Learn etymology · Glossary

Glossary of etymology

Etymologists use a handful of technical terms, some of which, like cognate, look simple and turn out to be precise. This glossary explains the ones you are most likely to meet in entries on this site and in other dictionaries, with an example for each. Where a guide explains an idea at length, the entry links to it.

A

Ablaut: A regular alternation of vowels inside a root, inherited from Proto-Indo-European, that marks a difference in grammar. It is why English has sing, sang, sung and song, or ride and rode.
Acronym: A word made from the initial letters of a phrase, such as radar or scuba. Acronyms are almost entirely a 20th-century habit, so a story that explains an older word as an acronym (posh, golf) is nearly always a myth. See Folk etymology and origin myths.
Amelioration: A change of meaning for the better. Nice once meant “foolish”; knight (Old English cniht) once meant “boy, servant”. The opposite is pejoration. See Words change their meaning.
Analogy: The reshaping of a word to fit a pattern that is common elsewhere in the language. Analogy is one of the main sources of exceptions to sound laws: cows replaced the older plural kine, and helped replaced holp, because most nouns and verbs work that way. See Explaining the exceptions.
Assimilation: A sound becoming more like a neighbouring one. Latin in- “not” became im- before p and b, as in impossible, because m, like p, is made with the lips. The opposite is dissimilation.
Asterisk(*): Placed before a word, it marks a form that is not recorded in any text but has been reconstructed, such as Proto-Germanic *fadēr, the ancestor of father. See How to read an etymology.
Attested: Found in written records. A word’s first attestation is the earliest known text that uses it; the word is usually older than that, but not by much, and a proposed origin that is later than the first attestation cannot be right. See The evidence.

B

Back-formation: A new word made by removing what looks like a suffix from an existing one. Edit was formed from editor, burgle from burglar, and pea from pease, which was singular but sounded like a plural.
Blend(portmanteau): A word made by fusing parts of two others: smog from smoke and fog, brunch from breakfast and lunch.
Borrowing(loanword): A word taken from another language, such as sky from Old Norse, beef from French, or shampoo from Hindi. Because borrowings arrive after a sound change has run its course, they don’t show its effects: paternal, borrowed from Latin, keeps the p that native father lost. See Relatives: cognates and borrowings.
Broadening(generalization): A change in which a word comes to cover more than it did. Middle English dogge seems to have named a particular sort of dog before it replaced hound as the general word; bird once meant a young bird. The opposite is narrowing. See Words change their meaning.

C

Calque(loan translation): A word or phrase copied from another language part by part, using native words. Skyscraper became French gratte-ciel and German Wolkenkratzer; English superman translates German Übermensch.
Clipping: A word made by cutting off part of a longer one: bus from omnibus, flu from influenza, pram from perambulator.
Cognate: Words in different languages that descend from the same ancestral word, without one borrowing it from another. English night, German Nacht, Latin nox and Sanskrit nákt- are cognates. Cognates need not look alike or mean the same thing: guest and Latin hostis “enemy” are cognates. See Relatives: cognates and borrowings.
Comparative method: The procedure for showing that languages are related and working out their common ancestor: collect likely cognates, establish the regular correspondences between their sounds, and infer the ancestral sound behind each one. See How proto-languages are reconstructed.
Compound: A word made of two or more existing words, such as bookcase or blackbird. Old compounds can wear down until the parts are hard to see: daisy is Old English dæges ēage, “day’s eye”.
Correspondence(sound correspondence): A regular match between sounds in related languages, repeated across many words: Latin p answers to English f in pater/father, pēs/foot and piscis/fish. Correspondences, not resemblances, are the evidence that words are related. See Correspondences, not resemblances.

D

Daughter language: A language descended from an older one, which is its parent. French, Spanish and Italian are daughters of Latin, and so sisters of each other.
Derivation: Making a new word by adding a prefix or suffix to an existing one: kind → kindness, do → undo.
Diachronic: Concerned with how a language changes over time, as etymology is. Its opposite, synchronic, describes a language as it is at a single moment.
Dissimilation: A sound becoming less like a nearby similar sound. Latin peregrīnus “foreigner” had two r’s; in the form that became English pilgrim, the first turned into l. The opposite is assimilation.
Doublet: Two words in one language that come from the same source by different routes. Fragile was borrowed straight from Latin fragilis; frail is the same word after centuries in French. Shirt (native) and skirt (from Old Norse) are another pair.

E

Epenthesis: The insertion of a sound that wasn’t there before, often to ease pronunciation. Old English þunor grew a d to become thunder; compare German Donner, which didn’t.
Eponym: A word that comes from a person’s name. Sandwich, cardigan and boycott are all named after real people: an earl, another earl, and an Irish land agent.
Etymological fallacy: The mistaken belief that a word’s original meaning is its true or proper one. Decimate once meant “kill one in ten”, but that does not make the modern meaning wrong. See A word’s origin is not its “true” meaning.
Etymon: The word that a later word comes from. Latin fragilis is the etymon of English fragile; Proto-Germanic *fadēr is the etymon of father.

