Word histories and mysteries: from abracadabra to Zeus

366 Pages·9.07 MB·English

by  Houghton Mifflin Company

Word
Histories
and
Mysteries
From Abracadabra to Zeus

Word
Histories
and
Mysteries
From Abracadabra to Zeus
From the Editors of the
American Heritage
®
Dictionaries
Houghton Mifflin Company
Boston New York
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Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All
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ISBN-13: 978-0-618-45450-1
ISBN-10: 0-618-45450-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Word histories and mysteries : from abracadabra to Zeus /
from the editors of the American Heritage dictionaries.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-618-45450-0
1. English language--Etymology--Dictionaries. I.
American Heritage dictionary. II. Houghton Mifflin
Company.
PE1580.W665 2004
422'.03--dc22
2004014798
Manufactured in the United States of America
QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Table of Contents
Editorial and Production Staff • vii
Introduction • ix
The Word Histories and Mysteries • 1
Glossary • 333
The Indo-European Family of Languages • 346
Picture Credits • 348
v

Editorial and Production Staff
Vice President,Publisher of Dictionaries
Margery S. Berube
Vice President,Executive Editor Vice President,Managing Editor
Joseph P. Pickett Christopher Leonesio
Project Editor
Patrick Taylor
Contributing Editors Art and Production Supervisor
Michael Adams Margaret Anne Miles
Benjamin W. Fortson IV
Manufacturing Supervisor
Copyeditor James W. Mitchell
Ann-Marie Imbornoni
Editorial Production Associate
Administrative Coordinator Brianne M. Lutfy
Kevin McCarthy
Text Design
Database Production Supervisor Catherine Hawkes, Cat & Mouse
Christopher Granniss
vii

Introduction
The Origins of English
The roots of English run deep into the past and reach all around
the world. Today English is the first language of over 350 million
people all over the globe, and the great diversity of English speakers
is matched by the great diversity of English words. This diversity has
arisen through a variety of historical processes, and in order to illus-
trate these processes vividly, this book traces all the twists and turns
taken by over four hundred words on their journey into modern
English. When we examine the origins of English words, even the
words we use everyday, we find that English has drawn its vocabu-
lary from a great variety of sources, and readers can discover in
these pages a representative sample of these wide-ranging borrow-
ings. However, English also has a considerable number of words that
have been in continuous use for thousands of years, inheritances
from the prehistoric ancestor of English spoken many thousands of
years ago, Proto-Indo-European.
The Prehistoric Ancestors of English
All around us as we speak, we can observe the kinds of linguistic
change that have transformed Proto-Indo-European into English. In
ix