The Germanic tribes who later gave rise to the English language traded and fought with the Latin speaking Roman Empire.
Many words for common objects entered the vocabulary of these Germanic people from Latin even before the tribes reached Britain: anchor, butter, camp, cheese, chest, cook, copper, devil, dish, fork, gem, inch, kitchen, mile, mill, mint (coin), noon, pillow, pound (unit of weight), punt (boat), sack, street, wall, wine.
During this time, Catholic monks mainly wrote or copied text in Latin, the prevalent medieval lingua franca in Europe.
When monks occasionally wrote in the vernacular, Latin words were translated by finding suitable Old English equivalents.
The same occurred for the Old Germanic pagan word blētsian, which meant "to sacrifice, consecrate by shedding blood".
Similarly fullwiht (literally, "full-being") and the verb fullian came to mean "baptism" and "to baptise" respectively, but probably originally referred to some kind of rite of passage.
Some examples include aberration, allusion, anachronism, democratic, dexterity, enthusiasm, imaginary, juvenile, pernicious, sophisticated.
Some of the words which entered English at this time are: apparatus, aqueous, carnivorous, component, corpuscle, data, experiment, formula, incubate, machinery, mechanics, molecule, nucleus, organic, ratio, structure, vertebra.
In addition to a large number of historical borrowings and coinages, today Latinate words continue to be coined in English – see classical compounds – particularly in technical contexts.
David Corson in The Lexical Bar (1985) defended the thesis that the large portion of Greco-Latinate words in Academic English explains the difficulties of working class children in the educational system.