To the History of a Word Introduced by Hristo Botev

The aim of the article is to present the history of a French loanword, introduced in Bulgarian language by the poet-publicist Hristo Botev. The research is within the realm of diachronic empruntology, viewed as a science for tracking interlanguage lexical transfers in their chronological order. The object of research is the lexeme "francophile", in the process of work the method of empruntological diachronic analysis being applied, which includes establishing the first text fixation of the french loan in standard Bulgarian language. The fate of the word in French and in Bulgarian languages is presented. Parallelly with this different derivative forms, which are compared to their Bulgarian counterparts. The results obtained allow for reconstruction of Bulgarian language fate of the French lexical creation "francophile" in a formal and semantic perspective, allowing for comparison of connotative uses of the French loan word francophile.