French words from Italian

31 French words with Italian in their history, whether borrowed directly or passed on through other languages.

• assassin

  It is borrowed from Italian assassino (“hired killer”), also “assessino”, used in that sense by Dante early in the 14th century. Older forms, frequent in Medieval Latin, Old French and Old Occitan…

• banqueroute

  It is borrowed from Italian bancarotta (15th century), literally “broken bench”, from banca (“bench, counter, bank”) and rotta (“broken”), the feminine past participle of rompere (“to break”). The…

• bizarre

  It is borrowed from Italian bizzarro (“irascible; extravagant”), which meant “angry” in the early 14th century and “extravagant” from the early 16th. The origin of the Italian word is uncertain. Rey…

• bombe

  It is borrowed from Italian bomba, found in Medieval Latin for an incendiary dart (about 1452) and later for an explosive device. The Italian word is either an independent imitative formation or…

• botte

  1. The bundle is borrowed from Middle Dutch bote (“bundle of flax”), related to boten (“to beat”), so properly the amount of crop threshed at one time. Bloch and Wartburg think a link with the…

• brigade

  It is borrowed from Italian brigata (“troop, band”), which named a military company in the 13th century and a team of workers in the 14th. The Italian word comes from briga (“strife; company”)…

• bronze

  It is borrowed from Italian bronzo (“alloy of copper and tin”) (1250–1300), whose origin is obscure. Medieval forms in northern Italy, such as “bronzium” (Piacenza, 1314) and “brundum” (Treviso…

• burlesque

  It is borrowed from Italian burlesco, at first in “alla burlesca” (before 1566), taken over by ear and later respelled after the Italian. It is derived from burla (“joke, trick”), probably from…

• buste

  It is borrowed from Italian busto (“upper body”) (14th century), perhaps from Latin bustum (“funeral pyre; tomb”), which could have come to mean “bust” because funeral monuments were often adorned…

• cantine

  It is borrowed from Italian cantina (“cellar, wine store”) (from the second half of the 13th century), a derivative of canto (“corner”), hence “out-of-the-way corner, store room”; it belongs to the…

• caprice

  It is borrowed from Italian capriccio, which first meant “a shiver of fear or horror” (13th century) and then, in the 16th century, “a sudden odd desire, a whimsical idea”. The Italian word comes…

• caricature

  It is borrowed from Italian caricatura (“a loading; a caricature”), derived with the suffix “-ura” from the past participle of caricare (“to load; to exaggerate”), which in the 17th century already…

• charlatan

  It is borrowed from Italian ciarlatano (15th century), a cross between cerretano, properly “an inhabitant of Cerreto”, a village near Spoleto whose people often sold drugs in market places, and…

• compliment

  It is borrowed from Italian complimento (“act or expression of homage”) (1578–1594, Tasso), itself from Spanish cumplimiento, “abundance” in the 13th century and “compliment” in the 16th, derived…

• costume

  It is borrowed from Italian costume (“custom”) (about 1260), which in the 16th century had taken the narrow artistic sense “the way of showing the age, rank and period of figures”. The Italian word…

• esquif

  It is borrowed from Italian schifo (“small boat”) (before 1470; the diminutive “schifetto” is found in the 14th century), from Lombardic *skif (“boat”), reconstructed from Old High German skif…

• esquisse

  It is borrowed from Italian schizzo (“rough sketch”) (early 16th century), Frenchified, earlier “splash made by a spurting liquid” (14th century, Boccaccio), the noun of schizzare (“to spurt…

• gazette

  It is borrowed from Italian gazzetta (“news sheet”) (before 1580), from the name of the Venetian news sheet Gazeta de le novità, which cost a gazeta, a small coin struck at Venice from 1539 and…

• girafe

  It is borrowed from Italian giraffa, itself from Arabic زرافة (zarāfa, “giraffe”). The Italian word is recorded from the second half of the 13th century. The Arabic word had already reached Old…

• granit

  It is borrowed from Italian granito, recorded in the modern sense from the late 15th century, the adjective “granito” “grainy” used as a noun, properly the past participle of granire (“to form…

• kiosque

  It is borrowed from Italian chiosco (1594), from Ottoman Turkish كوشك (köşk, “garden pavilion”), itself from Persian کوشک (kōšk, “palace; portico”). Wiktionary traces the Persian word back to Middle…

• manège

  It is borrowed from Italian maneggio (“handling; horse training”) (1590), a back-formation from maneggiare (“to handle; to train a horse”), derived from mano (“hand”), from Latin manus (“hand”), the…

• népotisme

  It is borrowed from Italian nepotismo, recorded in Italian only from 1672, derived from nepote (“nephew”) (Bloch and Wartburg and the GLLF write “nipotismo”, “nipote”), from Latin nepōs (“grandson…

• panache

  It is borrowed from Italian pennacchio (“plume on a helmet”) (14th century), from Christian Latin Late Latin pinnāculum (“pinnacle”), itself from Latin pinna (“feather, wing”). Bloch and Wartburg…

• parasol

  It is borrowed from Italian parasole, recorded from the 14th century, literally “what keeps off the sun”, from para-, from parare (“to ward off”), and sole (“sun”). The first French forms came…

• piano

  1. The adverb is borrowed from Italian piano (“softly, gently”), an adverb from about 1300–1313 (Dante), often doubled as “pian piano”, from the adjective piano (“flat, smooth; calm, soft”), from…

• risque

  It is borrowed from Old Italian risco (modern Italian rischio), which corresponds to Medieval Latin resicum, risicus, recorded at Marseille, Bologna and elsewhere from the 12th and 13th centuries…

• salon

  It is borrowed from Italian salone (“large hall”), the augmentative of sala (“hall”), which the TLFi and the Académie take from French salle; Wiktionary takes sala from Lombardic sala. Both go back…

• sequin

  It is borrowed from Italian zecchino, a Venetian word for a gold coin struck at Venice from 1280 or 1284, although the word is only found from 1543. It is derived from zecca (“mint”), from Arabic…

• sérénade

  It is borrowed from Italian serenata, recorded in the sense “evening concert” from the second half of the 15th century, earlier “clear weather, calm night” (14th century), derived from sereno…

• zéro

  It is borrowed from Italian zero (1491–1494), a contraction of zefiro, from Medieval Latin zephirum, a transcription of Arabic صفر (ṣifr, “empty; zero”). The Arabic word had already been borrowed as…

All French words by origin →