Vol. 09 · Loanwords ·South Asia ·1820s
Karma
from karman
- Meaning
- Action — particularly action that carries moral consequences into future rebirths.
- Source word
- karman
- Route into English
- Sanskrit → Hindi → English via Theosophist literature of the 1820s–1870s. The casual sense ("bad karma for cutting in line") is a 20th-century flattening.
- Arrived
- 1820s
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.