Etymology Terms

• ablative: the Latin case of adverbial relation, typically expressing the notion “away from,” or the source or place of an action.
• Abnaki: Algonquian language of northern New England and eastern Canada.
• accusative: typically the case of the direct object, but also sometimes denoting “motion towards.” Nouns and adjectives in French, Spanish, and Italian, languages from which English borrowed heavily, generally were formed from the accusative case of a Latin word.
• Afrikaans: Germanic language of South Africa, an offshoot of Dutch, also known as South African Dutch.
• Akkadian: Semitic language group spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, including Babylon and Assyria.
• Algonquian: widespread group of North American native languages.
• Anglian: the Old English dialect of the Angles; the dialect of Old English spoken in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of East Anglia.
• aphetic: a form of a word altered by loss of a short, unaccented vowel at the beginning (such as squire from esquire).
• Arabic: the Semitic language of the Arabs and the language of Islam.
• Aramaic: Semitic language of the Middle East. Aramaic became the lingua franca of the Assyrian empire and later for centuries was the official language of the Persian kingdom and the daily language of Israel at the time of Christ.
• Arawakan: native language family of northern South America and the West Indies.
• Armenian: the Indo-European language of Armenia.
• Assyrian: Akkadian dialect spoken in the empire that flourished on the Tigris River 7c. B.C.E.
• Attic: ancient Greek dialect of Athens and its region.
• augmentative: expressing increase in the force of the idea conveyed. It is used as a noun and an adjective in linguistics, and can be applied to a whole word or to an affix. Opposite of diminutive. Medallion is from an Italian augmentative of medal, so “a large medal.” Chariot is from a French augmentative of the word that became English car. A squadron is a large squad.↳
• base:  the unanalysable element which is the kernel of a word’s structure.
• Basque: non-Indo-European language of the Basque people.
• Breton: Celtic language of Brittany, the last surviving Celtic language in continental Europe.
• by: before a date, is an indication to you and note to myself that that date looks soft; the word in context may be older in English, lurking in the kind of sources that miss being checked, or the earliest record of it treats it as a word everyone already knows. But I haven’t had time to go track it back through the archives yet, and probably won’t. 
• Cantonese: type of Chinese spoken in the southeastern province of Canton (Guangzhou), where Europeans and Chinese often interacted in early modern times.
• Carib: South American native language spoken in northern South America and parts of Central America.
• Catalan: Romance language of Catalonia and some nearby places; closely related to Provencal.
• causative: a form of a verb expressing the notion “cause X to Y.” The en- in enrich is a causative prefix.
• Caxton: William Caxton (d. 1491), the first English printer, responsible for a number of spelling changes.
• Celtic: Indo-European language branch that includes Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton. Also the language spoken by the ancestral group during the presumed period of unity.
• Cherokee: native Iroquoian language of the southern Appalachians.
• Chinook: native language of a North American people who lived along the Columbia River; also Chinook jargon, a lingua franca of the Pacific Northwest made up of English, French and native elements.
• combining: the form of a word when it combines with other words.
• comparative: the second degree of comparison of an adjective or adverb. Longer is the comparative of long.
• Coptic: Hamitic language descended from ancient Egyptian, now confined to liturgical use.
• Cornish: Celtic language spoken until late 18c. in Cornwall.
• Coverdale:  Myles (or Miles) Coverdale (c.1488–1569), translator who produced the first complete printed translation of the Bible into English.
• Croatian: Serbo-Croatian as spoken in Croatia, and written in the Latin alphabet.
• Czech: West Slavic language of old Bohemia (modern Czech Republic).
• Danish: North Germanic language spoken in Denmark.
• dative: typically the case of the indirect object, but sometimes also denoting “motion toward.” In old Germanic languages, the “fourth case,” catch-all for I.E. dative, ablative, locative and other cases.
• diminutive: a form of a word used to express smallness, as ringlet is the diminutive of ring. The principal English diminutive suffixes are -et, -kin, -ling, -ock, -in, -y or -ie. In many words they have lost their force and no longer are felt as such.
• dissimilation: the process by which a word with a repeated sound changes one of the two; Latin peregrinus became French pelerin (“pilgrim”) by dissimilation.
• Dravidian: non-Indo-European language family centered in southern India, including Tamil and Telugu.
• Dutch: West Germanic language spoke in the Netherlands, descended from the Low German dialects of the Franks and Saxons.
• echoic: indicating a word that sounds like what it means.
• Egyptian: Afroasiatic (Hamitic) language spoken in ancient Egypt.
