Dictionary WikiDutch Words in English: Maritime and Trade Terms
Introduction
English and Dutch are cousins. Both descend from the same West Germanic root, so a lot of their shared vocabulary was never borrowed at all — it was inherited. The interesting story is what happened on top of that inheritance. Over several centuries, and especially during the stretch when Amsterdam was the financial and nautical capital of Europe, English pulled in whole blocks of Dutch vocabulary. Those borrowings do not scatter randomly. They cluster around the places where Dutch speakers led the world: ships, paintings, spirits, markets, and water engineering.
The 17th century matters most. While the Dutch Republic was at the peak of its Golden Age, England was expanding outward too, and the two countries were constantly tangled up — fighting three wars, sharing a king, trading across the Channel, and colonizing the same coastlines. Out of all that traffic came the bulk of the loanwords discussed below. A second wave arrived later by way of New Amsterdam, the Hudson Valley settlement that English forces seized in 1664 and renamed New York.
The Backstory
Contact between English and Dutch speakers did not begin with tall ships. Medieval England depended on Flemish weavers and wool merchants, and towns on both sides of the North Sea exchanged craftsmen, clergy, and goods for hundreds of years before Shakespeare was born. That steady drip of contact kept vocabularies leaking into each other long before any formal borrowing could be dated.
The 17th century then turned the drip into a flood. The Anglo-Dutch Wars of 1652, 1665, and 1672 pushed English sailors into close study of a superior Dutch navy, and they copied terminology along with tactics. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 capped the process by importing the Dutch stadtholder William III as king of England; his court brought Dutch landscape gardeners, bankers, and print-shop masters south, and their trade words came with them.
Words from the Sea
No category of Dutch borrowings is denser than the nautical one. For about a hundred years the best ships, the best charts, and the best sailors were Dutch, and English simply absorbed the language those sailors used.
Ships and their parts
Yacht began as jacht, a sleek hunter built to run down smugglers in the shallows of the Low Countries. Sloop is the English form of Dutch sloep, and schooner may trace back through Dutch or Scots. The flat surface you walk on, the deck, is Dutch dek (a cover); the horizontal spar called the boom is the same Dutch word for a tree or a pole.
Handling the ship
A skipper is a schipper, a shipmaster. To cruise is to kruisen, to criss-cross a stretch of water. A dock seems to come from Dutch dok, and to reef a sail (reduce its area) reflects Dutch reef. Throw in bowsprit, keelhaul, freebooter (a pirate, from vrijbuiter), and smuggle (from smokkelen), and you have most of the sailor's working toolkit.
Words from the Studio
The same century that produced Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hals also exported a studio vocabulary. Easel is ezel, "donkey" — a wry nickname for the wooden frame that carries the canvas the way a pack animal carries goods. Landscape started out as landschap, a category of painting; only later did English stretch it to mean the actual countryside.
Dutch print-making was unmatched, which is why etch comes straight from etsen (to bite with acid) and sketch from schets. Masterpiece is a calque of meesterstuk, and still life mirrors stilleven word for word. Even mannequin, via French, traces back to the diminutive manneken, "little man."
At the Table
American English in particular has a sweet tooth for Dutch. That crumbly disc next to your coffee, the cookie, is the Dutch diminutive koekje — "little cake" — carried to Manhattan in the 1600s and never surrendered. Coleslaw is koolsla, cabbage salad. Waffle is wafel, full stop.
On the bar menu, brandy is a shortening of brandewijn, "burnt wine," the Dutch name for distilled grape spirit. Gin is an abbreviation of jenever, Dutch juniper liquor, which Dutch soldiers introduced to English troops during continental campaigns. Booze probably echoes buizen, to drink to excess. Pickle descends from pekel, brine.
Hidden in Plain Sight
Some Dutch words are so ordinary now that nobody remembers they were foreign. Boss started as baas (master), and it entered American English partly because colonial laborers in New Amsterdam disliked the word "master" and reached for something else. Luck came from Middle Dutch luc. Snoop is snoepen, to sneak food, which drifted sideways to mean any sneaking. Bluff may come from bluffen, to boast or deceive.
