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A 'Wanderwort' (plural 'Wanderwörter', German for "wandering word" ) is a word that was spread among numerous languages and cultures, usually in connection with trade, so that it becomes impossible to establish its original etymology, or even its original language. The separation of wanderwörter from loanwords is not unambiguously possible, and they may be considered a special class of loanwords. Typical examples of wanderwörter are ''sugar'', ''ginger'', ''cumin'' and ''tea'', some of which can be traced back to Bronze Age Mediterranean trade. Note, however, that there have been generally accepted theories regarding the etymologies of many such wanderwörter—albeit either difficult or impossible to prove conclusively due to the long existence of such words—such as an ultimately Chinese origin for ''tea'' based on linguistic analysis, that the word has most diverse counterparts in China and has undergone most phonetic change.
Some ancient loanwords are connected with the spread of writing systems, an example would be Sumerian ''musar'',
Akkadian ''musarum'' 'document, seal', apparently
loaned to Proto-Indo-Iranian ''
★ mudra'' `seal' (Middle Iranian ''muhr'', Sanskrit ''mudrā''). Some even older, late neolithic, wanderwörter have been suggested, e.g. Sumerian ''gu-'', Ancient Chinese ''giu'', PIE ''gwou-'' 'cattle', or Sumerian ''balag'', Akkadian ''pilaku-'', or PIE ''pelek'u-'' 'axe'.