• emphatic: as used here is essentially the same as intensive (q.v.).
• English: West Germanic language spoken in England after c. 450; after c. 1000 heavily influenced by French and somewhat by Scandinavian.
• Estonian: Finno-Ugric (non-Indo-European) language of Estonia.
• Etruscan: language spoken by an ancient people of what is now Tuscany, neighbors of the early Romans; the origin of their language is uncertain.
• Faeroese: Scandinavian language of the Faeroe Islands.
• Finnish: Finno-Ugric (non-Indo-European) language of Finland.
• Flemish: West Germanic dialect spoken in Flanders, generally regarded as the Belgian variant of Dutch rather than as a separate tongue.
• Frankish: West Germanic language of the Franks, inhabitants of northern Gaul 5c.-6c., their descendants ruled France, Germany, Italy in 9c., and the language contributed hundreds of words to French and strongly influenced the form of it that was brought to England as Anglo-French.
• French: Romanic language spoken chiefly in France.
• frequentative: case denoting recurring action.
• Frisian: West Germanic language spoken in Friesland, the lowland coast of the North Sea and nearby islands, closely related to Dutch and Old English.
• Fulani: language of northern Nigeria.
• future: the verb tense indicating time to come. English lacks a pure future tense, but Latin and other languages have it.
• Gaelic: Celtic language of Highland Scotland.
• Gaulish: Celtic language of ancient Gaul.
• genitive: the case of the complement, typically expressing “possession” or “origin.”
• German: West Germanic language spoken in Germany, Austria, parts of Switzerland, technically “New High German.” A general rule when comparing English and German in their evolution from a common source is that English has been more conservative with its consonants, German with its vowels.
• gerund: a verbal noun, in English usually ending in -ing.
• Gothic: the East Germanic language of the Goths, extinct since 16c., but because of early missionary work among them we have Gothic texts 200 years earlier than those in any other Germanic language, which are crucial to reconstructing Proto-Germanic.
• Greek: Indo-European language spoken in Greece in the classical period, c. 8c. B.C.E.-4c. C.E. Among its dialects were Ionian-Attic (the language of Homer and the Athenian dramatists), Aeolic (used in Thessaly, Boeotia and Lesbos), and Dorian (the language of Sparta).
• Germanic: a branch of Indo-European, ancestral language of English, German, Dutch, Frisian, Scandinavian tongues and several extinct languages such as Gothic and Frankish.
• Guarani: native South American language of Paraguay, related to Tupi.
• Hawaiian: Polynesian (non-Indo-European) language of the Hawaiian Islands.
• Hebrew: classical Hebrew, ancient Semitic language of the Israelites.
• Hungarian: Finno-Ugric (non-Indo-European) language spoken in Hungary; also known as Magyar.
• Ibo: Kwa language of Nigeria.
• IE: Indo-European, the family of languages that includes most of the languages of modern Europe (English among them) and some current and extinct ones in western and southern Asia. All are presumed to share a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European (PIE).
• imitative:  “a convenient term to include onomatopoeic and echoic” [Weekley].
• imperative: the verbal category expressing commands or orders.↳
• imperfect: tense/aspect category indicating progressive aspect: I was saying is in the “past imperfect” tense.↳
• inceptive:  see inchoative.
• inchoative: aspect expressing the notion “entering into an action, beginning.” Latin verbs ending in -sco, -scere. Also sometimes inceptive.
• indicative: the mood expressing assertion.
• infinitive: the form of a verb that expresses existence or action.
• instrumental: case encoding the notion “means by which x is done.”
• intensive: giving force or emphasis.
• Irish: the Celtic language spoken in Ireland.
• Iranian: the branch of Indo-European languages spoken on and around the plateau of Iran, including modern Farsi and Kurdish.
• Iroquoian: North American native language family.
• Italian: the Romanic language spoken in Italy, it evolved out of the Tuscan dialect in the Renaissance.
• iterative:  marking repetition; generally identical with frequentative.
• Kentish: the dialect of Old English spoken by the Jutes who formed the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent.
• Japanese: the native language of Japan, with no known outside connections.
• Kurdish: Iranian (Indo-European) language of Kurdistan.
• Kwa: Niger-Congo language group spoken along the south coast of West Africa, which was a major supply region for American slavers.
• Latin: classical Latin, the Italic language of ancient Rome until about 4c.
• Lithuanian: the Baltic language spoken in Lithuania.
• locative: the case denoting “location in.”
• Malay: Indonesian language of the Malay peninsula.
