Etymology dictionary
Where does a word come from? Trace any English word back through the languages it passed through, and see how its meaning drifted on the way.
Words with surprising histories: salary, nice, clue, disaster, muscle, quarantine, sabotage, companion
The three layers of English
Why can you ask, question or interrogate someone? Each word arrived in a different wave. Old English gave us the short, everyday core. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, French became the language of the court and law. From the Renaissance on, scholars borrowed straight from Latin and Greek. Switch between the layers and watch the tone of the same idea change.
Germanic core: short, concrete, everyday, emotional.
Seeing a system laid out and switching between its parts is often what makes it click. You can try that firsthand on ahaboo, a standalone site whose guided explainers let you zoom into a leaf or map out marginal versus effective rates.
Eight word histories worth knowing
How etymologists know
Word histories are reconstructed from dated written evidence. Lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary collect quotations showing the earliest known use of each word and sense; a new earlier citation can move a word’s “first known use” by centuries. Beyond the written record, historical linguists compare related languages. Because English father, Latin pater and Sanskrit pitár line up through regular sound changes (Grimm’s law turned p into f in Germanic), they can reconstruct a shared Proto-Indo-European ancestor, written with an asterisk as *ph₂tḗr because no one ever wrote it down.
That is also why good sources hedge. “Origin unknown” is an honest answer, and it is far more common than internet stories suggest.
Questions people ask
What is etymology?
Etymology is the study of where words come from and how their forms and meanings have changed. The word itself comes from Greek etymon, “true sense”, and -logia, “study of”.
How reliable are word origins online?
Mainstream dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster and the Online Etymology Dictionary rely on dated written evidence. Popular stories that explain a word as an acronym (for example “posh” as “port out, starboard home”) are almost always folk etymology. Our AI tracer is told to flag disputed or unknown origins; check a dictionary before quoting anything.
Why does English have so many words for the same thing?
English layered three vocabularies on top of each other: Old English (Germanic), Norman French after 1066, and Latin and Greek borrowed by scholars from the Renaissance on. The layers explainer above shows how that gives us ask, question and interrogate.
What is a folk etymology?
A made-up but plausible-sounding explanation of a word’s origin that spreads because it is a good story. Sometimes it even changes the word: “sparrowgrass” for asparagus, or “female” being reshaped to look like “male” even though they are unrelated.
What percentage of English words come from Latin?
Estimates based on dictionary counts (for example, Finkenstaedt and Wolff’s 1973 study of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary) put Latin at about 29% and French at about 29%, with Germanic sources near 26% and Greek near 6%. In everyday speech the Germanic share is much higher, because the most frequent words are Old English.