Have you scrolled to the end of the emoji keyboard, looking for those peskily faraway hearts, and accidentally sent a mysterious “NG”? Asked a friend in Japan if they want to go out for hibachi and been met with a blank stare? As a language shifts and evolves, it’s wont to take absurd and arbitrary twists and turns. (Consider that inflammable means flammable, or that peruse means both to examine in close detail and browse superficially.) But when two languages get together, things can get extra weird.

On March 26, the Oxford English Dictionary, the historical dictionary widely considered as the definitive record of the English language, added 23 Japanese borrowings to its 500,000 words and phrases. Most were culture-related nouns, especially in food (“tonkotsu,” “onigiri”), along with “kintsugi,” “omotenashi” and “washi tape.”

“Hibachi” got an update as well. Though it was first added in 1933 as a charcoal brazier for warming hands or boiling water for tea, North Americans have been using it for just as long to mean something else. In English, the word can refer to a small portable barbecue, as well as to restaurants where someone cooks on a hot plate surrounded by diners (what’s called “teppanyaki” in Japan), as popularized by New York’s Benihana, which features a goofy chef who does tricks, including tossing food directly into people’s mouths.

(Japanese uses “teppan” for the bigger, hotter plate seen in restaurants, while the kind people use at home that often runs on induction is called, naturally, “hotto purēto.”)

“Language has quirks like that,” says Danica Salazar, lexicographer and executive editor for world Englishes at the OED. “Things happen to words as they travel from one language to another, and that's perfectly normal.”

She points to the case of reborrowings, also called boomerang words, which are words that pass from one language to the other, and then back again. The Japanese “anime” is short for “animēshon,” which, of course, came from the English for “animation,” but has since re-entered English with a more specific meaning. The same goes for “cosplay,” or “kosupure,” originally a combination of “costume” and “play” from English, which was added to the OED in 2008.

“NG,” which stands for “no good,” is used liberally in Japan but is, to an American English speaker, “not a thing” as they might say. But emoji sets, having originated in Japan, still retain a number of Japanese-specific concepts. So “NG” has its own emoji, right above “OK” on the iOS keyboard.

These examples are from the interplay of two languages — what about three? “Sukinshippu,” a word made in Japan based on “skin” and “relationship” to mean physical affection (as in, between a parent and child or friends) was later borrowed into Korean (“seukinsip”). It now also includes the meaning of PDA, and can be used by fans when gossiping about celebrities. With the rise of K-pop, “skinship” has now made it into English usage.

“The centers of English have mostly been considered to be the U.K. and later on the U.S., and any shifts in vocabulary have to start from there and then spread out to the rest of the English-speaking world,” says Salazar. But now trends starting in Asian countries spread across the continent first, before the West catches on, she says. “Now even countries like Japan and South Korea can have a certain degree of influence in English.”

How much one language affects another isn’t necessarily a reflection of a country’s global hard or soft power; rather it reflects the exposure of its speakers to that of the other. That’s why one of the earliest uses of Japanese words in English only comes in 1577, from a collection of travel writings in the “West and East Indies,” and why Japanese contributions are relatively few and recent, with 552 loanwords in English. Compare that with the 25,000 borrowings from French, most of which came into English following the Norman Conquest of 1066.

The OED uses a combination of a digital database and human scholars to track the frequency of words and phrases to be considered for inclusion. The dictionary is currently undergoing revision, says Salazar, pointing to the entry for “sakura.” The existing definition is “flowering cherry tree,” which isn’t different from the word “cherry blossom” in English. Still, says Salazar, “sakura” evokes something different than just generic blossoms. Like the French borrowing “haute couture,” for which English has its own “high fashion,” the phrase just gives an extra sense of je ne sais quoi.

Coming to a conversation near you

Here is a list of the 23 words that made it into the Oxford English Dictionary last month.

  • donburi, n.
  • hibachi, n.
  • isekai, n.
  • kagome, n.
  • karaage, n.
  • katsu, n.
  • katsu curry, n.
  • kintsugi, n.
  • kirigami, n.
  • mangaka, n.
  • okonomiyaki, n.
  • omotenashi, n.
  • onigiri, n.
  • santoku, n.
  • shibori, n.
  • takoyaki, n.
  • tokusatsu, n.
  • tonkatsu, n.
  • tonkatsu sauce, n.
  • tonkotsu, n./1
  • tonkotsu, n./2
  • washi tape, n.
  • yakiniku, n.