• Mandarin: the Beijing-area dialect of Chinese, now regarded as the standard form.
• Mandingo: Niger-Congo language group of West Africa.
• Mercian: the Anglian dialect of Old English spoken in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia.
• metathesis: inversion of segments within a word; Old English þridda became Modern English third through metathesis of -r- and -i.
• Micmac: Algonquian language of the Canadian Maritimes.
• Muskogean: North American native language family originally in the southeastern U.S. and including Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole.
• Nahuatl: Uto-Aztecan language of native Mexico; the language of the Aztecs and their neighbors.
• nominative: the case that typically codes the grammatical function of the subject.↳
• Northumbrian: the Anglian dialect of Old English spoken in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria.
• objective: designating or of the case of the object of a transitive verb or preposition.
• obsolete: a word or meaning or form of a word no longer in use.
• OED: Oxford English Dictionary, the principal source for modern English etymologies, begun in 1879 (as the “New English Dictionary”); a second edition was published in the 1980s, and the work is ongoing. References to it on this site, unless otherwise noted, are to the 2nd print edition.
• Ojibwa: native Algonquian language of the people on either side of Lake Superior.
• optative: a mood expressing wishing. The archaic Heaven forfend would be an example of optative, though unlike some I.E. languages English has no specific markers for this case.
• Oscan: the Italic language of the Samnites in middle and southern Italy in pre-Roman times; related to Umbrian and in the same family as Latin.↳
• participle: a verbal form having some functions of both verbs and adjectives (in English, usually ending in -ing).
• Pashto: Iranian (Indo-European) language of Afghanistan.
• passive: the form of a verb which indicates that the subject is the recipient of the action. The tree was struck by lightning is a passive construction.
• perfective: the tense or formation expressing the notion of “completion.” To eat is non-perfective; to eat up is perfective.
• Persian: also known as Farsi, modern Iranian language spoken in Iran and Afghanistan.
• person: the form a verb takes in indicating whether it refers to the person speaking, the person spoken to, or the person or thing spoken about. In Modern English I is the “first person singular;” you is the “second person singular,” we is the “first person plural,” etc.
• Phoenician: the extinct Semitic language of the Phoenicians, closely related to Hebrew.
• Phrygian: Indo-European language formerly spoken in Anatolia.
• PIE: Proto-Indo-European, the hypothetical reconstructed ancestral language of the Indo-European family. The time scale is much debated, but the most recent date proposed for it is about 5,500 years ago.
• Piman: branch of Uto-Aztecan languages spoken in what is now southern Arizona and northern Mexico.
• plural: the form of a word that denotes it refers to more than one person or thing. Some languages have a dual number (there are relics of it in Old English), and in those the plural refers to more than two people or things.
• Polish: West Slavic language spoken in Poland.
• Portuguese: Romanic language spoken chiefly in Portugal and Brazil.
• possessive:  form of a word designating possession or some similar relationship. Usually formed in English with an -s and an apostrophe; John’s is possessive of John.
• possibly: is not the same as probably (q.v.).
• preterite: the simple past tense.
• privative: indicating negation, absence, or loss, such as the prefix un- or the suffix -less.
• probably: probably, used here, indicates more likelihood than possibly, though that’s subjective and there’s no sharp line. Possibly is, perhaps, “there’s no obvious objection to this explanation, but the evidence is thin,” or “it’s similar to the development in this other word, but the circumstances are different.” Probably is on the order of: “The sense and phonetic development of this Middle English word from this French one is perfectly regular, there are no obvious objections, but the historical record is incomplete, or an intermediate form or sense is missing from the record.” You might occasionally also see a likely in place of probably.
• Provençal: Romance language of several dialects in southern France.
• Quechua: South American native language spoken in the Andes; the language of the Inca Empire.
• reduplicated: an inflectional device in which a syllable or part of a syllable is copied. Ancient Greek formed its perfect tenses by reduplication: leipo “I leave,” le-loipa “I have left.” It’s rare in English, but examples would be tom-tom and chitchat.
• reflexive: form of a word which indicates the subject and object of a verb in a sentence are the same, so that a transitive verb is directed back on its subject. (“John hurt himself” is a reflexive sentence.)
• rhotacism: the tendency in spoken language for “r” to take the place of other sounds, especially “s/z.” Latin flos “flower” has genitive floris, an instance of rhotacism.
• root: a historical term which refers to the etymological source of base elements in languages.
• Russian: East Slavic language of Russia.
• Sanskrit: the classical Indian literary language from 4c. B.C.E.
