page_title: Etymology
hierarchical_section_title: Etymology
caption_attribution_description: Graphical representation of the relationships between etymologically-related words. Note that 'etymon' is used in linguistic jargon, while 'root' is the more common colloquial term.
context_page_description: Etymology is the study of the history of words. By extension, the phrase "the etymology of [a word]" means the origin of a particular word. For place names, there is a specific term, toponymy.
  For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts, and texts about the language, to gather knowledge about how words were used during earlier periods, how they developed in meaning and form, or when and how they entered the language. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about forms that are too old for any direct information to be available.
  By analyzing related languages with a technique known as the comparative method, linguists can make inferences about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. In this way, word roots in European languages, for example, can be traced all the way back to the origin of the Indo-European language family.
  Even though etymological research originally grew from the philological tradition, much current etymological research is done on language families where little or no early documentation is available, such as Uralic and Austronesian.
context_section_description: Etymology (/ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/) is the study of the history of words. By extension, the phrase "the etymology of [a word]" means the origin of a particular word. For place names, there is a specific term, toponymy.
  For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts, and texts about the language, to gather knowledge about how words were used during earlier periods, how they developed in meaning and form, or when and how they entered the language. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about forms that are too old for any direct information to be available.
  By analyzing related languages with a technique known as the comparative method, linguists can make inferences about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. In this way, word roots in European languages, for example, can be traced all the way back to the origin of the Indo-European language family.
  Even though etymological research originally grew from the philological tradition, much current etymological research is done on language families where little or no early documentation is available, such as Uralic and Austronesian.
  The word etymology derives from the Greek word ἐτυμολογία (etumología), itself from ἔτυμον (étumon), meaning "true sense or sense of a truth", and the suffix -logia, denoting "the study of". 
  The term etymon refers to a word or morpheme (e.g., stem or root) from which a later word or morpheme derives. For example, the Latin word candidus, which means "white", is the etymon of English candid. Relationships are often less transparent, however. English place names such as Winchester, Gloucester, Tadcaster share in different modern forms a suffixed etymon that was once meaningful, Latin castrum 'fort'.
caption: Diagram showing relationships between etymologically related words
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