Words of Chinese origin have entered European languages, including English. Most of these were direct loanwords from various varieties of Chinese. However, Chinese words have also entered indirectly via other languages, particularly Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese, that have all used Chinese characters at some point and contain a large number of Chinese loanwords.

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English words of Chinese origin usually have different characteristics, depending on precisely how the words encountered the West. Despite the increasingly widespread use of Standard Chinese—based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin—among Chinese people, English words based on Mandarin are comparatively few. Chinese vocabulary has spread to the West by means such as: Though all these following terms originated from China, the spelling of the English words depends on the direct point of contact and borrowing, as well as which transliteration scheme is typically used.

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