The words are frequently humorous to speakers of English. Engrish can be found in many places, including signs, menus, and advertisements. Such text is often added to create a cosmopolitan feeling rather than to be read by native English speakers, and so may often be meaningless or grammatically incorrect. In Japan, it is common to add English text to items for decorative and fashion purposes (see Cool). While the term may refer to spoken English, it often describes written English. The term Engrish first appears in the 1940s (suggestive of a mispronunciation of English) but it was not until the 1980s that it began to be used as a byname for defective Asian English. The related Japanese term wasei-eigo ( 和製英語: 'Japanese-made English') refers to pseudo-anglicisms that have entered into everyday Japanese.

Terms such as Japanglish, Japlish, Jinglish, or Janglish are more specific to Japanese Engrish. The word itself relates to Japanese speakers' tendency to struggle to pronounce the English / l/ and / r/ distinctly arising from the fact Japanese has only one liquid phoneme (usually romanized r), but its definition encompasses many more errors. Engrish text on a Japanese t-shirt as a form of decorationĮngrish is a slang term for the inaccurate, nonsensical or ungrammatical use of the English language by native speakers of Japanese, as well as Chinese and other Asian languages.

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