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The online etymology dictionary (etymonline) is the internet's go-to source for quick and reliable accounts of the origin and history of English words, phrases, and idioms. It is professional enough to satisfy academic standards, but accessible enough to be used by anyone.
- Word Origin Stories
Etymology is the study of the origin of words and how the...
- Etymology
etymology. (n.). late 14c., ethimolegia "facts of the origin...
- Snakes of Iceland
"The Natural History of Iceland" (London, 1758) is an...
- Form
late 14c., name for the god of dreams in Ovid, son of Sleep,...
- Search and Research
The book is an English Latin phrasebook but the transcript...
- Homing in on Harlequin
Etymology ideas about the famous old time clown, by Talia...
- Superstitious Understanding
Etymology's joke on us is that our very words that mean...
- Nice
late 14c., "deranged, insane;" also "foolish, silly,...
- Mandrake Roots
Much of the bulk of an English historical dictionary is...
- Sources
PRINCIPAL SOURCES. Barnhart, Robert K., ed., Barnhart...
- Word Origin Stories
The meaning of ETYMOLOGY is the history of a linguistic form (such as a word) shown by tracing its development since its earliest recorded occurrence in the language where it is found, by tracing its transmission from one language to another, by analyzing it into its component parts, by identifying its cognates in other languages, or by tracing ...
Find definitions for over 300,000 words from the most authoritative English dictionary. Continuously updated with new words and meanings.
- How New Words Are Formed
- Borrowing
- Shortening Or Clipping
- Functional Shift
- Back-Formation
- Blends
- Acronymic Formations
- Transfer of Personal Or Place Names
- Imitation of Sounds
- Folk Etymology
An etymologist, a specialist in the study of etymology, must know a good deal about the history of English and also about the relationships of sound and meaning and their changes over time that underline the reconstruction of the Indo-European language family. Knowledge is also needed of the various processes by which words are created within Moder...
A majority of the words used in English today are of foreign origin. English still derives much of its vocabulary from Latin and Greek, but we have also borrowed words from nearly all of the languages in Europe. In the modern period of linguistic acquisitiveness, English has found vocabulary opportunities even farther afield. From the period of the...
Clipping (or truncation) is a process whereby an appreciable chunk of an existing word is omitted, leaving what is sometimes called a stump word. When it is the end of a word that is lopped off, the process is called back-clipping: thus examination was docked to create exam and gymnasium was shortened to form gym. Less common in English are fore-cl...
A functional shiftis the process by which an existing word or form comes to be used with another grammatical function (often a different part of speech); an example of a functional shift would be the development of the noun commute from the verb commute.
Back-formation occurs when a real or supposed affix (that is, a prefix or suffix) is removed from a word to create a new one. For example, the original name for a type of fruit was cherise, but some thought that word sounded plural, so they began to use what they believed to be a singular form, cherry, and a new word was born. The creation of the t...
A blend is a word made by combining other words or parts of words in such a way that they overlap (as motel from motor plus hotel) or one is infixed into the other (as chortle from snort plus chuckle — the -ort- of the first being surrounded by the ch-...-le of the second). The term blend is also sometimes used to describe words like brunch, from b...
An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of a phrase. Some acronymic terms still clearly show their alphabetic origins (consider FBI), but others are pronounced like words instead of as a succession of letter names: thus NASA and NATO are pronounced as two syllable words. If the form is written lowercase, there is no longer any formal c...
Over time, names of people, places, or things may become generalized vocabulary words. Thus did forsythia develop from the name of botanist William Forsyth, silhouette from the name of Étienne de Silhouette, a parsimonious French controller general of finances, and denim from serge de Nîmes(a fabric made in Nîmes, France).
Words can also be created by onomatopoeia, the naming of things by a more or less exact reproduction of the sound associated with it. Words such as buzz, hiss, guffaw, whiz, and pop) are of imitative origin.
Folk etymology, also known as popular etymology, is the process whereby a word is altered so as to resemble at least partially a more familiar word or words. Sometimes the process seems intended to "make sense of" a borrowed foreign word using native resources: for example, the Late Latin febrigugia (a plant with medicinal properties, etymologicall...
Sep 4, 2018 · webster (n.)"a weaver," Old English webbestre "a female weaver," from web (q.v.) + fem. suffix -ster. Noah Webster's dictionary, typically American and execrable for etymology, was first published 1828.
The Online Etymology Dictionary or Etymonline, sometimes abbreviated as OED (not to be confused with the Oxford English Dictionary, which the site often cites), is a free online dictionary that describes the origins of English words, written and compiled by Douglas R. Harper.
Description: Free online dictionary that describes the origins of English-language words.
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