Soya is from a variant of soy, from Dutch soja, from Japanese shōyu ('soy sauce'), ultimately of Chinese origin. The historical chain includes Dutch soja and Japanese shōyu. Older glosses in the chain include "soy sauce", which help explain the semantic range of the modern word. Morphologically, soya is best read as borrowing, yielding an English noun shaped by both form history and later usage. In current English it functions as a noun, with the sense "the soybean plant or its protein-rich seed, used for food and oil". related forms include soy and soybean. The result is an English noun whose etymology preserves the older forms while supporting the word's specialized modern meaning.