About For Books Dictionary Of Word Origins For Online
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What is the link between map and apron, acrobat and oxygen, zeal and jealousy, beef and cow, flour and pollen, danger and dominion, secret and crime?Did you know that crimson comes originally from the name of tiny scale insects, the kermes, from whose dried bodies a red dyestuff is made? That Yankee started life as a nickname for Dutchmen? That omelette evolved from the Old French amelette, ‘a thin sheet of metal’, and is a not-too-distant cousin of the word laminate?The average English speaker knows about 50,000 words – almost twenty-five times more words than there are stars visible in the night sky. And even that amount is insignificant next to the approximately 500,000 words in the English language. However, looked at from a historical perspective, that diversity is more apparent than real. Tracing a word’s development back in time shows that in many cases what are now separate lexical items have a common roots. Over the millennia our language has nurtured word-seeeds that have proliferated into widely differentiated families of vocabulary.The Dictionary of Word Origins uncovers the hidden and often surprising connections between words. Written in a clear and informative style, the more than 8,000 articles reveal the origins of and links between some of the most common English-language words. They also contain an extensive selection of words whose life histories intrinsically fascinating or instructive.
