Italian words used in English, ranked

English says pizza and piano constantly, crescendo and fiasco rarely, and ombrello — the actual Italian word behind "umbrella" — never. The usual list of "Italian words in English" just names them; we measured them instead, counting how often each spelling turns up in 735 million words of English film and television subtitles and how often the Italian word behind it turns up in 247 million words of Italian. Ranked that way, by how much English actually uses them rather than by how exotic they sound, the list splits cleanly: a handful of these words are so ordinary that nobody hears them as foreign any more, and most of the rest are said for colour, far less than Italians say them.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 7 min read

The words, ranked by how often English actually says them

The first rank is the word's place in English speech; the second is the Italian word's place in Italian speech. Three words — cello, umbrella and volcano — are not spelt the way Italian spells them at all, and the Italian spelling is given alongside.

Only words with a sourced Italian etymology are on this list at all: each one traces, in Wiktionary's etymology section, to an Italian word English borrowed directly, not to a word Italian and English both happen to have from Latin. Of these 29, only 5 are also among the thousand commonest words of Italian speech, and the top five by English use — pizza, piano, studio, bravo, opera — are so settled in English that nobody pauses over them.

The oldest borrowings are the invisible ones

Four of these words are spelt differently in the two languages, and all four are also among the oldest, best-naturalised loans here: balcony (balcone), umbrella (ombrello), volcano (vulcano) and cello (short for violoncello, which Italian does not shorten). Measured against each other, something unexpected shows up: English says balcony, umbrella and volcano more often than Italian says balcone, ombrello and vulcano — these three rank higher in our English corpus than their Italian originals do in our Italian one. They came into English centuries ago, changed their spelling to fit, and are now just English words that happen to have an Italian grandparent. Nobody learning Italian meets ombrello and thinks of an umbrella emoji; nobody speaking English thinks of Italy when they say "it's starting to rain, grab the umbrella."

Studio and villa keep their Italian spelling and tell the same story: both are common in both languages, and both are, for an English speaker, simply English.

Plural traps: four of these words are already plural

Four of the showier borrowings are Italian plurals, and English uses them as if they were singular, or as a mass noun with no singular at all:

• Spaghetti is the plural of spaghetto, "a little string". Ask for "a spaghetti" in Italian and you will not be understood; it is dough, sliced thin, many strings of it.
• Biscotti is the plural of biscotto, "a cookie, a biscuit" — any biscuit, not only the twice-baked almond kind English means by it.
• Graffiti is the plural of graffito, "a little scratch". A single piece of spray-painted wall writing is, properly, a graffito.
• Paparazzi is the plural of paparazzo, the name of a photographer character in Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) — English's whole category of intrusive celebrity photographers is named after one man in one film.
• Panini is the plural of panino, "a small bread roll". Order "a panini" in Italy and, strictly, you have ordered a contradiction — though Italians hear this constantly from tourists and understand it fine.

None of this is a trap in practice — English has simply decided these plurals are singular, the way data and agenda (also originally Latin plurals) settled down in English long ago. It is only a trap for anyone assuming the Italian word works the way the English one does.

Meanings that moved

• Latte in Italian is milk — plain, ordinary milk, with nothing to do with coffee. Order "un latte" in an Italian bar and you get a glass of milk; the coffee drink is caffè latte, which English clipped to the half that means "milk".
• Bravo is an adjective in Italian before it is a shout: good, skilful, well-behaved — un bravo studente, a good student. As an interjection it still agrees with what it praises: brava to a woman, bravi to more than one person. English flattened all of that into one unchanging shout.
• Fresco means fresh or cool, and the painting technique is short for affresco, "onto the fresh [plaster]" — the wall painting is named for the wet plaster it is painted on, not the other way round.
• Fiasco is simply a flask or bottle in Italian. The failure sense comes from old Italian theatre slang, far fiasco, literally "to make a bottle", for reasons etymologists admit they do not fully know.
• Ghetto is not from a general word for "slum": it is the name of the old Jewish quarter of Venice, and the sense spread outward from that one place.
• Ciao began as a Venetian phrase, s-ciao vostro — literally "(I am) your slave" — a florid bit of servility that wore down, the way "your humble servant" might, into a plain hello or goodbye.
• Zucchini reflects a masculine Italian dialect form, zucchino; standard Italian is normally feminine, zucchina (plural zucchine). The American word for the vegetable is not quite standard Italian to start with — the British word, courgette, is French.

Why this matters for a learner

The useful lesson here runs backwards from the usual one. Knowing pizza and piano buys an Italian learner nothing, because they are English words now, used with English grammar and English assumptions. The words worth noticing are the ones that moved: assume latte orders coffee, and in Florence you get milk; assume bravo never changes, and you will not hear that it does. A frequency list of real Italian — not of Italian words English kept — is the faster way to the words that actually come up, and it starts with none of these: the first thousand words of our Italian list are everyday grammar and everyday nouns, not loanwords.

Verbavia (our own course) teaches Italian from that frequency list, in hand-written lessons with the grammar explained in English and reading, listening and writing sections; it is free on the web and works in any browser, including on a phone. The Italian course starts with the words Italians actually say most, and the two-minute Italian vocabulary test estimates how many of them you already know.

Why Italian takes real work beyond its borrowed words — double consonants and the seven shapes of "the" — is in is Italian hard to learn, and how many words you need to speak Italian measures the basic vocabulary against a hand-built Italian word list. The same exercise for three other languages: French words used in English, German words used in English and Spanish words used in English.

Sources

• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018 (English and Italian), content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com.
• Wiktionary, English etymology sections, checked 2026-10-07: balcony, ghetto, paparazzo, ciao, fiasco, volcano, umbrella, scenario, studio, villa, bravo, latte, panini, biscotti, graffiti, spaghetti.
• The word list, every meaning and every etymology note are written by hand in scripts/frequency_extras.py (italian_loanwords); the ranks and per-million figures are computed by scripts/frequency_curves.py and printed from its output rather than typed.