The Concise Dictionary of English Etymology

by Walter W. Skeat

The pioneering work on the roots & origins of the English language. The remarkable scholarship of Walter W. Skeat (1835-1912) was instrumental in the revival of the great works of early English literature, & he inspired later philologists & lexicographers. Skeat's astonishing detective work into the origins & development of the worlds most widely used language provides an unsurpassed guide to its flexibility & richness. This edition of his larger Etymological Dictionary is not a mere abridgment, but was entirely rewritten by Skeat.

Genres: Reference, Nonfiction, Language, Dictionaries, Linguistics

633 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1882

About the author

Walter William Skeat, English philologist, educated at King's College School (Wimbledon), Highgate School, and Christ's College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow in July 1860. The noted palaeographer T. C. Skeat was his grandson.

In 1878 he was elected Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge. He completed Mitchell Kemble's edition of the Anglo-Saxon Gospels, and did much other work both in Anglo-Saxon and in Gothic, but is perhaps most generally known for his labours in Middle English, and for his standard editions of Chaucer and Langland's Piers Plowman.

As he himself generously declared, he was at first mainly guided in the study of Chaucer by Henry Bradshaw, with whom he was to have participated in the edition of Chaucer planned in 1870 by the University of Oxford, having declined in Bradshaw's favour an offer of the editorship made to himself. Bradshaw's perseverance was not equal to his genius, and the scheme came to nothing for the time, but was eventually resumed and carried into effect by Skeat in an edition of six volumes (1894), a supplementary volume of Chaucerian Pieces being published in 1897. He also issued an edition of Chaucer in one volume for general readers, and a separate edition of his Treatise on the Astrolabe, with a learned commentary.

His edition of Piers Plowman in three parallel texts was published in 1886; and, besides the Treatise on the Astrolabe, he edited numerous books for the Early English Text Society, including the Bruce of John Barbour, Pierce the Ploughman's Crede, the romances of Havelok the Dane and William of Palerne, and Ælfric's Lives of the Saints (4 vols.). For the Scottish Text Society he edited The Kingis Quair, usually ascribed to James I of Scotland, and he published an edition (2 vols., 1871) of Chatterton, with an investigation of the sources of the obsolete words employed by him.

He is buried at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge.

Reviews

[Marisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Always by my bedside, this book is the one that I pick up when I can't decide what to read. Pick a word-any word-look it up and you have a whole history! I love it!

[Richard Schave]

An etymological dictionary of the English language by Walter W. Skeat (1888)

[Wim Borsboom · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is now called PIE he preceded it with his Aryan Sanskrit roots.
In my mind this is still the best etymological dictionary ever

[Hisao Kondo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Too good for me, one of the English learners as a second language. In my case, a middle-sized English- Japanese dictionary is appropriate, 140 million entries and almost every word has its origins.