An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction

by Anatoly Liberman

This work introduces renowned linguistics scholar Anatoly Liberman’s comprehensive dictionary and bibliography of the etymology of English words. The English etymological dictionaries published in the past claim to have solved the mysteries of word origins even when those origins have been widely disputed. An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology by contrast, discusses all of the existing derivations of English words and proposes the best one.

In the inaugural volume, Liberman addresses fifty-five words traditionally dismissed as being of unknown etymology. Some of the entries are among the most commonly used words in English, including man, boy, girl, bird, brain, understand, key, ever, and yet. Others are mooch, nudge, pimp, filch, gawk, and skedaddle. Many, such as beacon, oat, hemlock, ivy, and toad, have existed for centuries, whereas some have appeared more recently, for example, slang, kitty-corner, and Jeep. They are all united by their etymological obscurity.

This unique resource book discusses the main problems in the methodology of etymological research and contains indexes of subjects, names, and all of the root words. Each entry is a full-fledged article, shedding light for the first time on the source of some of the most widely disputed word origins in the English language.

“Anatoly Liberman is one of the leading scholars in the field of English etymology. Undoubtedly his work will be an indispensable tool for the ongoing revision of the etymological component of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary.” —Bernhard Diensberg, OED consultant, French etymologies

Anatoly Liberman is professor of Germanic philology at the University of Minnesota. He has published many works, including 16 books, most recently Word Origins . . . and How We Know Etymology for Everyone.

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction, Reference

368 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Anatoly Liberman is a philologist and professor at the University of Minnesota.

Reviews

[Mark Desrosiers]

Here we get very (very) lengthy etymologies for words which heretofore had unknown origins, such as "fuck" (10 pages), "skedaddle" (4 pages), "hobbledehoy" (4 pages), "traipse" (2 pages), and "slowworm" (5 pages) (hey! I thought that was just the name of that venomous Archers of Loaf song!).

Informative for sure, but on the whole it seems to ropewalk the abyss of droll and dry. And yet... just now I stumbled on this, under the word "pimp":

"Unlike pimp, Pimpf poses no problem for an etymologist. It was originally a contemptuous designation for a youngster too weak to produce a big Pumpf, that is, a big fart."

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

So cool to find the origin of a word, although some of them are highly contested and still unknown.

[Hans-werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Lemmata in this dictionary are presented as examples for a detailed analytic dictionary of English etymology. This works very well for the examples, as they are about words with disputed or unclear etymologies. But a printed dictionary based on this format, containing all lemmata included in the existing etymological dictionaries of English, would go into tens of thousands of pages, so I'd be surprised if any publisher would embark on such an endeavor. Maybe something like this could be realized as an Internet resource.
It is also interesting to see the history of proposed etymologies. But I doubt it is necessary to include contemporary proposals by crackpots like Makovskij – if stuff like that is included, where to stop?
Even if the dictionary project never comes to pass, the book is valuable as a collection of etymologies on which there is no current consensus or for which Liberman challenges the consensus.