List of gairaigo and wasei-eigo terms

This is a selected list of gairaigo, Japanese words originating or based on foreign language (generally Western) terms, including wasei-eigo (Japanese pseudo-Anglicisms).

Many of these words derive from Portuguese, due to Portugal's early role in Japanese-Western interaction; Dutch, due to the Netherlands' relationship with Japan amidst the policy of sakoku during the Edo Period; and from French and German, due to France and Germany's cultural and scientific prominence during Japan's modernization in the Meiji Period.

However, most come from English, the dominant world language today. Due to the large number of western concepts imported into Japanese culture during modern times, there are thousands of these English borrowings. These English words are informally referred to as having been "Nipponized".

Japanese vocabulary also includes large numbers of words from Chinese, borrowed at various points throughout history. However, since the Japanese language has such strong historical ties to the Chinese language, these loans are not generally considered gairaigo.

Many loan words are in fact pseudo-borrowings: despite their links to foreign language words, the word forms as used in modern Japanese are not used in the same way in their languages of origin. In fact, many such terms, despite their similarity to the original foreign words, are not easily understood by speakers of those languages (e.g. left over as a baseball term for a hit that goes over the left-fielder's head, rather than uneaten food saved for a later meal as in English—or famikon ファミコン from "Family computer", which actually refers to the Nintendo Entertainment System).

...
Wikipedia