Semantic Changes and Adaptation of Arabic Loanwords in English

Abstract

This article examines the semantic development of five Arabic-origin loanwords in English through a combined historical and corpus-based approach. While previous scholarship has mainly described Arabic-derived items from lexicographical, etymological, or orthographic perspectives, less attention has been paid to their diachronic semantic adaptation in English. To address this gap, the study analyses the words alcohol, magazine, candy, sherbet, and assassin using etymological evidence from the Oxford English Dictionary and contextual data from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the British National Corpus (BNC). The findings show that these items followed several recurrent pathways of semantic change, including broadening, narrowing, metaphorical extension, and generalisation. The corpus evidence further demonstrates that semantic change is closely related to changes in usage, communicative function, and socio-cultural relevance. The study contributes to research on historical semantics, lexical borrowing, and language contact by showing that Arabic loanwords in English were not simply transferred as fixed lexical forms, but were actively reinterpreted and semantically reshaped over time.