The main goal of this communication is to present concisely the spread of specialized non-European loanwords, chiefly commercial –monetary, of measurement and textile-related- and scientific words –mathematical and chemical- in the English language of the 16th century. Consequently, some examples of Arabic, Hebrew, Indian, Malayan, Turkish and Russian loanwords are exposed and their source and first entry in English are shown. The main reasons of their introduction are, apart from the influence of Arabic science, English contact with these non-European languages due to the development of navigation and British oceanic trade expansion, which led to an imperialistic period of great settlements. The selected commercial and scientific terms come from several sources studied over a long period of diachronic and synchronic analyses of specialized English lexicon such as Weekley, An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, New York: Dover, 1967; The OED, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1978; Onions, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: OUP, 1982; Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Oxford: OUP, 1985; The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. CD-ROM, Oxford: OUP, 1993, and Pérez Iglesias, Análisis del inglés informático and El inglés científico-técnico: evolución histórica, Salamanca: Hespérides, 1998.