This chapter looks at some historical product-names, positing that regardless of origin, they were words like any other and subject to the same kinds of phonological, morphological and semantic changes that affected the rest of the lexicon. I focus on four linguistic processes which show merchants’ innovations: the development of bound morphemes, conversion from one part of speech to another, semantic extension, and sociolinguistic innovation. My data comes from commodity-names retrieved from the British Newspapers 1600–1950 database, and two main areas of multilingual borrowing emerge: the names of commodities brought to Britain from abroad via trade, and names arriving in Britain as the result of defense policy when the Empire was threatened. A multilingual trading perspective reverses the traditional relegation of commodity-names to the sidelines of linguistic history, foregrounding instead everyday domestic conversations. This everyday lexicon directly reflected Britain’s global political and economic partnerships with speakers of other languages