List of English words of Chinese origin

Different sources of loan words

• via missionaries who lived in China. These have heavy Latin influence due to Portuguese and Spanish missionaries.
• via sinologists who lived in China. These have heavy French influence due to the long history of French involvement in Sinology.
• via the maritime trade route, e.g. tea, Amoy, cumshaw etc. Heavily influenced by the Amoy dialect in southern seaports.
• via the early immigrants to the US in the gold rush era, e.g. chop suey. Heavily influenced by the Toisan dialect.
• via the multi-national colonization of Shanghai. Influenced by many European countries, as well as Japan.
• via the British colonization of Hong Kong, e.g. cheongsam. Heavily influenced by Cantonese.
• via modern international communication, especially after the 1970s when the People's Republic of China opened its Bamboo Curtain to let its people migrate to various countries, e.g. wushu, feng shui. Heavily influenced by Mandarin.
• via Japanese and Korean and Vietnamese. These languages have borrowed large amounts of Chinese vocabulary in the past, written in Chinese characters. The pronunciation of such loanwords is not based directly on Chinese, but on the local pronunciation of Chinese loanwords in these languages, known as Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, and Sino-Vietnamese. In addition, the individual characters were extensively used as building blocks for local neologisms with no counterpart in the original Chinese, resulting in words whose relationship to the Chinese language is similar to the relationship between new Latinate words and Latin. Such words are excluded from the list.

The list