Source for etymological study

Question

It has always been interesting for me to know how words are made and where they are coming from. Is there any reliable source for etymological studies? any books, or dictionaries out there?

Answer 1

Online Etymology Dictionary

The basic sources of this work are Weekley's "An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English," Klein's "A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language," "Oxford English Dictionary" (second edition), "Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology," Holthausen's "Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Englischen Sprache," and Kipfer and Chapman's "Dictionary of American Slang."

Answer 2

Wiktionary

Designed as the lexical companion to Wikipedia, the encyclopaedia project, Wiktionary has grown beyond a standard dictionary and now includes a thesaurus, a rhyme guide, phrase books, language statistics and extensive appendices. We aim to include not only the definition of a word, but also enough information to really understand it. Thus etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations are included.

Answer 3

General purpose:

• Online Etymology Dictionary
• Google Books, set date range and sort by date
• Google Ngram Viewer

Newspapers:

• USA: Chronicling America (1836-1922) by the Library of Congress
• Australia: Trove (-1954) by the National Library of Australia

Particularly for computing terms:

• Google Groups for Usenet archives (also good for slang) (1981 - present)
• DSpace@MIT for the CSAIL archives (1959 - present)
• IETF's RFC archive (1969 - present)
• PDP-10 software archive (~1967 - ~1990), for old source code
• Tech Model Railroad Club dictionary, TMRC 1st & 2nd editions (1959, 1960)
• The Jargon File and its archives (also here) (1981 - 2003)
• MIT's The Tech newspaper archives (1881 - present)
• Bitsavers' Software and PDF Document Archive (misc. dates)