Borrowed Tongues

Etymology Games

In-app purchases

About this game

Every word has a story. Some of them are a thousand years in the making.

Did you know English is more than half French in origin — a legacy of the Norman Conquest of 1066? Did you know most star names in English are Arabic, because Arab astronomers mapped and named the sky a thousand years before telescopes existed? Did you know "rodeo" — a word that feels as American as it gets — is actually Spanish, from "rodear," meaning "to go around," born from Mexican vaquero cattle-herding culture?

Borrowed Tongues is a swipe puzzle game where you rebuild English words by dragging their original root fragments together — the same syllables borrowed from Arabic, Greek, Norse, Sanskrit, Spanish, and a dozen other languages that quietly built the English you speak every day.

SWIPE THE ROOTS
Drag syllable and root chunks together — never single letters — to reconstruct real English words. Swipe "tele" and "phone" together, and watch TELEPHONE assemble before your eyes — then discover it's Greek for "far" and "sound."

A PUZZLE THAT GROWS WITH YOU
Early levels ease you into the mechanic. As you progress, extra root fragments join the dial — real syllables borrowed from elsewhere in the game, mixed in to sharpen your eye, not trick you. Word Sense — free for your first three levels in every world — reveals how many words remain and their letter count. After that, it's a power-up you can unlock with Gold Leaves once you've saved enough, or you can play on instinct alone, swiping roots with no scaffolding at all.

TRAVEL THROUGH A DOZEN WORLDS
Every world is a different language's fingerprint on English — Arabic, Greek, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Spanish, Sanskrit, Norse, Dutch, and the languages that arrived with immigration and reshaped American English. Each level comes with a real historical clue and hand-written etymology facts, not generic trivia.

COLLECT YOUR CODEX
Every word you solve is bound permanently into your Word Codex — a personal, growing library of every borrowed word you've discovered, complete with its roots and the story of how it crossed into English. Nothing you've earned is ever lost.

BUILD YOUR OWN JOURNEY
Choose any three languages to begin your quest. Complete them, and you'll unlock your choice of any world on the map — every world after that opens by playing, not paying. Mastered a world already? Replay it any time — your progress is remembered, and replays shuffle so you won't just be solving the same levels in the same order twice.

RACE THE CLOCK, EARN YOUR WAY
A gentle timer keeps each level moving. Solve words to earn Gold Leaves, and spend them how you like — unlock Word Sense for a world, or reveal one random remaining word when you're stuck. Nothing is ever required to keep playing; every tool in the game is something you can also simply play your way past.

Every word has a story. Swipe your way into a few thousand of them.

What’s new

performance and stability improvements