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I'm wondering about the origins of a particular word and, while my first thought was to ask the ELU community, I decided I should do the work myself.

Where should I start looking? I'd love to see some suggestions.

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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it should be migrated to meta.
    – Mitch
    Commented Mar 17, 2019 at 15:17
  • @Mitch We cannot migrate questions this old to meta.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Mar 19, 2019 at 2:44
  • The information can be copied and pasted into the resource post or something else on meta. I'm not sure why you reopened this @tchrist.
    – Laurel ♦
    Commented Mar 19, 2019 at 2:49
  • @Laurel I suppose they could be, but I would not be comfortable making believe that other people's answers were my own.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Mar 19, 2019 at 2:50
  • @tchrist Use disclaimers. This is obviously a request for resources, and belongs on ELU.Meta. Searchability is a prime requirement, and that means good collation.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Aug 26, 2023 at 14:06

3 Answers 3

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  • etymonline is a great resource for looking up specific words.

  • If you are at a university, you might have OED access, which is the most in-depth and hardcore etymology resource (if you can get to it).

  • Take Our Word For It is a fun website for browsing through and learning about etymologies in a more entertaining, less structured way.

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    All great suggestions. In my experience a lot of phrase or word etymologies will appear in one source but won't appear in another or vice versa, so my favorite method is still to just google each one and include the word etymology.
    – Dan
    Commented Sep 7, 2010 at 19:30
  • +! for OED, my absolute favorite–still pricy, good note on uni access
    – Charlie
    Commented Sep 9, 2010 at 0:57
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    +1 again for the OED. Many public libraries also have OED access, depending on where you live.
    – PLL
    Commented Nov 8, 2011 at 13:55
  • The University of Michigan version of OED V.2 will give you every example sentence that a given lemma occurs in (often more than 10,000 for common words), all dated, with source, in HTML for easy sorting. Wow. But only accessible if you have a umich.edu account, alas.
    – John Lawler
    Commented Aug 26, 2023 at 18:06
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General purpose:

Newspapers:

  • USA: Chronicling America (1836-1922) by the Library of Congress
  • Australia: Trove (-1954) by the National Library of Australia
  • New Zealand: Papers Past (1839-1945) by the Nation Library of New Zealand

Particularly for computing terms:

Therefore it's important to double check the date: scroll up to confirm the real date for "full view" books, and for preview/"snippet view" verify with another source (such as the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg or the HathiTrust Digital Library).

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  • Someday someone (not me) will go through the first 50 years of computing and catalog the metaphors. All computing terms are metaphors, after all; , for instance files used to be cardboard (so things are IN them, while screens used to be paper (so things are ON them).
    – John Lawler
    Commented Aug 26, 2023 at 18:08
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I would also like to add our etymology dictionary that draws directed etymology graphs called Etymologeek.com.

Here is an example of a directed graph: directed etymology graph for the word elephant

It works in multiple languages, providing etymology data, descendants, related words and more. It also has a pretty quick search, and the index is constantly growing in the number of words and slowly growing in accuracy too.

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