing all the OED2 words marked as coming from the Americas, where they came from, and who transmitted them. So here it is:

There’s no way you can read that, so you may want to download this scalable PDF version, or a larger PNG.

Not included in the graphic is information on how the words got into OED. more on that in the future. But for you OED fans it might be of interest to know that 211 of the 489 were added by Burchfield in the Second Supplement.

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