About Etymon Yard
What this is
Etymon Yard is a reference site about Latin and Greek roots and the English words built on them. It is written for learners who already meet these words in reading and want the history behind them: the chain of forms a root passed through, the English family it produced, and the specific trap it sets.
The site is deliberately slow. Entries are published on a schedule rather than all at once, so what you find here is a set that has been checked rather than a bulk import. Entries not yet published are not listed, not searchable and not in the sitemap.
How an entry is built
Each entry starts from the oldest reconstructable form and works forward through the languages the word actually passed through, naming each stage. Where a form is reconstructed rather than attested, the entry marks it with an asterisk, which is the usual convention in etymological writing.
The kindred-family table lists only English words that genuinely descend from or were coined on that root. Words that merely look similar are left out, and where a word is a folk-etymology story rather than a real derivation, the entry says so.
Sources and disagreements
Entries are written from standard published etymological references and general histories of English vocabulary. Where those references disagree β and for many common words they do β the entry reports the disagreement instead of flattening it into a single confident line.
Dating is given in centuries rather than years because the surviving written record for most of these forms is thin. A word first written down in 1380 may well have been spoken in 1300.
The editorial desk
The entries, the diagrams and the corrections are the work of The Lexicon Desk, the editorial desk that signs every entry on this site. It is a desk rather than one named author: it is responsible for checking each entry against the published references before it goes live, and for the correction queue at [email protected].
Languages
Every entry exists in English and in Chinese. The two versions carry the same information, the same examples and the same caveats; the Chinese version is written for Chinese-speaking learners rather than translated word for word.
Corrections
If an entry gets something wrong, write to [email protected] with the entry name and the source you are working from. Corrections that come with a citation are applied first, and the entry date is updated when the substance changes.