etymology

etymology

1. Etymology is the study of the history and derivation of words, and an etymology is the history of a particular word. Most dictionaries of concise size and larger give detailed accounts of a word's sources, which can be from other English words (e.g. newspaper) or from other languages (e.g. kiosk via French from Persian). Some words borrowed from other languages have been assimilated to English-looking forms; for example Spanish cucaracha has given us cockroach by assimilation with the English words cock and roach (see assimilation).

2. The vast majority of English words (apart from those made from existing English words) are derived from Old English (Anglo-Saxon), from Norse languages, or from a late form of Latin via French words that came into English after the Norman Conquest in 1066. A succinct account of the main sources of English words is given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary (1995), ix-xii, to which the reader is referred for further information. It is disappointing for many people that the origins of some quite familiar and important words remain obscure or unknown. The histories of boy and girl are unknown before Middle English, dog has no identified Germanic cognates, many informal or slang words, such as bamboozle, caboodle, cagey, clobber, gimmick, jiff, and posh, have no verified origins, despite spurious claims made for some of them (such as the supposed ‘port outward starboard home’ origin of posh), and some words that appear to be made up of distinctive elements, for example contraption and theodolite, are also doubtful or unknown in origin.

3. Certain words, possibly including some of those in the last paragraph, are onomatopoeic, i.e. they represent a sound with which their meanings are associated, such as clang, plonk, and thwack; and a few words that are less obviously connected with sounds, such as blizzard and jumble, also belong to this class.

4. The word etymology itself comes from a Greek word etymon meaning ‘true’. However, the etymology of a word represents its original meaning rather than its true meaning in any judgemental sense. Appeals to etymology to defend the use of words against change in meaning (as for example with decimate), though commonly made, are usually futile, since few words in the core vocabulary of English now mean what they used to mean, as the complex history of nice demonstrates.