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BENGALI BUNGALOW

8/1/2020

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The word bungalow was borrowed in the late seventeenth century, when it was spelled Bungale. Later attestations have included bungala, bungelow, bungilo, bungallow, and bungalo, with the modern form becoming standardized in the early 1800s. The reason for these early variations is that it's a transliteration of the Hindi word bangli, which was their name for the Bengali people, since the house style originated from the country. We're not exactly sure where that demonym comes from, but it might be after Banga, a founding chief. In Bangladesh itself, the people call the building a banglaghar, and it's pretty much something along those lines everywhere else, too. According to Google Ngrams, literary usage of bungalow peaked in 1922, and according to Google Trends, searches for the term spike every year in mid-summer.
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    Hello! I'm Adam Aleksic, a senior studying government and linguistics at Harvard University, where I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy trivia, politics, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law. 
      If I don't cover it soon, I probably already did it
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