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Definition
the origin & history of a word; or the study of such for all words- The word's etymology can be traced to ...
- Many English and German words share the same etymology.
- : cry of the water-seller on Arrakis (etymology uncertain).Frank Herbert -- Dune
- ] [Footnote 139: What is the etymology of the word mob?Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Selected Essays
- Etymology: over England; from one land to another; into Ireland.Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables
- The word, which I interpret the flying or floating island, is in the original Laputa, whereof I could never learn the true etymology.Jonathan Swift -- Gulliver's Travels
- The etymology of 'Tannit' proposed by Cross is: feminine of 'tannin,' which would mean 'the one of the serpent.'Neal Stephenson -- Snow Crash
- Etymologically, the word means "no difference."Elie Wiesel -- The Perils of Indifference
- The name stuck, and over time began to take on its own meaning among the kids in Clarkston, one separate from its etymology.Warren St. John -- Outcasts United
- None of them, however, goes into the matter at any length, nor even into the matter of etymology.Henry L. Mencken -- The American Language
- That was the bulk of it, with additional coursework in mythology, etymology, history, and prehistoric cultures.James A. Owen -- Here, There be Dragons
- MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE by Herman Melville ETYMOLOGY.Herman Melville -- Moby Dick
- "Miss Lucy's called the bell o' St. Ogg's, they say; that's a cur'ous word," observed Mr. Pullet, on whom the mysteries of etymology sometimes fell with an oppressive weight.George Eliot -- The Mill on the Floss
- Langdon considered offering an etymological sidebar about the word hermaphrodite and its ties to Hermes and Aphrodite, but something told him it would be lost on this crowd.Dan Brown -- The Da Vinci Code
- If they have sometimes recourse to learned etymologies, vanity will induce them to search at the roots of the dead languages; but erudition does not naturally furnish them with its resources.Alexis de Toqueville -- Democracy In America, Volume 2
- It appeared, in answer to my inquiries, that nobody had the least idea of the etymology of this terrible verb passive to be gormed; but that they all regarded it as constituting a most solemn imprecation.Charles Dickens -- David Copperfield
- The realm of the subconscious, the "occult" realm in the etymological sense of the word, very quickly turns out to be occult in the narrower sense as well and forms one of the sources for phenomena that emerge from it and to which we apply that same makeshift term.Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain
- The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotionjoy, anxiety, happiness, pain.Milan Kundera -- The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers.Charles Dickens -- Hard Times
- I wouldn't try to set my friend right in his etymology; and I thought I had best say nothing about the boy-farms which I had been used to call schools, as I saw pretty clearly that they had disappeared; so I said after a little fumbling, "I was using the word in the sense of a system of education."William Morris -- News from Nowhere