Food and cooking: Three of the words incorporated from South Asia have to do with food and cooking. This includes the dish nihari (red meat slow-cooked in a spicy stew) and shutki (a Bengali dried fish). The karahi, “a bowl-shaped cooking pot with two handles,” which might be used to prepare the said dishes has also been included.

Dress: Two traditional robes, usually worn by men, have also found mention. They are are the chapan, a long loose open robe worn as an overcoat, which does not have a collar, and chapkan, a “long, close-fitting coat buttoned at the front.”

Administration From Bangladesh, the OED takes upazila, a district sub-division, and Nazim comes from the Mughal era, referring to the governor of a province who was responsible for military and judicial affairs.

Picked up from Pakistan, ‘affectee’ has been floating around since at least 1939. It defines “a person affected or harmed as a consequence of a particular action, course of events, set of circumstances, etc.” An example in a sentence would be: The landslide affectees were paid a compensation of Rs 50,000.

Then there is a public call office, the full form of the once ubiquitous PCO, a public payphone booth that anybody who grew up in India and Pakistan before mobile phones will remember.

Art: Borrowed from Bengali folk art comes the word alpana, a “geometric design” painted on the floor on an auspicious occasion. The paint is created using rice flour and water.

Other “Englishes”

Not just South Asia, the OED also legitimised words from Australia, Canada and popular culture, such as ‘yeah nah’ a alang popular among Australians and New Zealanders, used as either an acknowledgement, to suggest one is not sure about something or an emphatic no, ‘elbows up’, a term that comes from Canadian ice hockey, but was co-opted by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney during election to indicate his aggressively defensive stance towards US tariffs, and humblebrag (an self-deprecating statement made to draw attention to an achievement), floordrobe (a heap of clothes on the floor), life hack, long game, folksonomy (tagging system in fan forums), and finally at last, the French word au contraire was declared English.

These updates validate Chinese-American author R F Kuang’s assertion in her 2022 novel Babel that English–the global lingua franca–was a “Frankenstein vernacular” stitched together with loanwords from around the world. The cache from India and the larger South Asian sub-continent famously included words such as pakka, bungalow, loot, pajamas, juggernaut and karma, and subsequent reviews have further enriched the language, ensuring that people from around the world, be it Dhaka, Toronto, Sydney, Manipur, Scotland, and even parts of the ever-evolving internet can actually understand each other, and not descend to actual babel.