We all know so many foreign(Greek, Latin, French and Norman) words entered English in post-norman period instead of Anglo-Saxon era. But we don't talk about latin words in OE since Anglo-Saxons were christian and theological language is Latin. Maybe Greek.

  • As OP says, it seems to be particularly words related to the church, for example:

    • church (MdnE) < cirice (OE) < kyriakē oikia (Greek)
    • bishop (MdnE) < bisceop (OE) < episcopus (Latin) < episkopos (Greek)
    • priest (MdnE) < preost (OE) < presbyter (Latin) < presbyteros (Greek)

    I remember reading (but I can't find the source) that some other words, like oil, wine, school entered Common Germanic from Latin or Greek while the Angles, Saxons and Jutes were still on the continent, so the OE words for these comes from Common Germanic, rather than being a later introduction.

    Ciese (cheese, from L caseus) is another one, a loanword to West Germanic prior to the Anglo-Frisian shift of c to ch before front vowels.

    Good one!

    Though I find it hard to believe that Germanic people didn't eat cheese before contact with Rome. They must have had a word for it. Maybe they used a word related to curd (which I've just discovered is a metathesis of crud).

    They did have (a) word(s) for cheese (see Old Norse ostr, which isn't attested in other branches of Germanic but has an Indo-European etymology; the Proto-Germanic word has been reconstructed as \justaz, cf. Finnish *juusto), but the loanword might at first have applied to a kind of cheese made the Roman way. Sometimes words are borrowed in certain contexts and then become generalized, see for example Dutch paard, German Pferd, "horse", from a Proto-West-Germanic \parafred,* from Latin paraveredus - you can imagine those folks did have several words for "horse" before that. That said, it's not uncommon for a loanword to just catch on and displace a native word even if it never referred to something new

    There's many other non-religious words that were borrowed from Latin thanks to close contact along the western limes and which survived into Old and even Modern English. For example, coquina/cocina > cycen(e) > kitchen, moneta > mynet > mint, molinum > mylen > mill, (via) strata > stræt > street, etc. Understandably, this source of Latin loanwords dried up eventually

    Candle is another Latin borrowing into Old English.

    Table (in the sense “tablet, writing-board, chart”) and dish are two more Proto-West Germanic loans from Latin.

  • I'm sure I've seen several studies or considerations of the Latin element in OE.

  • I too think the Latin words should be taught as OE where the Latin word was used and declined as an OE word by an Anglo-Saxon author. When a word is adopted in that way, it becomes part of the language, even if it keeps the orginal spelling. There aren’t a ton of these, but they’re mostly in science and religious texts. I remember someone was looking for the OE word for a specific mineral on this sub a while back and I managed to find it in a manuscript and it was using the Latin word, and the manuscript treated it as an OE word. Especially for people trying to translate Modern English into OE this would fill a lot of gaps and make reconstructing words that didn’t exist happen a lot less. After all, today we still borrow a lot of Latin words in the sciences and it would be laughable if someone 1000 years from now made up an English word for something we all use Latin for.

  • My favourite is 'habban'. It is derived from the Latin verb habeo, habere, habui, habitum. In long term, probably, it came from Germanic roots

  • For anyone interested in this topic (or Old English lexical studies more generally) I would recommend the following works:

    • A History Of Foreign Words In English (Mary Serjeantson, 1936)
      • Latin Words Before the Conquest, pp. 11–39.
    • Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English (Philip Durkin, 2014)
      • Very Early Borrowings into Germanic, pp. 66–75.
      • Old English and Proto-Old English in Contact with Latin, pp. 97–119.
    • The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume 1: The Beginnings to 1066 (ed. Richard Hogg, 1992)
      • Semantic and Vocabulary (Dieter Kartovsky), pp. 290–408.
    • The New Cambridge History of the English Language: Context, Contact and Development (Laura Wright & Raymond Hickey, 2025)
      • Latin in the Early History of English (Olga Timofeeva), pp. 193–218.

    Additionally, for anyone who can read German, there is an interesting work which suggests that some of these Greek loanwords into Old English were instead transmitted via Gothic rathern than Latin:

    • Die griechischen Lehnwörter im Altenglischen (Anna Feulner, 2001)

    The general consensus is that most Latin lexical borrowings are found in the domain of religious vocabulary or contexts, but that Latin loanwords can be found throughout many OE semantic domains in the form of semantic loans and loan translations (or calques).