The French-speaking people, and in particular Quebecois, have a reputation for inventing French words when globally there are English words that are already, or are becoming, popular. But this obviously is not as successful as some would hope going by a recent list of popular English words that are popular in .fr domain name registrations.
Recently the .fr registry, AFNIC, published a blog post on the top 15 words that are used in the 3.2 million .fr registrations. The list is:
As the post notes, they are all short and some of the words – namely "club", "design", "coach", "test" and "stars" - are terms that the French have adopted to the point where they no longer try to use their equivalents in French.
Among other words that have become popular, “blog” has become a global term while the blog post notes that "king" is obviously used in order to promote an activity, while the last three, "land", "home" and "space" refer to spaces that are more or less private.
The list also is reflective of developments in the French language. Sometimes the foreign words have been on a path of evolution for centuries. For example the word “coach” comes from the French word "coche" – a four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage, which came from the German “Kutsche” and Hungarian “kocsi”.
