Etymologizing — Seeking Word Origins
Finding meaning in word history
If you’re like me, you often wonder about words, not just what they mean, or their synonyms, but where they came from.
The entries in an etymological dictionary often need deciphering because they are densely packed with information, but you can easily learn to unpack them.
By doing so, you will gain an understanding of the countries and cultures that spawn a new word, about what that word meant at its origin, and about how it evolved over time, perhaps centuries, to mean what it does now. Writers will learn useful background information about languages, about the countries where words were born, and often about the authors of first usage.
English is a marvelous, plastic language. It is ever-changing, borrowing from other languages, abbreviating into acronyms, turning nouns into verbs, and tolerating many other creative abuses. English is often abused, especially in current speech, but it is also forgiving because, even when abused, it communicates. (See my Medium article on a more recent verbal abuse.)
I own a two-volume Etymological Dictionary of Modern English written by Ernest Weekley. I refer to it all the time. It is entertaining in a dry, dictionary sort of way. For example, here is the entry for the word Dictionary:
