Dutch Words That Have Entered English

For a small country wedged between sometimes larger neighbors and the sea, the Netherlands has had an absurdly outsized influence on English vocabulary. The reason is simple: for roughly two centuries, the Dutch ran the world’s shipping (and sadly part of the slave trade). During the Dutch Golden Age, Dutch loanwords entered English in large numbers, particularly between 1600 and 1800, driven by Dutch naval and commercial dominance. Sailors picked up the words first, then merchants, then the Dutch colonists who founded New Amsterdam — which is why so much of this vocabulary still smells faintly of salt water and pancake batter. Yes, that’s a stupid sentence, but we’re building a story here and it helps.

On the water, almost the entire vocabulary of English sailing is borrowed. Yacht comes from Dutch jacht, meaning “hunt,” originally referring to a light, fast pirate-hunting vessel. Skipper is from schipper, “someone who ships,” and cruise comes from the Dutch verb doorkruisen, meaning to sail across or go through. Even the pirate-movie staple avast is Dutch: it comes from houd vast, “hold fast.” And if you’ve ever been threatened with keelhauling, you can blame the Dutch for that too — kielhalen literally meant “to drag under the keel of a ship as punishment.” Delightful people, 17th-century sailors.

On the plate, the Dutch quietly colonized American breakfast. Cookie comes from koekje, meaning “little cake,” while coleslaw is a fairly direct lift from koolsla, meaning “cabbage salad.” Waffle comes straight from wafel, and gin traces back to jeneverbes, “juniper berries,” the key flavoring in the original Dutch spirit. Even booze is Dutch, from the verb búsen, “to drink a lot of alcohol” — which feels almost too on-the-nose to be true, and yet.

In art and everyday life, the Dutch Golden Age painters left their fingerprints on the vocabulary of picture-making: landscape and easel both come from Dutch studio terms, borrowed wholesale as English artists imported Dutch techniques along with Dutch pigments. Meanwhile ordinary Dutch immigrant life in New Amsterdam gave American English boss — from baas, with the Dutch double-a becoming the English “o” — and stoop, the little porch outside a brownstone, straight from Dutch stoep.

And then there are the funny and unflattering ones. Poppycock, meaning nonsense, is not a cute nursery word at all — it comes from Dutch pappekak, which translates rather bluntly as “soft turd.” Next time someone talks poppycock, you’re technically accusing them of talking soft dung, and it’s wonderful that nobody in polite company realizes this. Dope has a similarly unglamorous past: it comes from Dutch doop, “sauce,” from dopen, “to dip,” and only later curdled into slang for drugs and for a foolish person, apparently because opium’s semi-liquid texture reminded people of a thick dipping sauce. Quack (as in quack doctor) is a shortened form of kwakzalver, and even the classic pirate command has a comic afterlife in nerd culture — anorak-style, freebooter comes from vrijbuiter, a free-plunderer, which is a fairly glamorous way to describe what was, in practice, theft with a boat.

Here’s the full rundown by topic:

The overall shape of the story is pretty consistent: wherever the Dutch had a monopoly on the technology or the vocabulary — ships, cabbage salads, Golden Age painting — English just took the word rather than bothering to invent its own. And wherever the borrowing happened through slang and street contact rather than official trade, you get the gloriously undignified stuff, like an insult that literally means “soft turd” surviving four centuries to become a word British newsreaders use on television.