Borrowed Tongues is a word app developed by Etymology Games.
Download Statistics
Borrowed Tongues has been downloaded 290 times. In the last 30 days, the app was downloaded 110 times. It is ranked #3 in word.
User Ratings
The app has no ratings yet.
App Information
Borrowed Tongues is FREE to download. The APK download size is 77.56 MB. The latest version available is 2.2. The last update was on September 2, 2026.
Technical Requirements
The app has a content rating of Everyone. The app has been available on Google Play 2 weeks ago.
Description
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.
Recent changes: Welcome to Borrowed Tongues!
Every word has a history, swipe root chunks together to build words, then discover where they truly came from. Explore 12 worlds of etymology: Arabic, Greek, Celtic, Norse, Sanskrit, Norman French, and more.
✨ Word Sense hints when you're stuck 📜 Earn Scrolls as you play 📖 Codex: every word you solve is saved, so you can revisit its origin story anytime
This is our very first release, thank you for playing from day one!
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