F

False cognate: Words that look related and mean similar things, but are not. English have and Latin habēre are a classic case (the real cognate of have is Latin capere), as are English much and Spanish mucho. See Correspondences, not resemblances.
False friend: A word in another language that looks like a familiar one but means something different, whether or not the two are related. Spanish embarazada means “pregnant”, not “embarrassed”.
Folk etymology: The reshaping of an unfamiliar word to make it look like words people know. Old English brȳdguma “bride-man” became bridegroom once guma “man” died out. The term is also used for popular but false stories about where a word came from. See Folk etymology and origin myths.

G

Gloss: A short translation of a word’s meaning, conventionally put in quotation marks: Latin hostis “stranger, enemy”.
Grimm’s law: The set of regular sound changes that separated the Germanic languages from the rest of Indo-European, turning p t k into f th h, among others. It is why English has father, three and hundred where Latin has pater, trēs and centum. See A pattern in the vocabulary.

I

Inherited word(native word): A word handed down from one generation to the next since before the language had a separate identity, rather than borrowed. Father, night and water are inherited English words. See Where new words come from.

L

Language family: All the languages descended from a single proto-language. English belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family; Finnish and Hungarian belong to the Uralic family.
Laryngeals: Three consonants of Proto-Indo-European, written h₁, h₂ and h₃, that were lost in almost every daughter language. Ferdinand de Saussure inferred them in 1879 from patterns in the vowels; the discovery of Hittite, which kept some of them, later bore him out. See How do we know it works?.

M

Metathesis: Two sounds swapping places. Old English brid became bird; the dialect form aks for ask goes back to an Old English variant, acsian.
Morpheme: The smallest part of a word that carries meaning. Unbreakable has three: un-, break and -able.

N

Narrowing(specialization): A change in which a word comes to cover less than it did. Meat once meant any food (as in sweetmeat), and deer any animal, as its German cousin Tier still does. The opposite is broadening. See Words change their meaning.
Neologism: A newly coined word or a new sense of an old one. Every word was once a neologism; etymology tries to find out when, and how, it was made.

O

Old English: The earliest written stage of English, from roughly 450 to 1150, also called Anglo-Saxon. It was followed by Middle English (about 1150 to 1500), the language of Chaucer, and Early Modern English, the language of Shakespeare.
Origin unknown: An honest verdict, used when no proposed etymology survives the evidence. Some very common words, dog and boy among them, have no agreed origin. See How to read an etymology.

P

Pejoration: A change of meaning for the worse. Silly once meant “blessed, happy”; villain once meant a farm worker; knave once meant simply “boy”. The opposite is amelioration. See Words change their meaning.
Philology: The study of languages through their written texts: editing, dating and interpreting old documents. Etymology depends on it for its evidence.
Proto-Germanic: The reconstructed common ancestor of the Germanic languages, including English, German, Dutch, the Scandinavian languages and Gothic. It was spoken in northern Europe in the last centuries BC and was never written down.
Proto-Indo-European(PIE): The reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European family, which includes most languages of Europe and many of Iran and South Asia. Most linguists place it in the fourth millennium BC or a little earlier; it was never written down. See The same method, without the answer key.
Proto-language: The common ancestor of a family of languages, worked out by comparing its descendants. For the Romance languages the ancestor, Latin, is also known from writing, which is how we know the method works. See What is a proto-language?.

R

Rebracketing(false splitting): A shift in where people hear the boundary between words. A nadder became an adder, and a napron became an apron; going the other way, an ekename (“an extra name”) became a nickname.
Reconstruction: A form of a language that nobody wrote down, worked out with the comparative method and marked with an asterisk. A reconstruction is a model of what the regular correspondences require, not a recording. See What reconstruction can’t do.
Reflex: The form that an older sound or word takes in a later language. English f is the reflex of Proto-Indo-European *p; father is the English reflex of *ph₂tḗr.
Root: The core of a word that carries its basic meaning, to which endings and other elements attach. Proto-Indo-European *ped- “foot” is the root behind English foot, Latin pēs (whence pedal) and Greek poús (whence podium).

S

Semantic change(semantic shift): Any change in what a word means: broadening, narrowing, amelioration, pejoration, or a sideways move by metaphor. Unlike sound change, it follows no laws, so every step needs evidence. See Words change their meaning.
Sound law(sound change): A change in pronunciation that affected every word containing a given sound, in a given position, in a given language at a given time. Their regularity is what makes etymology testable. See Sound laws: why sound change is regular.
Stem: The part of a word to which grammatical endings are added. Latin nox “night” has the stem noct-, seen in noctis “of the night” and in English nocturnal.
Substrate: A language that was spoken in a region before another replaced it, and that left traces in its successor. English took few words from the Celtic languages spoken before it, but many river names, such as Avon (Welsh afon “river”), come from them.

V

Verner’s law: A refinement of Grimm’s law, found by Karl Verner in 1875, showing that its apparent exceptions depended on where the stress fell in the ancestral word. It turned the last big set of exceptions into a rule. See Explaining the exceptions.

W

Wanderwort: German for “wandering word”: a word that has spread from language to language by borrowing, often along trade routes, so that its ultimate source is hard to pin down. Sugar travelled from Sanskrit śarkarā through Persian, Arabic, Latin and French.