List of Romanian words of possible pre-Roman origin

Including place-names and river-names, and most of the forms labelled as being of unknown etymology, the number of the substratum elements in Eastern Romance may surpass 500 basic roots.

Linguistic research in recent years has increased the body of Eastern Romance words that may be considered indigenous.

The current Dicționar explicativ (DEX) published by the Romanian Academy continues to list many words as borrowings, though the work of other linguists (Sorin Olteanu, Sorin Paliga, Ivan Duridanov, et al.) may indicate that a number of these are in fact indigenous, from local Indo-European languages.

The list does not include the Dacian plant names collected by Dioscorides and Pseudo-Apuleius, since these words were not retained in Romanian.

An example is vatră (home or hearth) which is found in Albanian, Serbo-Croatian, Carpathian highlander dialects of Polish and Ukrainian and other neighboring languages, though with modified meaning.