The Tamil language of Dravidian family has absorbed many loanwords from Indo-Aryan family, predominantly from Prakrit, Pali and Sanskrit,[1] ever since the early 1st millennium CE, when the Sangam period Chola kingdoms became influenced by spread of Jainism, Buddhism and early Hinduism.
Many of these loans are obscured by adaptions to Tamil phonology.
[2] There are many words that are cognates in Sanskrit and Tamil, in both tatsama and tadbhava forms.
This is an illustrative list of Tamil words of Indo-Aryan origin, classified based on type of borrowing.
[3][4] In the examples below, the second word is from Tamil, and its original Indo-Aryan source is placed to the left.