This summer , many of us will be travelling and collecting another chop in our passport. That’s the Singaporean in me talking, but it is intelligible to Hongkongers, too: by “chop” I mean “passport stamp”.

The word is wonderfully evocative of the passage and contact of peoples and cultures in earlier times. From the Hindi chaap, meaning stamp, imprint, seal or brand, or instrument for stamping (used already in 17th-century colonial Indian English), the word entered English in the early 19th-century as chop, referring to a trademark – a consequence of trade of the linguistic kind during the British empire’s expansion into the Indian subcontinent. Merchants and civil servants travelling from British India to other outposts of the empire spread the word.