About Etymologically

Etymologically is an etymology dictionary: it explains where words come from, what they first meant, and how they reached the form and meaning they have today. It starts with English and will grow to cover other languages.

What an entry contains

• Etymology: the chain of forms a word passed through, language by language, back to its earliest traceable root.
• Earliest recorded meaning and semantic evolution: what the word meant when it first appeared and how that changed.
• Timeline: dated first attestations of the word and of its main senses.
• Word family and related words: words built from it, and words that share its root.
• Etymology tree: the ancestors and descendants of the word across languages, linked to their own entries.

Sources

Statements in entries are footnoted to published dictionaries and scholarly works. The full list, with every entry that cites each work, is on the sources page. Where sources disagree, or a popular story about a word's origin is not supported by the evidence, the entry says so.

Corrections and history

Every change to an entry is kept: each page has a public history showing what changed, when, and why, and any earlier version can be restored. See recent changes for the latest edits across the dictionary.