Metaglossia: The Translation World

This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.

The dates beside a word indicate the earliest year for which there is a surviving written record of that word (in English, unless otherwise indicated). This should be taken as approximate, especially before about 1700, since a word may have been used in conversation for hundreds of years before it turns up in a manuscript that has had the good fortune to survive the centuries.

The basic sources of this work are Weekley's "An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English," Klein's "A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language," "Oxford English Dictionary" (second edition), "Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology," Holthausen's "Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Englischen Sprache," and Kipfer and Chapman's "Dictionary of American Slang." A full list of print sources used in this compilation can be found here.

Since this dictionary went up, it has benefited from the suggestions of dozens of people I have never met, from around the world. Tremendous thanks and appreciation to all of you.

MyEtymology.com is an etymology dictionary for all languages. Its purpose is to tell you the etymology of every word of every language, going as far as it is currently known by science and showing it in a simple and clean graphical interface.
But it also tries to be more than a simple etymological dictionary: it wants to show you for each word the relationships with the other words in its language and beyond: it will show the words which were derived from it in any language and even cognates in other languages.
While mydictionary strives to encompass all languages, it started by having more words in some European languages, including English, Latin, French, French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, German, Romanian and other.