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etymology |
Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Medical, Legal, Wikipedia, Hutchinson | 0.03 sec. |
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etymology (ĕtĭmŏl`əjē), branch of linguistics that investigates the history, development, and origin of words. It was this study that chiefly revealed the regular relations of sounds in the Indo-European languages (as described in Grimm's law Grimm's law, principle of relationships in Indo-European languages, first formulated by Jakob Grimm in 1822 and a continuing subject of interest and investigation to 20th-century linguists. ..... Click the link for more information. ) and led to the historical investigation of language in the 19th cent. In the 20th cent. linguists continued to use etymology to learn how meanings change, but they came to consider that the meaning of a form at a given time must be understood without reference to its history if it is to be understood at all. The term etymology has been replaced by the term derivation for the creation of combinations in a language, such as new nouns formed with the ending -ness. See grammar grammar, description of the structure of a language, consisting of the sounds (see phonology ); the meaningful combinations of these sounds into words or parts of words, called morphemes; and the arrangement of the morphemes into phrases and sentences, called syntax. ..... Click the link for more information. ; dictionary dictionary, published list, in alphabetical order, of the words of a language. In monolingual dictionaries the words are explained and defined in the same language; in bilingual dictionaries they are translated into another language. ..... Click the link for more information. . How to thank TFD for its existence? Tell a friend about us, add a link to this page, add the site to iGoogle, or visit webmaster's page for free fun content. |
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Each entry is identified by part of speech, inflections, order of senses, examples of usage and etymologies. Other language sources for bird names are also revealed in concise entries that include the etymologies and meanings of scientific and common names. The faults of this essay--willful etymologies, an ignoring or ignorance of recent scholarship, the construction of large edifices on small or non-existent foundations (the notion that Shakespeare shared crank biological theories that he had probably never read), extreme tendentiousness--all this, plus enormous carelessness, is the norm of other chapters in this collection. |
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