• Scandinavian: also known as North Germanic, sub-group of Germanic spoken in Scandinavia consisting of Norwegian, Swedish, Danish.
• Scottish: the variety of English spoken by the people of Scotland. Not to be confused with Gaelic, which is Celtic. A number of French words entered English through Scotland because of the political alliance and connection of Scotland and France 13c.-16c.
• Serbian: eastern variant of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, generally written in Cyrillic.
• singular: the form of a word that denotes it refers to only one person or thing.
• Sinhalese: Indic language of Sri Lanka.↳
• Siouan: North American native language group of the U.S. upper Midwest, including the language of the Sioux, Crow, Omaha and Osage peoples.↳
• Slavic:  a principal branch of the Indo-European language family spoken in Eastern Europe. Includes Russian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian.↳
• Slovak: West Slavic language of Slovakia.
• Spanish: also known as Castilian, Romanic language spoken in Spain and Spanish America.
• subjunctive: the mood typically denoting notions like unreality, doubt.
• Sumerian: non-Indo-European, non-Semitic language of ancient Sumer.
• superlative:  the third degree of comparison of an adjective or adverb. Longest is the superlative of long.
• Tagalog: Indonesian language of the Philippines.
• Tamil: Dravidian (non-Indo-European) language of southern India and Sri Lanka.
• Telugu: Dravidian (non-Indo-European) language of southern India.
• Thai: Sino-Tibetan language of the Tai group spoken in Thailand.
• Tibetan: Sino-Tibetan language of Tibet.
• Tupi: native South American language of the Amazon basin; the northern branch of Tupi-Guarani.
• Turkish: Turkic (non-Indo-European) language spoken in Turkey.
• Turkic: branch of the Altaic language family spoken in Turkey and parts of south-central Asia. It includes Turkish, Uzbek, Kirghiz.
• Twi: Kwa (Niger-Congo) language of Ghana.
• Ukrainian: East Slavic language spoken in Ukraine.
• Urdu: language of the Muslim conquerors of India; originally a dialect of Hindi with a large admixture of Arabic and Persian. From zaban-i-urdu “language of the camp.”
• vocative: the case or expression of “direct address.” In English it long ago merged with the nominative.
• Wolof:  Niger-Congo language of Senegal and Gambia.
• Xhosa: Bantu language of South Africa.
• Yoruba: West African tonal language of the Kwa group, spoken in Nigeria. **adj.: adjective. A word used to qualify, limit, or define a noun or noun-like part of speech.
• adv.: adverb. One of the indeclinable parts of speech, so called from being ordinarily joined to verbs for the purpose of limiting or extending their signification, but used also to qualify adjectives and other adverbs.
• agent noun: form expressing the notion “doer of action.” Hunter is an agent noun, and -er is an agentive suffix.
• American English: the English language as spoken and written in the United States of America.
• American Spanish: the Spanish language as spoken and written in the New World.
• Anglo-French: the French written in England from the Norman Conquest (1066) through the Middle Ages; the administrative and legal language of England 12c.-17c. Derived from the French of Normandy, which was influenced by Germanic.
• Anglo-Latin: the form of Medieval Latin used in England during the Middle English period.
• Anglo-Norman: the dialect of Anglo-French spoken by the Norman settlers (French-speaking descendants of Scandinavians who settled in Normandy in the 9c.) in England after the Conquest (1066). For purposes of this site, essentially the same as Anglo-French.
• back-formation:  the process by which an apparently complex word is erroneously split up and a new, simple form produced from it (burgle is a back formation of burglar).
• Church Latin: Late Latin as used in Christian ritual, discipline, and theology.
• conj.:  “conjunction.” A connective particle serving to unite clauses of a sentence or coordinate words in a clause or sentence (and, but, or, etc.).
• Ecclesiastical Greek: Greek as used by the early Christians.
• East Frisian: variant of Frisian spoke on the islands off the North Sea coast of Germany.↳
• fem.: feminine, the grammatical gender in highly inflected Indo-European languages that denotes females and many other words to which no distinction of sex is apparent.
• Gallo-Romance** or **Gallo-Roman: the vernacular language of France c. 500-900 C.E.; intermediate between Vulgar Latin and Old French.
• Late Latin: the literary Latin language as spoken and written c. 300-c. 700.
• loan-translation: a literal piece-by piece translation from one language to another. Old English ymb-sniþan”around-cut” is a loan-translation of Latin circum-cidere.
• Low German: plattdeutsch, the modern descendant of Old Saxon.
