Calque
Etymology
From French calque, "a copy, a tracing," from calquer ("to trace, to copy"), which came through Italian calcare from Latin calcare, "to tread, press down." The image is of pressing a design through to make an exact copy. That is precisely what a calque does to a phrase: "skyscraper" was traced into French as gratte-ciel, "scrape-sky."
noun · /KALK/
A word or phrase borrowed from another language by translating its parts literally rather than importing the sound.
What it names
The quieter way languages borrow — not lifting a foreign word whole, but tracing its structure piece by piece into native words.
Example
English "flea market" is a calque of the French marché aux puces, translated stall by stall.
Related idea
A loanword imports the foreign word’s sound intact ("café"); a calque imports only its structure, rebuilt from native parts. Fittingly, "loanword" is itself a calque of German Lehnwort.