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Dutch loanwords in English — and back again

English quietly runs on Dutch. Cookie, boss, yacht, skipper and Santa Claus all came from Dutch, mostly through seafaring and the colony of New Amsterdam. Traffic now flows the other way too: modern Dutch absorbs English and French words daily, and bends them to Dutch grammar. This page traces both directions.

A loanword is a word one language takes from another and keeps. Dutch and English have swapped them for a thousand years, but the heaviest borrowing into English happened between the 1500s and 1700s, when the Dutch were Europe's great sailors, traders and painters, and when Dutch settlers founded New Amsterdam — today's New York. That is why so many English words about ships, water, money and food have a Dutch root.

Dutch → English: the borrowings

Grouped by the world they came from. The Dutch source is in the first column; where the modern Dutch spelling differs, that is what you see.

English → Dutch: the modern flood

Today the current runs the other way. English words pour into Dutch, especially in business, technology and youth speech: de meeting, de deadline, de laptop, de manager, chillen, random, cringe. Purists complain, but the borrowing is unstoppable, and Dutch does something clever with it: it makes the loans obey Dutch grammar.

How English verbs get Dutch endings

An imported English verb takes the full Dutch conjugation. The stem gets Dutch present-tense endings (see present tense) and, crucially, a Dutch past participle with ge- (see perfect tense):

The spelling is governed by the same 't kofschip rule that decides -t versus -d for native verbs (covered on past tense): gecheckt ends in -t because "check" ends in a voiceless sound, while gedownload keeps -d. Nouns get a Dutch article, usually de (de app, de deadline), and a Dutch plural (de managers, de laptops).

The French layer

Long before English dominated, French was the prestige language of the Low Countries, and it left thousands of everyday Dutch words — often so naturalised that learners never guess the origin:

Note how many French loans keep an unpredictable article — another reason to memorise de/het with each noun.

Why this matters for learners

Loanwords are a gift: hundreds of Dutch words are already sitting in your English vocabulary, and hundreds of recent English imports need no learning at all beyond a Dutch article and conjugation. The one trap is the loanword whose meaning drifted — which is where this page meets its sibling, false friends, where a borrowed word looks familiar but no longer means what you expect.