guanaco

The word 'guanaco' entered the English lexicon as a direct borrowing from Spanish, which had adopted it from Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire, where it was 'wanaku'. This term names the animal indigenous to the Andes mountains of South America. Unlike many scientific terms derived from Latin or Greek roots, 'guanaco' represents a classic example of a loanword, where the name for a New World species was taken wholesale from the language of its native region. Its journey from a Quechua term to a Spanish colonial word to an English zoological noun illustrates the flow of vocabulary following cultural and geographical discovery, preserving the original sound and form without morphological decomposition.

This word is a direct loanword from Spanish, which itself borrowed it from Quechua (wanaku). It functions as a single, unanalyzable lexical unit in English.