English adopts more Chinese phrases

As the current lingua franca of international business, science and technology, with a vocabulary of over one million words, English has always contained words from other languages, including languages such as Latin, German, French, Italian, and Chinese.

Over 1,000 words of Chinese origin can now be found in the Oxford English Dictionary and, since the mid-1990s, the adoption of Chinese words and phrases into English seems to have been on the rise.

Chinese words found in English are mostly direct borrowings - for example, buzheteng, literal translation running dog - and blending, such as "taikonaut", the word for a Chinese astronaut.