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What is Loanword?
A loanword is a word directly taken into by one language from another with little or no translation. A calque or loan translation is a related process whereby it is the meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word "loanword" is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort.

Although loanwords are typically far less numerous than the "native" words of most languages (creoles and pidgins being an obvious exception), they are often widely known and used, since their borrowing served a certain purpose, for example to provide a name for a new invention.

Loanwords in English

English has many loanwords. In 1973, a computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd edition) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff. Their estimates for the origin of English words were as follows:

French, including Old French and early Anglo-French: 28.3%
Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%
Germanic languages, including Old and Middle English: 25%
Greek: 5.32%
No etymology given or unknown: 4.03%
Derived from proper names: 3.28%
All other languages contributed less than 1%
This survey shows no information about the frequency of words, however. If the frequency of words is considered, words from Old and Middle English occupy the vast majority.

The reasons for English's vast borrowing include:

its modern importance;
its being a scientific language;
England being invaded by the Vikings and the Normans;
English becoming a trade language in the 18th century;
the fact that English is fairly free of phonetic restrictions in its syllable structure.
This lack of restrictions makes it comparatively easy for the English language to incorporate new words. Compare this with Japanese, where the English word "club" (itself originally from Old Norse) was turned into "kurabu" because of Japanese's numerous phonetic restrictions. However, the English pronunciation of a loanword will often differ from the original pronunciation to such a degree that a native speaker of the language it was borrowed from will not be able to recognize it as a loanword when spoken.

The tendency of the English language to borrow extensively is summed up by James D. Nicoll: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." 1