Let’s get nerdy!

Etymology, meaning “the study of the history or evolution of a word”, has an etymology of its own. Appropriately, the root of the word that means the root of a word is based in a language that is at the root of many words today: Greek!

Related to etymos, meaning “true” or “real”, etymon means “true sense; original meaning”. Pair it with the Greek suffix for “study of”, -logia (see biology, astrology, and archaeology as a few other examples), and you get the Greek etymologia: “study of a true/original meaning of a word.”

The word obviously didn’t change all that much from there. It was the exact same in Latin where it transferred over to French (étymologie) and English.

Happy Word Nerd Wednesday! Comment with words you’d like to see in coming weeks and I’ll get catch y’all next week for some linguistic hump day history.