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More than 11,000 words that Italian has borrowed from various foreign languages make up the Italian of today. These loanwords are often a source of trouble in comprehension, grammar, pronunciation or spelling.
This nimble and thorough volume helps broaden one’s knowledge and sort out uncertainties over usage.
The dictionary brings together the most significant borrowings from more than 60 different languages. Among the Indo-European languages, loanwords come from English, French, Spanish, German, and other Germanic languages (Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian, and Icelandic) but also from Russian and other Slavic languages (Serbian, Croatian, Polish, Slovene, and Bulgarian).
Italian has also borrowed from Sanskrit and other languages in ancient and modern India (Vedic, Hindi, Bengali, and Punjabi), as well as Persian. Non-Indo-European languages are represented in loanwords from Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, African languages (Somali, Bantu, etc.), Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian languages (Tibetan, Javanese, Korean etc.).
The list of headwords is enriched by a substantial number of neologisms from the technical vocabulary of science, technology, economics, and social science. Ethnography and cuisine are, of course, well represented, but there are also foreign words that have now become completely assimilated into Italian. Terms that have gained currency include pseudo-exotic items that have meanings totally different in Italian from their sense in the language of origin.
Every entry includes:
- etymology
- phonetic transcription
- syllabification
- field of usage
and the volume includes:
- index by language
- index by field of usage
- appendix of Italian words derived from or related to foreign words
- appendix of two-word terms coined by analogy to foreign expressions (calques)
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