• masc.: masculine, the grammatical gender in highly inflected Indo-European languages that denotes males and used with many other words to which no distinction of sex is apparent.
• Medieval Latin: Latin as written and spoken c. 700-c. 1500.
• Mexican Spanish: Spanish as spoken in Mexico.
• Middle Dutch: the Dutch language as it was spoken and written c. 1100-c. 1500. English-speakers would have encountered it often after 13c., as the Low Countries were major trading partners, Low German formed the lingua franca of the Hanseatic towns, and fishing fleets of both speeches trawled the same waters. The loans tend to be colloquial or associated with the cloth trade.
• Middle English: the English language as written and spoken c. 1100-c. 1500.
• Middle French: the French language as written and spoken c. 1400-c. 1600.↳
• Middle High German: the High German language as written and spoken c. 1100-c. 1500.
• Middle Irish: Irish as written and spoken in the high Middle Ages.
• Middle Low German: the Low German language as written and spoken c. 1100-c. 1500.
• Modern English: language of Britain, Australia, British America, etc., since mid-16c.
• Modern Greek: language of Greece since c. 1500.
• Modern Latin: Latin language in use since c.1500, chiefly scientific.
• n.: noun.
• North Germanic: the subgroup of Germanic comprising Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Old Norse, etc.; also the language spoken by the ancestral group during the presumed period of unity.
• North Sea Germanic:  the closely related languages of the Germanic tribes along the coastal and lowland regions of the North Sea coast of continental Europe before the period of the Anglo-Saxon migration, comprising Old Low Franconian, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, and Old English.
• N.T.: New Testament.
• Old Celtic: ancestral language of modern Irish, Scottish, Welsh and related languages.
• Old French: the French language as written and spoken c. 900-1400. More than 90 percent of it was from Vulgar Latin, with a smattering of Celtic and Germanic, plus some Medieval Latin learned terms.
• Old Church Slavonic: the earliest attested Slavic language, known from 9c. C.E. Used by the Slavs of Macedonia and Bulgaria.
• Old Danish: the form of West Norse spoken in Denmark after c. 1000 C.E.
• Old Dutch: also known as Old Low Franconian, the Germanic speech used on the North Sea coast of continental Europe c. 700-c. 1000.
• Old English: the English language as written and spoken c. 450-c. 1100. It is purely Germanic and had several dialects (West Saxon, Anglian, Kentish, Northumbrian).
• Old Frisian: Germanic language akin to English spoken on the North Sea coast of modern Netherlands and Germany before 1500.
• Old High German: the ancestor of the modern literary German language, a Germanic language spoken in the upland (“high”) regions of Germany; German language as written and spoken from the earliest period to c. 1100.
• Old Irish: the Irish language as written and spoken from earliest times to 11c.
• Old Italian: the Italian language as written and spoken before 16c.
• Old Low German: the Low German language as written and spoken from earliest times to 12c.
• Old Norse: the Norwegian language as written and spoken c. 100 to c. 1500 C.E., the relevant phase of it being “Viking Norse” (700-1100), the language spoken by the invaders and colonizers of northern and eastern England c. 875-c. 950. This was before the rapid divergence of West Norse (Norway and the colonies) and East Norse (Denmark and Sweden), so the language of the vikings in England was essentially the same, whether they came from Denmark or from Norway. Only a few of the loan words into English can be distinguished as being from one or the other group.↳
• Old North French: the dialect of northern France before the 1500s, especially that of coastal Normandy and Picardy.
• Old Persian: the Persian language as written and spoken from 7c. B.C.E. to 4c. B.C.E.
• Old Provençal: Romanic language of the troubadours, spoken in southern France before c. 1500.
• Old Prussian: a West Baltic language similar to Lithuanian, extinct since 17c.
• Old Saxon: a West Germanic language, the earliest written form of Low German, spoken c. 700-c. 1100.
• Old Slavic: another name for Old Church Slavonic (q.v.).
• Old Spanish:  the Spanish language as written and spoken c. 1145-16c.
• Old Swedish: the Swedish language as written and spoken c. 900-c. 1500.
• O.T.: Old Testament.
• past participle: a form of a verb that can be both a verb and an adjective, and which denotes action which has been completed. In Modern English, it commonly ends in -ed or -en. Thus, asked is the past participle of ask. French past participles commonly were adopted as finite verbs in Middle English.
• past tense: indicating an action completed or in progress at a former time.
