The Influence of Italian on English: Words You Didn’t Know Were Italian

Another notable Italian contribution is modern music: this list is equally long, populated by names of musical instruments such as piano and cello, tempos such as allegro and moderato, and singing voices such as alto and baritone – not to mention, the soprano itself. Both standardised musical notation (13th century) and opera (16th century) were invented in Italy, so it stands to reason that Italian came to dominate musical communication all over the world.  

It would have been strange if a culture so abounding in creativity did not leave its mark on other spheres of European life, and on Europe’s languages. Today, we go beyond carpaccio and crescendo, to uncover the lesser-known Italian origins of some ordinary English words. 

14th Century: Quarantine, courtesy of the Great Plague 

The word quarantine evokes the dark days of Covid isolation for many of us, but its origins are darker yet: the Great Plague. No, Italy does not have the distinction of being the cradle of one of history’s deadliest diseases. But the practice of sequestering people in case they show worrying symptoms began in Dubrovnik, which at the time was under Venetian rule. Before entering the city, visitors were required to remain isolated for an excruciating forty days, or quarantina. Too bad this didn’t stop the Black Death from wiping out half of Europe’s population in a mere quindici anni (fifteen years). 

16th Century: Novel, Bank, and Management (of horses)

While the great Covid novel is yet to be written (apologies to those who have already tried), the Plague’s silver lining is no doubt the seminal Decameron by the Tuscan Giovanni Bocaccio. In it, ten people flee to the countryside to escape disease-ridden Florence, and bide their time by entertaining each other with fictional tales. Each tale is referred to as a novella: in the wake of the book’s transformative influence, the word, literally meaning ‘new’, became the default term for any work of fiction. After a few mutations inflicted on it by the French, it finally joined the English lexicon as novel in the 16th century.  

When Italians weren’t trying to contain deadly pandemics or writing legendary works of fiction, some engaged in more routine practices, such as money-lending. They worked from a workbench, of banco – whence the modern English bank for the likes of Lloyds – and, like any self-respecting financial institution, aimed to make a profit, or at least to break even. If they failed at this, legend has it, their workbenches were sawed in two, as an embarrassing public demonstration of their insolvency (aren’t we glad we don’t live in the Renaissance). What they ended up with was a banca rotta, or ‘broken workbench’. Once again, the expression was altered by French and Neo-Latin and entered English as bankrupt in the 1500s, by which time there was plenty of use for it to be found on the island. 

One of the most often-used words in the professional sphere today, management, also came into English from 16th-century Italy. The verb maneggiare, meaning ‘to handle’ and derived from mano (‘hand’), was first used in reference to managing a horse. Gradually, it broadened to signify being in control of other things. Those who have ever managed a difficult group will appreciate the equine comparison. 

17th century: Jeans! 

Did you know that Italians have been wearing jeans since the 1600s? The word comes from the northern city of Genoa, which produced the strong twilled cotton cloth initially used for ship sails. Its durability also made it ideal for workwear. The inventive Genovese dyed it with indigo brought from India and exported it under the French name bleu de Gênes (Genoa blue), which morphed into jeans in English. A mysterious 17th-century Italian artist, known to us only as ‘Master of the Blue Jeans’, painted numerous scenes of daily life featuring fabric that looks strikingly similar to the blue jeans of today. 

18th century: Galvanise, Voltage, and Caricature 

Have you ever been galvanised by a deadline? The word, meaning ‘spurred to action’, comes from the name of the Bolognese scientist Luigi Galvani, whose experiments with the twitching legs of dead frogs led to the discovery of bioelectricity. His staunch rival, Alessandro Volta, credited with the invention of the ‘voltaic pile’ (more commonly known as the battery), has been immortalised in terms such as voltage – the strength of an electrical current, measured in volts.  

The 1700s are also the time when the word caricature appeared in the English language, adapted from the Italian caricatura, or ‘exaggeration’. While drawings exaggerated for comic effect date to at least as far back as the Roman period, it was the social changes in 18th-century Europe, such as the growing rates of literacy and printing, that allowed caricatures to blossom as a genre. 

And now for a bite of etymological wisdom: ‘caricature’ is related to the car that you drive, as well as to the cargo that you carry in it. All these proceed from the Latin verb carricare, meaning ‘to load’ a vehicle such as a wagon. To draw a caricature was to ‘overload’ your drawing with certain features. Nowadays, we all know public figures that render this exaggeration unnecessary, being in themselves an overload to the senses.

19th century: Graffiti 

Most of us understand graffiti as urban architecture transformed beyond recognition by (more or less) skilful street artists, but the origin of this Italian loan in English is more high-brow: graffiato, from the verb graffiare (‘to etch, to scratch’), was adopted by 19th-century archaeologists to refer to markings found on excavated relics. It is not until the 1970s that ‘graffiti’ acquired its association with markings made illicitly in public spaces – but Italians had nothing to do with it! 

20th century: Propaganda

One of the more palatable Italian loans in the sphere of politics, which came to be widely used in the early 1900s, is propaganda – the deliberate dissemination of biased, misleading information designed to convince and influence. While the original word is Latin and dates back to the propagation of the Catholic faith during the Renaissance, it acquired negative connotations and really took off with the rise of political dogma and authoritarian governments, as opportunities for applying it were rife across a Europe headed towards disaster.