ETYMOLOGY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does etymology mean? 

• ETYMOLOGY (noun)
  The noun ETYMOLOGY has 2 senses:

1. a history of a word

2. the study of the sources and development of words

  Familiarity information: ETYMOLOGY used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ETYMOLOGY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A history of a word

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Hypernyms ("etymology" is a kind of...):

account; chronicle; history; story (a record or narrative description of past events)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "etymology"):

folk etymology (a popular but erroneous etymology)

Derivation:

etymological (based on or belonging to etymology)

etymologist (a lexicographer who specializes in etymology)

etymologize (construct the history of words)

etymologize (give the etymology or derivation or suggest an etymology (for a word))

Sense 2

Meaning:

The study of the sources and development of words

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

Hypernyms ("etymology" is a kind of...):

linguistics (the scientific study of language)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "etymology"):

lexicostatistics (a statistical technique used in glottochronology; used to estimate how long ago different languages evolved from a common source language)

Derivation:

etymological (based on or belonging to etymology)

etymologist (a lexicographer who specializes in etymology)

etymologize (construct the history of words)

etymologize (give the etymology or derivation or suggest an etymology (for a word))

 Context examples 

The word Houyhnhnm, in their tongue, signifies a horse, and, in its etymology, the perfection of nature.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

It appeared, in answer to my inquiries, that nobody had the least idea of the etymology of this terrible verb passive to be gormed; but that they all regarded it as constituting a most solemn imprecation.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Its grey front stood out well from the background of a rookery, whose cawing tenants were now on the wing: they flew over the lawn and grounds to alight in a great meadow, from which these were separated by a sunk fence, and where an array of mighty old thorn trees, strong, knotty, and broad as oaks, at once explained the etymology of the mansion's designation.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

This vampire which is amongst us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men; he is of cunning more than mortal, for his cunning be the growth of ages; he have still the aids of necromancy, which is, as his etymology imply, the divination by the dead, and all the dead that he can come nigh to are for him at command; he is brute, and more than brute; he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not; he can, within limitations, appear at will when, and where, and in any of the forms that are to him; he can, within his range, direct the elements; the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and the bat—the moth, and the fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small; and he can at times vanish and come unknown.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

The word, which I interpret the flying or floating island, is in the original Laputa, whereof I could never learn the true etymology.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)