/sɔɪ/·noun·1679 — John Locke's journal records 'soye' as a Japanese sauce encountered through Dutch East India Company trade; the word entered English via Dutch merchants operating in Nagasaki·Established
Origin
English 'soy' descends from Japanese shōyu (itself from Chinese jiàngyóu, 'sauce oil'), carried to Europe by Dutch traders at Nagasaki in the 1600s and clipped from the Dutch form soja — a word whose journey maps maritime trade routes from Han dynasty fermentation to American commodity agriculture.
Definition
A leguminous plant (Glycine max) native to East Asia, or the sauce derived from its fermented beans, borrowed into English via Dutch 'soja' from Japanese 'shōyu' (醤油), itself from Mandarin Chinese 'jiàngyóu' (醬油, literally 'sauce oil').
The Full Story
Japanese (from Chinese)17th century borrowing into European languageswell-attested
The word 'soy' traces a remarkable path from ancient East Asia to modern English, crossing multiple language families through maritime trade. The ultimate source is Old Chinese, where the character 醤 (jiàng) referred to a fermented paste or sauce. The specific compound 醤油 (jiàngyóu), meaning 'sauce oil,' designated the liquid condiment we know
Did you know?
The Indonesian word kecap originally meant soy sauce — a thick, sweet fermented soy condiment still called kecap manis. When British colonists encountered it in Southeast Asia, they borrowed the word but applied it to an entirely different condiment made from tomatoes, mushrooms, or walnuts. This is how 'ketchup' entered English
the word through Dutch, initially as 'soye' or 'soy,' referring specifically to the sauce rather than the bean. The bean itself was later named after the sauce — a reverse derivation, since the sauce was the product Europeans encountered first through trade, not the raw legume. This is a pure loanword chain, not a cognate relationship: Chinese → Japanese → Dutch/Portuguese → English. There are no Indo-European cognates. The path follows the maritime spice trade routes of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and Portuguese Estado da Índia, which connected East Asian ports to European markets. The Chinese root 菽 (shū), meaning 'pulse' or 'bean,' is a separate but related term in the broader semantic field, attested as far back as the Shang dynasty oracle bones. The modern Mandarin dòu (豆) for 'bean' replaced shū in common usage. The compound 大豆 (dàdòu, 'great bean') remains the standard Chinese term for soybean, while 醤油 persists as the term for the sauce across both Chinese and Japanese. Key roots: 醤油 (jiàngyóu) (Chinese: "sauce oil — fermented bean liquid condiment"), 醤油 (shōyu) (Japanese: "soy sauce — immediate source of European forms"), 菽 (shū) (Old Chinese: "pulse, legume — ancient word for the bean itself").