Ebook: Online Etymology Dictionary

© November 2001 Douglas HarperЕтимологічний словник з англійської мовиI began this project after I looked one day for a free dictionary of word origins online and found that there was none. You could subscribe to the Oxford English Dictionary for $550 a year. There were free dictionaries with definitions, some lists of slang words and their sources, and some sites that listed a few dozen of the strangest etymologies of English words. But there was no comprehensive public list of the words we use every day - words like the and day - that told what they used to be before we got them.
For some reason no university has seen fit to shackle its graduate students to the cyber-mill, grinding out an online etymology dictionary. So I decided to do it for them. I also did this to increase my understanding of the language, and its ancestors and relatives. As a writer and editor with an amateur's passion for linguistics, I took this as a joy ride more than drudgery. And I know so much more useless trivia than I did when I started (applaud is related to explode; three people can have a dialogue; and if anyone calls you feisty, slug him).
I hope this map of the wheel-ruts of English will be useful or amusing to a lot of people. It's not meant to be pedantic: These are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant 600 or 2,000 years ago. Think of it like looking at pictures of your friends' parents when they were your age. People will continue to use words as they will, finding new or wider meanings for old words and coining new ones to fit new situations. In fact, this list is a testimony to that process.
While working on this I've decided that Shakespeare's strength of language is due in part to his having written at the time when English had just opened itself wide and taken in whole libraries of Latin words. (English vocabulary, by one calculation, increased 275 percent between 1475 and 1700 (from about 45,000 words to about 125,000). Those words still retained their literal sense in the ears of his audiences, but they had begun to acquire colorful metaphoric extensions. Now we only know one or the other of these, but the Bard could play on both.
The same word usually exists in English in many forms - cross, for example, is a noun, a verb (both transitive and intransitive), an adjective, and an adverb - and I haven't broken down the history of each form. Words are generally listed in the form in which they are first attested in English.
I've also included, where possible, the earliest date for which there is a record of each word in English. This should be taken as approximate, especially before about 1700, since it represents the earliest appearance of the word in a written source. A word may have been in use for hundreds of years, of course, before it turns up in a manuscript that has had the good fortune to survive the centuries so that it may be examined by etymologists. The number of entries "first recorded" in 1611 doesn't mean there was a mania for coining words that year; rather, the publication that year of the King James Bible and Randle Cotgrave's "Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues" put a lot of words in print for the first time. Many of these words probably had been in use orally for generations.
Since this dictionary went up, it has benefited from the suggestions of dozens of people I have never met, from around the world. They've corrected my typos and misspellings. They've called attention to aspects of Persian or Old French that were more subtle than I or my book sources knew. And they've pointed out words that deserved more explanation than the cursory treatment I initially gave them. Tremendous thanks and appreciation to all of you, and especially to Sarina Isnin and to Chiron, both of whom helped me with coding issues.