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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.
- Homing in on Harlequin
In conclusion, the name "Harlequin" is deeply rooted in the...
- Online Etymology Dictionary
Etymology is the study of the origin of words and how the...
- Sources
A Word or Two. Etymology Entomology. June 17, 2024 at 4:05...
- Snakes of Iceland
"The Natural History of Iceland" (London, 1758) is an...
- Reconciliation
reconciliation. (n.). mid-14c., reconciliacioun, "renewal of...
- Woman
woman. (n.) "adult female human," late Old English wimman,...
- Norsk (Norwegian)
Den online etymologi ordboken (etymonline) er internettets...
- Online-Herkunftswörterbuch
Online-Herkunftswörterbuch. Dies ist eine Karte der...
- Homing in on Harlequin
6 days ago · The book draws on Oxford's unrivalled dictionary research programme and language monitoring, and relates the fascinating stories behind many of our most curious terms and expressions in order to offer the reader a much more explicit account than can be found in a general English dictionary. Organized A-Z, the entries include first known use ...
A brief history of singular ‘they’. Singular they has become the pronoun of choice to replace he and she in cases where the gender of the antecedent – the word the pronoun refers to – is unknown, irrelevant, or nonbinary, or where gender needs to be concealed. It’s the word we use for sentences like Everyone loves his mother.
- 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...
Words of Unknown Origin. When the source of a word appearing as a main entry is unknown, the expression "origin unknown" is usually used. Only in exceptional circumstances (as with some ethnic names) does the absence of an etymology mean that it has not been possible to furnish an informative etymology.
3 days ago · Drawing on Oxford's unrivalled dictionary research programme and language monitoring it brings to light the intriguing and often unusual stories of some of our most used words and phrases.The A-Z entries include the first known use of the term along with examples, related lexes, and expressions which uncover the etymological composition of each word.
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2 days ago · Edited by: T. F. Hoad. Based on The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, the principal authority on the origin and development of English words, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Etymology contains a wealth of information about the English language and its history. Find out where the words 'bungalow' and 'assassin' came from, what 'nice ...
