Arabic Words You Say in English Everyday

Añadido: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Do you know you speak Arabic every day?

[00:00:01]You just don't know it. The sugar in your coffee, that's Arabic. Sukkar. The coffee itself, qahwa. The alcohol in your glass, al-kuhl, distilled, named, and perfected by Arab chemists who never drank it. The cotton shirt on your back, qutn. The lemon and the orange in your fridge, laymun and naranj. The magazine on your table, makhazin, an Arabic word for storehouse. The algebra you failed in school, al-jabr. The zero you write down, sifr. The safari you've always wanted to take, safar, meaning journey.

[00:00:35]Even the word candy comes from qand, and the jar in your kitchen from jarrah.

[00:00:39]Every one of these is Arabic, sitting quietly inside English, pretending to be ordinary. And if English borrowed this much from across an ocean, imagine what happened across the Sahara.

[00:00:50]In Nigeria, the word wahala, the word everybody uses for trouble, from Lagos to London, is Arabic. Wahla. Adura, the Yoruba word for prayer, du'a. Baraka, for blessing, baraka. Kadara, for destiny, qadar. Fitina, for chaos, fitna.

[00:01:10]Arabic didn't just influence religion.

[00:01:12]It entered everyday speech itself. From the sugar in your tea, to the algebra behind computing, to wahala in the streets of Lagos.

[00:01:20]The Islamic language of revelation has miraculously become the language of life.