📚 Etymology

Word biographies: the dictionaries that trace them and the false derivations that travel faster.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject etymology in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	A Sanskrit-English dictionary	Monier Monier-Williams	1872	55
	On the study of words	Richard Chenevix Trench	1852	35
	Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache	Friedrich Kluge	1884	31
	Origins	Eric Partridge	1958	25
	Concise Etymological Dictionary	Walter W. Skeat	1882	24
	Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française	Robert, Paul	1951	23
	A practical grammar	S. W. Clark	1847	21
	An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Dictionary)	Walter W. Skeat	1882	20
	The making of English	Henry Bradley	1904	18
	Words and places	Isaac Taylor	1864	17
	Growth and structure of the English language	Otto Jespersen	1905	16
	History in English words	Owen Barfield	1926	15
	The first book of etymology	James Lynd	1847	13
	A complete etymology of the English language	Smith, William W.	1867	13
	Diccionario filológico-comparado de la lengua castellana	Matías Calandrelli	1880	12
	Words of science, and the history behind them	Isaac Asimov	1959	12
	Shuo wen jie zi	Xu, Shen	1644	10
	Diccionario crítico etimológico de la lengua castellana	Joan Corominas	1954	10
	Making the most of marriage	Paul Henry Landis	1955	10
	Vocabolario etimologico della lingua italiana	Ottorino Pianigiani	1907	9
	Studies in words	C. S. Lewis	1960	9
	Contested etymologies in the dictionary of the Rev. W. W. Skeat	Hensleigh Wedgwood	1882	8
	Dictionary of Word Origins	Joseph Twadell Shipley	1945	7
	Et cetera, et cetera	Lewis Thomas	1990	7
	Kill or get killed	Rex Applegate	1956	6
	Drama	Brown, Andrew	1962	6
	Dictionary of word origins	John Ayto	1991	6
	Wordslut	Amanda Montell	2019	6
	A dictionary of the Old English language	Francis Henry Stratmann	1873	5
	Etymologisches wörterbuch der albanesischen sprache	Meyer, Gustav	1891	5

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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