Who Did This? (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Who Did This? (2017)

etymonline.com

213 pointsdredmorbius37 comments

Love this. Etymonline is one of my favorite websites, and often my first-choice dictionary (even though its word corpus is smaller than other dictionaries), because IME understanding the roots and origins of a word help me remember and use it better. It's the one dictionary I enjoy looking up.

Just in case someone hasn't seen it before... ;-) If you're an etymonline fan, I would venture that you might find interesting "You’re probably using the wrong dictionary" by James Somers: http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary

I can’t upvote this enough, that dictionary link is so wonderful. I’ve had the 1913 Webster’s dictionary on my Mac for years thanks to that blog post and it’s so useful for helping to find just the right word.

Webster-1913 is also included in the default dict/dictd English-langauge dictionary on Debian, Ubuntu, etc.

https://packages.debian.org/buster/dict-gcide

I regret that I have but one upvote to give.

I thank you and the OP. Until now, I didn’t know that I needed these things in my life.

Let me recommend people interested in words check out C.S. Lewis’s book Studies in Words https://amzn.com/B01GEROZMQ/, which takes a handful of words and extends their analysis far beyond anything you could find in a comprehensive dictionary.

People might also get some use out of Garner’s Modern American Usage https://amzn.com/0195382757. DFW sorta-review https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-...

In a slightly different direction, there's also The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson, which is more of a humourous explanation of English quirks.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29.The_Mother_Tongue

A favourite as well, and the bio is so redolent of the 1990s-era Web that I thought it might be illuminating here, both for those who were there, and the many who were not.

Etymonline is also a labour of love, though one that has real costs. It's supported by donations and schwag sales, and I strongly encourage anyone who can to help with the site's funding.

https://www.patreon.com/etymonline

http://www.cafepress.com/etymonline

No affiliation myself other than as an exceptionaly satisfied user.

Does the suggested app (Dictionary Universal) provide integration with iOS’ “look up” feature?

I loved this bio. In particular, it reinforced the value of blogs and websites that are independent of closed systems like Medium, Facebook, etc. This site exists as a passion and gift to the world. With the Internet Archive it is much harder for this to disappear compared to serving the same content on Facebook.

It was a joy to read the bio of the creator and to learn of the interests, background and desires that led the the dictionary. Adding to my list of favorite sites.

A handful of sentences that really stood out to me:

> Ask me why I did it and I'll give you a solid answer. And tomorrow I'll give you a different one. They're all correct. I tease myself along through the drudgery with a combination of guilt and vanity. If I did this right, I can say at the end of life I bundled up my worst qualities -- obsessiveness, impudence, narcissism -- and made something vaguely useful with them.

> It is useless to try to hide these things. Any site done by one person is going to be in some deal eccentric and reflect the ego and cultural limitations of the creator. It is liable to the sort of blunders only an individual can make; because if you had had another mind riding shotgun with you you wouldn't have gotten so far lost or missed that turn. A dictionary written by one person hangs the maker's mind naked in public, exposed in all its intellectual flab and moles.

I've been several times disappointed by the lack of references in this dictionary. For example, it claims the meaning of some words shifted around a particular time without linking to data that proves so.

Quick tip: On DuckDuckGo, you can search on etymonline with !ety (or !etym).

Among my most-used bangs ;-)

(Submitter)

You can also add search shortcuts to pretty much any browser now. I just did it in Firefox, it's as simple as this:

Go to etymonline.com and right-click in the search box itself.

Hit "Add a keyword for this search". In the dialog that pops up, I put "ety" as the keyword.

That's it. Now when I open a new tab, I can just type

ety pathos

And there we are.

I was lucky to have a class on linguistics when I was in school. It was there where I learned the concept of etymology and realized how interesting the origin of words is.

I am constantly amazed at how relevant it is every day. I am a currently an enterprise architect, and every day, the "naming things is hard problem" is front and center.

Understanding how the use of words developed historically, say, even within a single organization/culture, and how to research that is an amazing skill and really helpful. That is in addition to understanding how to use tools like etymonline or other famous etymological dictionaries to find out the origins of even old words, that we have been using for thousands of years.

You'd be surprised by the insight, and even sometimes inspiration you find when you see the origins of words. Things are not always as they sound/seem.

Thinking practically, consider the implications of these skills for data modeling/data dictionaries, business glossaries, naming variables, etc. Really valuable and interesting!

I love this site; I refer to it constantly. Thank you for creating and tending to it so lovingly.

etymonline is a perpetual delight.

The maintainer answers emails fast, too: i asked him to provide a RSS feed for blog posts 6 weeks ago and it was live 90 minutes later!

Just nitpicking - it's her (at least according to the linked page, second last paragraph).

> When I played World of Warcraft I found I generally chose a rogue. Human. Female.

Doesn't say anything about the author's actual sex, gender or preferred pronouns in real life. Only the character they like to play in a video game.

In the footer though, it does say:

Make of that what you will.

If the author played a female orc, would edjrage have assumed the author was an orc? :-)

On the internet, no-one knows you're a human...

The name in the footer is correct. Doug was a few years ahead of me in school, and our families are still friends from way back.

Douglas Harper is a historian, author, journalist and lecturer based in Lancaster, Pa. He is the author of...

http://slavenorth.com/columns/bio.htm

I was just looking for an RSS feed but I can't find a link on the site. What is the URL?

https://www.etymonline.com/feed/columns.xml

YMMV I suppose - I emailed him a correction (for "anime") years and years ago, which seemed pretty uncontroversial (4-5 reputable sources that all agreed), but he never replied or updated the entry. :(

for the animation style or the gothic armour?

The animation style. Not sure how armor fits into things, but etymonline lists "anime" as being derived from French, where it's actually just an abbreviation of English "animation".

For a totally unrelated reason, it is a late 15th century italian/swiss/german armor form made of laminated and often enameled plate: https://collections.royalarmouries.org/archive/rac-archive-8...

I always seem to end up on etymonline.com at least once per day. Another good site is Omniglot.com.

At the extreme other end of the function-vs-fun scale, I find myself on OneLook.com for wildcard searches in the way that most modern search engines don't seem to grok anymore.

That looks interesting, thanks.

Might also be worth an HN submission.

It's a great resource for HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

This brings a grin:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22082281

This website is responsible for my SAT vocabulary. I could never memorize word lists, but I could remember words if I looked it up on etymonline.

Some of the interesting words I still remember:

Maverick

Confluence

Applause

Inculcate

Assiduous

Ever since then it’s been a pleasure guessing at word roots of many new words I face.

FYI: that word list would be considered pretty basic by pre-Internet high school students.

Having said that, I've read some WW2-era high school math textbooks that had college-level chapters on polynomials.

On this subject, what are some other good website about pages?

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