The search for meaningful origins for familiar or strange words is far older than the modern understanding of linguistic evolution and the relationships of languages, which began no earlier than the 18th century. Etymology has been a form of witty wordplay, in which the supposed origins of words were creatively imagined to satisfy contemporary requirements. For example, the Greek poet
Pindar (born ) employed inventive etymologies to flatter his patrons.
Plutarch employed etymologies insecurely based on fancied resemblances in sounds.
Isidore of Seville's '
was an encyclopedic tracing of "first things" that remained uncritically in use in Europe until the sixteenth century. ' is a grammatical encyclopedia edited at
Constantinople during the 9th century, one of several similar
Byzantine works. The 13th-century
Golden Legend, as written by
Jacobus de Voragine, begins each
hagiography of a saint with a fanciful
excursus in the form of an etymology.
Sanskrit In
ancient India,
Sanskrit linguists and grammarians were the first to undertake comprehensive analyses of linguistics and etymology. The study of Sanskrit etymology has provided Western scholars with the basis of
historical linguistics and modern etymology. Four of the most famous Sanskrit linguists are: •
Yāska () •
Pāṇini () •
Kātyāyana (6th-4th centuries BCE) •
Patanjali (2nd century BCE) These were not the earliest Sanskrit grammarians, but rather followed an earlier line of scholars who lived several centuries earlier, who included
Śākaṭāyana (814–760 BCE), and of whom very little is known. The earliest of attested etymologies can be found in the
Vedas, in the philosophical explanations of the
Brahmanas,
Aranyakas, and
Upanishads. The analyses of
Sanskrit grammar done by the previously mentioned linguists involved extensive studies on the etymology (called or in Sanskrit) of Sanskrit words, because the ancient Indians considered sound and speech itself to be sacred and, for them, the words of the Vedas contained deep encoding of the mysteries of the soul and God.
Greco-Roman One of the earliest philosophical texts of the Classical Greek period to address etymology was the
Socratic dialogue Cratylus () by
Plato. During much of the dialogue,
Socrates makes guesses as to the origins of many words, including the names of the gods. In his
odes, Pindar spins complimentary etymologies to flatter his patrons.
Plutarch (
Life of Numa Pompilius) spins an etymology for , while explicitly dismissing the obvious, and actual "bridge-builder": The priests, called Pontifices.... have the name of Pontifices from , powerful because they attend the service of the gods, who have power and command overall. Others make the word refer to exceptions of impossible cases; the priests were to perform all the duties possible; if anything lays beyond their power, the exception was not to be cavilled. The most common opinion is the most absurd, which derives this word from pons, and assigns the priests the title of bridge-makers. The sacrifices performed on the bridge were amongst the most sacred and ancient, and the keeping and repairing of the bridge attached, like any other public sacred office, to the priesthood.
Medieval Isidore of Seville compiled a volume of etymologies to illuminate the triumph of religion. Each saint's legend in
Jacobus de Voragine's
Golden Legend begins with an etymological discourse on their name: Lucy is said of light, and light is beauty in beholding, after that S. Ambrose saith: The nature of light is such, she is gracious in beholding, she spreadeth over all without lying down, she passeth in going right without crooking by right long line; and it is without dilation of tarrying, and therefore it is showed the blessed Lucy hath beauty of virginity without any corruption; essence of charity without disordinate love; rightful going and devotion to God, without squaring out of the way; right long line by continual work without negligence of slothful tarrying. In Lucy is said, the way of light.
Islamic Golden Age During the
Islamic Golden Age between the 8th and 14th centuries, several scholars laid the foundations of systematic etymology in Arabic. In the 8th century,
al‑Khalīl ibn Aḥmad al‑Farāhīdī compiled the first
Arabic dictionary, ''
Kitab al-'Ayn'' ( "The Source"), in which he organized entries by root and phonetic properties rather than alphabetic order, and provided etymological commentaries tracing word meanings to their
triliteral origins.
Ibn Fāris was the first to apply the method of
isytiqq (derivation analysis) in his
Maqāyīs al-Lughah, tracing multi‑letter words back to their root forms.
Modern era Etymology in the modern sense emerged in the late 18th-century European academia, in the context of the
Age of Enlightenment, although preceded by 17th-century pioneers such as
Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn,
Gerardus Vossius,
Stephen Skinner,
Elisha Coles, and
William Wotton. The first known systematic attempt to prove the relationship between two languages on the basis of similarity of
grammar and
lexicon was made in 1770 by the Hungarian,
János Sajnovics, when he attempted to demonstrate the relationship between
Sami and
Hungarian. The origin of modern
historical linguistics is often traced to
William Jones, a Welsh philologist living in India, who in 1782 observed the genetic relationship between Greek and Latin. Jones published his
The Sanscrit Language in 1786, laying the foundation for the field of
Indo-European studies. However, as early as 1727, a Jesuit missionary in India, père Gargam, theorized that Sanskrit could be a "mother tongue arrived from another country" for
Telugu and
Kannada because they contained many of the same Sanskrit terms; and in a letter to Abbé Barthélemy of the
Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in 1767, another Jesuit missionary in India, père
Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux, posed the question of the origin of the Sanskrit language and systematically argued his hypothesis of a "commune origine" of Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek, even putting Sanskrit terms and their Latin equivalents in columns. Although they sent many Sanskrit-related texts to the
Bibliothèque du roi, such as literary translations, grammars, dictionaries, and other works, the
Jesuit Missionaries in the
Carnatic Region between 1695–1762, including
Jean Calmette, Coeurdoux, Gargam,
Jean François Pons, and others, have only recently begun receiving more attention in modern scholarship for their early contributions to fields like Indo-European Studies, historical linguistics, and comparative philology. The study of etymology in
Germanic philology was introduced by
Rasmus Rask in the early 19th century and elevated to a high standard with the ''
(German Dictionary
) compiled by the Brothers Grimm. The successes of the comparative approach culminated in the Neogrammarian school of the late 19th century. Still, Friedrich Nietzsche used etymological strategies (principally and most famously in On the Genealogy of Morality'', but also elsewhere) to argue that moral values have definite historical origins, where the meaning of concepts such as good and evil are shown to have changed over time according to the value-system that appropriates them. This strategy gained popularity in the 20th century, and philosophers, such as
Jacques Derrida, have used etymologies to indicate former meanings of words to de-center the "violent hierarchies" of Western philosophy. == Notable etymologists ==