About

Words move. Coffee traveled from Arabic through Turkish, and then Dutch or Italian (the sources disagree), before it reached English; robot came from a Czech play published in 1920 and was in dozens of languages within a decade. Some words make the trip and keep their meaning. Others arrive in a new language, quietly change meaning and become the false friends that trip up anyone learning a second language.

This site follows those trips. You’ll find five kinds of articles:

• Loanwords: one word, or a family of them, and the route it took between languages.
• False friends: pairs of words that look alike and mean something different, and how they drifted apart.
• Shared roots: words that are related across languages because the languages themselves are related.
• Untranslatable: words said to have no equivalent, and what they really mean.
• Learning words: how to use all of the above when you’re learning a language.

Every etymology here comes from a source you can check: an etymological dictionary, a national academy’s dictionary or a published paper, linked in the text. When the origin of a word is uncertain or disputed, the article says so. Articles are revised from time to time; when one is, the update date appears under the title.