Reach for a bottle of shampoo tomorrow morning, and you are, without realising it, saying a Hindi word. 

Nearly two centuries before it became a fixture on bathroom shelves worldwide, champo simply meant kneading and pressing the scalp with oil. 

On 14 September, India marks Hindi Diwas, the day in 1949 when the Constituent Assembly adopted Hindi in the Devanagari script as an official language. 

It is a fitting moment to notice something rarely taught in classrooms: hundreds of everyday English words, spoken from London to Los Angeles, were quietly borrowed from Hindi. Here are ten worth knowing.

Words that walked in through trade and travel

1. Shampoo, meaning to wash the hair, comes from champi, meaning head massage. Sake Dean Mahomed, born in Patna in 1759, later opened Hindoostane Coffee House in London, Britain's first Indian restaurant. In 1814, in Brighton, he opened a bathhouse offering the massage, and the word travelled with the service, later shifting to the liquid product.

2. Bungalow, meaning a single-storeyed house, comes from bangla, meaning in the Bengal style. British colonial officials adopted both the word and the architecture wholesale, and........

© The Better India