A bluffer’s guide to etymology
How to guess the age and origin of any English word
Let’s try an experiment. Take four English words: knight, courage, fabricate, hypothesis.
Without looking anything up, can you tell where each one came from, and roughly when it came into English?
Here are my guesses: knight is pure English, never borrowed. Courage is from French, arriving around 1300. Fabricate is from Latin, around 1600. Hypothesis comes from Greek, also around 1600.
Now let’s check the results. The Oxford English Dictionary gives: knight, Old English; courage, c1300; fabricate, 1598; hypothesis, 1596.
Maybe it’s more of a party trick than an experiment. But how is it possible? Is it decades spent reading linguistics papers combined with years of careful study of Old English, French, Latin, and Ancient Greek?
No, it’s a far lazier method than that.
The words themselves carry the evidence of their histories in their sound, shape, and spelling. English has been borrowing words for well over a thousand years, and each wave of borrowing has left recognizable marks.
Reading those marks is a learnable skill, and that’s what this article teaches: a handful of rules for practical etymology. You don’t need to learn Latin, or French, or Ancient Greek. You don’t even need to learn any linguistics. All you need to do is look.
The rules won’t always be right — English has too many individual word histories for that. But for the vast majority of the vocabulary, they’ll get you there. And when they don’t, you’ve most likely stumbled on a weird word, perhaps even one whose origins remain a mystery.
You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 45,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of linguistic history.
This is the first instalment of A Deep History of English, a series that traces the story of the English language through the mysteries that remain in Modern English.
I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and the content I’m most proud of: practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, honest takes on how language really works, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and (up next!) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
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Impress your friends with this fact: roughly 80% of the words in a comprehensive English dictionary are borrowed from other languages.1 French, Latin, and Greek account for the vast majority of these loanwords. By raw headcount, English doesn’t even look like a particularly Germanic language.
But frequency tells a different story. Among the hundred most common words in English — words like the, is, and, to, have, it, and for — you’ll find very few borrowings. The non-Germanic words in the top hundred can be counted on one hand: people and very (from French), just and use (ambiguously from French or Latin).2
Add to that a smattering of Norse words — they, their, get, take, and give — which are borrowed but still Germanic, and you see how little borrowing has changed the inner core of the language.
The grammatical glue that holds everything together is stubbornly, almost entirely, Old English.
Rule 1. Function words are Germanic
Function words are the parts of a language’s vocabulary which have little meaning on their own. Instead, they express grammatical concepts or relationships. The parts of speech you learned in school (or, in many cases, from Schoolhouse Rock)3 can help you here. The function words consist of:
articles (a, the)
auxiliary verbs (be, have; will, shall, can, must, might)
conjunctions (and, but, or; if, when, because, though)
particles (not; up, down, out, as used in phrases like make up, live down, take out)
prepositions (to, from, with, in, on)
pronouns (I, he, they, who, which, herself)
certain adjectives and adverbs having to do with quantity or questions (any, all, some; how, which, when)
Because function words are necessary to show grammatical relationships, they make up about half of the words in any given stretch of spoken or written English. I‘ve placed all the function words in this paragraph in boldface so that you can see just how common they are.4
The “function words are Germanic” rule works because of the durability of a language’s structural bones. Languages borrow words — English more than most — but they very rarely borrow function words.
Very rarely doesn’t mean never: the close contact between speakers of Old English and Old Norse in parts of England during the Middle Ages left its mark even on the function words: they (pronoun), until (preposition/conjunction), though (conjunction) all have Old Norse origins.
Part of the reason Old Norse words could jump so easily into Old English is that the two languages were still at that date very close. In fact, they were probably mutually intelligible in some situations.
This same similarity makes it very hard for any set of rules to distinguish between the two, which is why this rule says: “function words are Germanic,” not “function words are Old English.”
The vast majority of “Germanic” words in English are Old English in origin, but some will be from Old Norse, and it’s very hard to tell Old Norse from Old English without knowing the two languages. There is one trick, however, which we’ll get to later.
For now, we’ll satisfy ourselves with assigning the label “Germanic” to every function word we come across.5
That’s one rule down. There are four more, and they’re the ones that let you pull off the dating trick.
