The Romance languages are those whose grammatical structure, as well as part at least of their vocabulary, is directly descended from Latin— as Italian, French, Spanish. Under Romance words we include all that English has borrowed from Latin either directly or through the Romance languages. And words borrowed from Greek in general use, ranging from alms to metempsychosis, may for the purposes of this chapter be considered as Romance. The vast number of purely scientific Greek words, as oxygen, meningitis, are on a different footing, since they are usually the only words for what they denote.