Talk:Etymological dictionary

Notes

I'm going to start bringing together some notes from which we can begin this article. Everything here has come from Google searches so far...

Definitions

• wordorigins.org: An etymological dictionary is simply one that focuses on the etymological portion of the entry. It will include more details on the origins, such as the dates when various word forms appeared in the language or extended notes on the origins. This is usually done at the sacrifice of other information. Pronunciations, plural and other forms, and even definitions are left out.
• wordnet: a dictionary giving the historical origins of each word.

History

• 100—121 CE: Shuowen Jiezi compiled by Xǔ Shèn.
• 10th century: Sanas Cormaic, "Cormac's Glossary". "This work may be the earliest etymological dictionary in a European vernacular and was heavily influenced by the work of Isidore of Seville".
• 11th century: The first etymological dictionaries: "Vocabulista" by Papias, "Panormia/derivationes" by Osbern of Gloucester.
• 1721: The first etymological dictionary which explained the origin of English words by Nathan Bailey.
• 1868: Indo-European etymological dictionary by August Fick.

Caucasian languages

• East Caucasian: Leksika 1971, Khaidakov 1973
• West Caucasian: Kuipers 1975
• North Caucasian: "A COMPARATIVE DICTIONARY OF NORTH CAUCASIAN LANGUAGES":

Chinese

• Shuowen Jiezi (說文解字, "Explaining Simple and Analyzing Compound Characters") is often cited as the earliest Chinese etymological dictionary. Compiled in 100-121 CE by Xǔ Shèn.

English

• Nathan Bailey: First English etym. dict., 1721.
• Professor Anatole Lieberman of the University of Minnesota "is working on the first complete etymological dictionary of the English language". (25 Oct 2001)

Indo-European

• August Fick compiled the first comparative etymological dictionary of Indo-European languages in 1868.

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Altaic

Altaic hypothesis is widely discredited these days, should some of the links there be grouped into a disputed section? The first link there even has Nostratic, which has an even worse reputation than Altaic. --chinneeb-talk 11:16, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Referencing aims

{{Unreferenced}} seems like overkill when the first section basically is a list of references. Do we want references that assert some kind of additional notability for etymological dictionaries to be mentioned, or are we operating here with the understanding that any scholarly etymological dictionary is worth mentioning? --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 13:18, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

I contributed to the list assuming the latter. E.g. it would be quite difficult to prove notability of dictionaries that are still unfinished though obviously valuable projects. But even the classics in the languages I'm interested in seem to be simply known as classics by default, without having to reference any specific reviews or articles that would assert their importance. The importance of dictionaries is best deduced from practical usage - do you see them recommended and referenced by scholars frequently, basically. So I think it's better to stick to the latter principle you mention. Admittedly, if each language had fifty dictionaries on the list, I would agree we would have to become more selective, but in practice there's not that many etym. dictionaries to list in the first place. — Phazd (talk) 16:46, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

Sounds good. I will keep expanding the initial list, quite a lot is still missing. At some point we might consider splitting it by language family, but probably this is not yet a major concern.

I am less sure which part of the list "subgroup-wide" dictionaries like Leslau's dict. of Gurage should be on. Listing them for every individual language seems like a poor idea, but the language family section seems to be focused on dictionaries focusing on the overall reconstruction of a language family.--Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 16:55, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Organisation and status of the article - proposals

I think the article would be much easier to navigate if the list were organised hierarchically according to the language family and branch. This would be logical considering the topic itself: etymological dictionaries of a given branch will be more relevant to each other and to the parent proto-language than to whatever random language comes alphabetically before and after them. (This has already been suggested by @Tropylium.) Does anyone object to this idea?

And how should the dictionaries be ordered within each section? Currently it looks like a mix of chronological and reverse chronological. I personally prefer chronological, but I understand that one might prefer to put the latest advancements into the forefront...

Perhaps the section with online dictionaries could be dispensed with. I suspect some of them are amateur efforts and might not be desirable on the list, I could comb through them and remove those. Those that are done by professionals could be integrated into the main list. In general the division into print and online dicts seems unnecessary, some of those that are linked are merely digitised versions of those that are already found in the "print" section.

Finally, the article is basically just a list, so perhaps it might be better to classify it as such. The introductory section could be left here (of course, it should be expanded either way), and the rest of the article could be moved to a new List of etymological dictionaries.

— Phazd (talk|contribs) 01:57, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

Since nobody objected, I went ahead and reorganised the list. Not fully, the online dicts aren't yet integrated into the main body. — Phazd (talk|contribs) 22:28, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

I will also note that the Ukrainian article uk:Етимологічний словник is impressively detailed and could be used for filling out the gaps in the English version (though I'd steer clear from its bibliographic excesses - there really is no need to list dozens of mechanical reprints). It also raises the question of whether the article should include onomastic-etymological and phraseological-etymological dictionaries. — Phazd (talk|contribs) 22:35, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

The Serbian article Етимолошки речници српског језика – од концепције ка методологији (Снежана М. Петровић, Марија Д. Вучковић, https://doi.org/10.18485/mks_srpska_slavistika.2018.1.ch16) contains a bibliography of articles about etymological dictionaries in general, which might be useful for expanding the lead section. — Phazd (talk|contribs) 21:19, 26 October 2025 (UTC)

@Tbhotch Since you added the cleanup tag and described the article as a directory, would you support my above idea to split off most of the article into List of etymological dictionaries? Or do you think some other approach could be taken? — Phazd (talk|contribs) 02:51, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Yes, of course, I came here because of an article I'm writing, and I wasn't expecting to find a long list of examples, but rather an article on the topic. I'd move this page to List of etymological dictionaries to retain the page's history, and write an article about etymological dictionaries in the resulting redirect instead of splitting the page. Tbhotch^™ (CC BY-SA 4.0) 02:57, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

@Tbhotch Thank you. I must admit, although I linked the article above and recommended its bibliography, I still haven't read the references myself. (If you yourself come across any additional useful texts on the matter, do share them here as well.) So, I can't really promise to revise it very soon, and until I or someone else takes up the work, I suppose leaving the list here won't hurt? — Phazd (talk|contribs) 01:31, 19 July 2026 (UTC)