Food & drink

kefir

Kefir, a fermented milk, comes from the North Caucasus, where related words exist in Ossetian, Mingrelian and Karachay-Balkar. Russian took the drink and its name in the 1870s and passed both on to English, German, Polish and the Baltic and Caucasian languages; a 1980s health craze took it to Japan.

Weakest linkCertain

The road to English

From Russian to German

From Russian to Polish

From Russian to Armenian

From Russian to Lithuanian

From Russian to Latvian

From Russian to Modern Greek

From Russian to Korean

From English to Japanese

1870Russian

Hops are evenly spaced; labels show the year each form is first attested.

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