Semantic loan

In linguistics, semantic loan is a process (or an instance or result) of borrowing semantic meaning (rather than lexical items) from another language. It is very similar to the formation of calques, excepting that in this case the complete word in the borrowing language already exists; the change is that its meaning is extended to include another meaning that is already possessed by its counterpart in the lending language. Semantic loans are often grouped roughly together with calques and loanwords under the phrase borrowing.

Semantic loans often occur when two languages are in close contact, and they take various forms. The source and target word may be cognates, which may or may not share any contemporary meaning in common; they may be an existing loan translation or parallel construction (compound of corresponding words); or they may be unrelated words that share an existing meaning.