The origins of English words

Is business a typical English word? Or are enterprise and economy, for that matter? They all are, but they came from different sources. Business is related to being busy, an old Germanic word, while enterprise was originally a French word, and economy has come from the Greek language via Latin.

In fact, English has soaked up so much vocabulary from other languages that it has become the word-richest language in the world, according to most linguists. Some say that English has almost a million words today, ranging from awe to zoopharmacognosy. Even native speakers don’t know them all.