Gairaigo are Japanese words originating from, or based on, foreign-language, generally Western, terms.
Due to the large number of western concepts imported into Japanese culture during modern times, there are thousands of these English borrowings.
Japanese vocabulary includes large numbers of words from Chinese, borrowed at various points throughout history.
Many such terms, despite their similarity to the original foreign words, are not easily understood by speakers of those languages, e.g. left over as a baseball term for a hit that goes over the left-fielder's head, rather than uneaten food saved for a later meal as in English—or famikon, ファミコン, from "family computer", which actually refers to the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Older loans may be written using ateji, with Kanji used to represent their phonetic readings without necessarily inheriting their meaning.