Vol. 09 · Loanwords ·South Asia ·1610s
Guru
from guru
- Meaning
- Literally "heavy, weighty" — a teacher or spiritual authority.
- Source word
- guru
- Route into English
- Sanskrit → Hindi → English via 17th-century travel writing. The "expert consultant" sense (financial guru, tech guru) emerged in American English in the 1960s.
- Arrived
- 1610s
From South Asia
Three centuries of British colonial contact — East India Company, Raj, military, domestic life — deposited a distinct Hindi/Urdu/Bengali/Sanskrit layer in everyday English.
English borrows.
Browse the full loanword atlas or explore another source language.