A few more: knapsack is knapzak, a snack bag; trigger began as trekker, a puller; roster comes from rooster, originally a grid printed on paper, then any list; snack goes back to snakken, to snap at something; slim meant "sly" or "crooked" in Dutch before English twisted it into "thin." Add hustle, poppycock, and the military sense of tattoo (the drummed signal to stop drinking and return to quarters) and the list keeps growing.
New York's Dutch Roots
The short-lived colony of New Amsterdam, founded in 1626 and lost to England in 1664, punches far above its weight in American English. Dutch did not stop at the cookie jar; it stuck to the map, the calendar, and the vocabulary of urban life.
Place names
Brooklyn is a reshaping of Breukelen, Harlem of Haarlem, the Bronx of Jonas Bronck's estate, and Wall Street of de Waalstraat. Coney Island gets its name from konijn, the Dutch word for rabbit — the original island was thick with them — and Flushing preserves the town of Vlissingen in Zeeland.
Cultural carry-overs
Santa Claus is a flattened pronunciation of Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of Saint Nicholas. Yankee, now worn as a badge of national pride, probably began as Jan Kees or Janke, an insult for a Dutch colonist that later rebounded on English colonists themselves. The front-porch step that New Yorkers still sit on, the stoop, is stoep. Caboose, the tail-end car of a freight train, probably comes from kabuis, the ship's galley.
Water and Land
A country half below sea level naturally exports hydraulic vocabulary. Dike (or dyke) is Dutch dijk. Polder, the term for a tract of drained coastal land held dry by pumps and sluices, is pure Dutch and is used without translation in engineering textbooks worldwide. Dam is shared across Dutch and related Low German dialects.
As noted above, landscape entered the language as a painter's category and only later migrated to geography. Boulevard takes an even stranger route: it is French on the surface, but the French word was borrowed from Dutch bolwerk, a bulwark or defensive earthwork, which explains why boulevards so often trace the lines of old city walls.
Money and Markets
The Amsterdam Beurs of 1602 was the first stock exchange on earth, and the commercial machinery built around it — shareholding, futures contracts, short selling, insurance syndicates — gave English new nouns or sharpened existing ones. The financial sense of stock was shaped inside Dutch trading houses. Excise comes from accijns, a tax on goods.
The early vocabulary of futures markets and speculation was refined in Amsterdam before English adopted it. Everyday commerce carries the same fingerprints: freight is Dutch vracht, and the apparatus of trade — from bills of lading to the customs cutter — took on its modern form in Dutch harbors first and English ones second.
Idioms That Mention the Dutch
English has a curious pocket of phrases that name the Dutch as a cheap joke. "Going Dutch" (each person paying their own share), "Dutch courage" (the bravery that comes out of a bottle), "Dutch uncle" (someone who delivers blunt, unsolicited advice), and "double Dutch" (speech you cannot follow) all date from the 17th-century rivalry. They are fossils of an old geopolitical grudge, preserved long after the grudge itself has faded.
Most of these expressions now sit in the language without any sting. Modern speakers use "going Dutch" without intending insult, and "Dutch courage" is as likely to be self-deprecating as mocking. The phrases survive less as slurs than as curiosities of how fiercely two neighboring powers once jostled for sea lanes.
The Afrikaans Branch
Dutch did not stop evolving when it left Europe. In southern Africa it developed into Afrikaans, and through Afrikaans a second, later wave of vocabulary reached English. The grimmest of those loans is apartheid, "separateness," now known in every language on earth. Two more arrived through the Boer Wars: trek (originally an ox-wagon journey, now any demanding walk) and commando, first a Boer militia column, later a type of elite soldier.
The wildlife books are full of the same branch. Veldt names the South African grassland; springbok is a leaping antelope; kraal is a corral for livestock; aardvark is literally "earth pig." Spoor is the line of tracks a hunter reads on the ground, and wildebeest is "wild beast" — all of them entering English through the Afrikaans window on the world.
Closing Notes
Put the loans together and a picture emerges: a small country that punched massively above its weight for a hundred years and left fingerprints all over the English of ordinary life. You touch the legacy every time you eat a cookie, stand on a stoop, check the roster, call the boss, take out a yacht, paint a landscape, or drop a gin into your glass. None of those words feel borrowed now — which is, in a way, the definitive sign that the borrowing worked. Languages grow best when the contact is thick, the rivalry is real, and nobody is keeping score of whose word won.