Online Etymology Dictionary

http://www.etymonline.com is a gem on the internet that we are proud to be affiliated with.

If you haven't seen it yet please have a look, Mr Harper has done a fantastic job of collating etymology.

For the sake of those nagivating in from Mr. Harper's site here are a few useful links.

Excellent writing on etymonline.com

Able2know's English forum

Cool

I wonder if we can find any etymology that Mr Harper has not yet included in his lexicon.

Craven- You have no idea as to how this excites me. When I was in college, at age 17, we were required to take a course for a year called, "Latin & Greek in Current Use". Obviously, this course was about the etymology of words. At 17, I thought that the course was a "crock", paid little attention to it, and sqeaked by with a "D" both terms.

To this day, I still talk about it. I think that it was one of the most valuable courses that I had ever taken, and could kick myself for not applying myself at the time. Every once in awhile a word comes up, and I can remember learning the etymology about it in class.

This dictionary is great. This time I will pay attention, and maybe I will finally learn something!

etmyonline- Welcome to A2K!

I once started an etymology dictionary, I quit when I saw etymonline's work. He was far ahead of me. :-)

how it works
Ummm, thanks, all, for the kind welcome. This is a new place to me. I'm still figuring it out.

In the introduction to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it says the project is a bid to fill a need -- the lack of a comprehensive free Internet dictionary of word origins. But there's an unwritten other half of that statement, which is: there's an awful lot of bogus etymology in the world, including online.

I'm really only using the most conservative and "academic" sources: the OED, Barnhart's dictionary (now published as Chambers), Klein in some cases, and a very few others that are listed in the bibliography.

Etymology as a discipline attracts cranks and agendas. And there's a passel of exquisitely creative, but utterly wrong, etymologies making the rounds (two you might have seen positively assert that "****" and "****" are both acronyms).

Other people insist, in the face of all evidence, that every other word in English traces to Welsh/Hebrew/Sanskrit/Cherokee, etc.

So feel free to suggest anything, but if you want something added in to the dictionary, I'm going to be a hardass and ask you to source it and I'm going to reserve the right to politely decline.

I have to be careful about this, because I'm not a professional; simply an amateur with way too much time on his hands.

Someday, if I ever finish this project, I'm going to write a dictionary of etymologies that are beautiful, but wrong.

etymonline,

Varied etymological attributions is something we have already had a taste of. Your site was the first one I went to when the etymology of "hit the hay"came up here but I didn't find a listing.

I think you have it right in your desire to be right rather than big. False etymology is interesting in it's own right. I will start a topic about that in a bit and link to it from here.

Here's the link to my false etymology discussion

Oh, great! Probably at least once a week I enter some word plus "etymology" into Google. I hadn't come across your site before.

Here's one of the "wrong" etymologies that I was commanded to believe:

"I have an interesting story about the etymology of 'knee'. It has the same root as 'know' and originally denoted a "knowledge of God". But why? DaVinci, the first to perform autopsies, found that the sciatic nerve connected the spinal cord (and thus the brain) to the knee and thought that pressure on the knee during prayer must carry priviledged information. As it turns out, functional MRI (fMRI)studies show that pressure on the knee highlights the temporal-parietal lobe of the brain, the site where we indeed store religosity. Thus a mechanical habit such as kneeling reinforces religious thoughts and vice versa."

<spit take>

Interesting, tho.

Yes, it is. But that's the insidious part. It's like that drinking game we used to play where someone came up with an obscure word, and the players tried to write the most convincing -- but false -- definition of it.

At least I think it was a drinking game.

And you'll remember these bad boys long after you've forgotten the fairly pedestrian, but genuine, sources of the words.

The Internet gets scary when it can't tell the difference between a good story and a true one, and I'm afraid that's pretty common.

Maybe it's because I've been in newspapers for 20 years (yes, it's uncomfortable and the ink just won't wash off). There's the unforgivable sin: To willingly blur the line between what you know is true and what you wish was true (witness four-plus pages of the New York Times on Sunday).

Witness, indeed.

And while I hesitate to invite someone who would certainly prove to be a formidable opponent, we have a version of that game going on here on A2K:

Balderdash

Thanks for the link, I use it already since about half a year or so.
(Got a mention in "Humbul Humanities Hub" or a similar site. :wink: )

re. 'knee'

When it really is connected to the germanic languages (which most others say), it derives from Germanic *knewa* (=knee, neutrum) > Oldfrisian *kni, kne*, > Oldenglish *cneo*

The Gothic *knussjan* (= to knee down) is only indirectly connected to 'knee'.

online etymology dictionary
I already had the site added to my favorites. A warm welcome to you. I recently posted info re assassinations explaining it was derived from Persian re: users of hashish. They were fought by Omar Khayyam the poet who was also a military leader.

Checked the site just now for confirmation and found:

assassin - 1531, via Fr. and It., from Ar. hashshashin "hashish-user," after fanatical Ismaili Muslim sect of the time of the Crusades with a reputation for murdering opposing leaders after intoxicating themselves by eating hashish

a wonderful site.

My natural teaching style is to use humorous "not this" examples, as well as the factual "this" examples. I found out when I was student teaching that I was not supposed to do that -- studies have shown that students often remember the "not this" example as the truth.

Online Etymology Dictionary
I found the site listed at the librarian's index to the internet (www.lii.org). It's my source for a lot of information incuding parallel searches which include google plus others searching for a more complete search.

Thanks, bobsmyth - that's exactly from where I got the link!