• Pennsylvania Dutch: also, and more properly, Pennsylvania German, High German and Low Franconian dialect mingled with English words and deformed in pronunciation, spoken in the German-settled counties of interior Southeastern Pennsylvania.
• Pre-Greek: a proposed substrate language spoken in the region of Greece before the arrival of Indo-European peoples. It is supposed to have contributed a number of words and toponyms to Greek.↳
• present participle: a form of a verb that can be a verb, an adverb, and even a noun (gerund), and which denotes action which is ongoing. In Modern English, most easily identified by its characteristic ending -ing. Thus, asking is the present participle of ask.
• present-preterite: a group of Germanic verbs (mostly auxiliaries such as may, shall, can) whose original past tense forms split off and became separate pres. tense verbs (might, should, could).↳
• Proto-Germanic: hypothetical prehistoric ancestor of all Germanic languages, including English.
• Proto-Italic:  hypothetical prehistoric ancestor of all Italic languages, including Latin and its descendants, the Romance languages.
• Proto-Indo-European: see PIE.
• q.v.:  abbreviation of Latin quod vide “which see.”
• Serbo-Croatian: South Slavic language or group of dialects spoken in Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. Official standard language of the former Yugoslavia.
• substrate/substratum: refers to the languages of the non-Indo-European tribes native to mainland Europe before the arrival of the IE peoples. They presumably survived for a time under Indo-European domination. Linguists have begun to see evidence of pre-Indo-European loanwords in IE languages (especially in names of rivers, landscape features, animals, and plants) and even reconstructed some of their phonological qualities, though the process is not without controversy.
• trans.: transitive, of verbs, taking a direct object.↳
• U.S.: United States.
• Uto-Aztecan: native North American language family of the southwestern U.S. and Mexico.
• v.: verb. A word that asserts or declares; that part of speech of which the office is predication, and which, either alone or with various modifiers or adjuncts, combines with a subject to make a sentence.
• Verbal noun:  a noun derived from a verb and sharing in its senses and constructions.
• Vulgar Latin: the everyday speech of the Roman people, as opposed to literary Latin; the modern Romanic languages descend more from it than from the form of the language used by the classical authors. Some language observers as early as the Renaissance noted that modern Romanic languages seem to have descended from a Latin different from the language of the Roman classics. Vowel patterns consistent across the Romanic languages are nowhere found in classical literature; in the daughter languages many of the common words in classical Latin have been replaced by the same foreign or formerly obscure Latin word (pulcher/bellus; ignis/focus, bellum/guerre, etc.). In the early 19th century, scientific etymology, and the publication for the first time of vast amounts of surviving Latin prose and inscriptions other than the highest literature (including graffiti from Pompeii), allowed linguists to work out the rough shape of what they called, with some objection, Vulgar Latin.↳
• West African: languages of the Guinea coast and inland regions of Africa, the principal source of slaves for the European colonies in the New World.
• West Frisian: dialect variant of Frisian spoken in the Netherlands.
• West Germanic: the subgroup of Germanic comprising English, Dutch, German, Yiddish, Frisian, etc.; also the language spoken by the ancestral group during the presumed period of unity.
• West Saxon: the dialect of Old English spoken in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex.
• asterisk (*): Words beginning with an asterisk are not attested in any written source. Some have been reconstructed by etymological analysis, such as Proto-Indo-European *ped-, the root of words for “foot” in most of its daughter tongues. In other cases they are hypothetical words or forms of words that might have, but didn’t, come into use in a modern language (Modern English *astronomian, if Middle English astronomyen had survived). Or they are presumed forms in ancient languages of words that are attested only in oblique or derived forms.↳
• c. “century,” when following a number (16c.); “circa” when preceding one (c. 1500).
• cf. abbreviation of Latin confer “compare.” In other words, “see the following entry for more information.”
• cognate (adj.), having the same ancestor. As a noun, a word that has a common ancestor with another.
• DAS “Dictionary of American Slang,” by Harold Wentworth and Stewart Berg Flexner, published 1960, revised four times since.
• e.g. abbreviation of Latin exempli gratia “for the sake of example.”
• I-mutation, also known as “i-umlaut.”
• intrans., “intransitive,” of verbs, not taking a direct object.
• neut., “neuter,” the third grammatical gender in highly inflected Indo-European languages.
• prep., “preposition,” a word that connects a noun to another element of a sentence; in Modern English common prepositions include in, by, for, with, to.
• pron., “pronoun.”
• Semitic, major subgroup of Afroasiatic language family, including Hebrew, Aramaic, Akkadian.
• Swedish, North Germanic language spoken in Sweden.