Loan words from Czech

Just occasionally, other languages have words borrowed from Czech. Some of the ones in English are pistol (which we’ve used since 1570), camellia (since 1753), polka (since 1844), and robot (since 1923). And of course Semtex (since 1985).

You may never need to know or use such words as acathisia (an inability to sit or 'morbid fear of sitting') or ferritin, (which is a water-soluble crystalline protein), but we owe these and many other unusual words to Czech.

And another word in daily use all over the world has come to us, admittedly not from the Czech language, but from the German name of a small Czech town. And that word is

$ Dollar!

So in a way the Americans, Canadians and others owe their very money to the sixteenth-century Bohemian miners who dug out the silver ore to make the coins that came to be known as Thaler – and this is the word that travelled the world and ended up as dollar.