Etymology

The revision of the Oxford English Dictionary's etymological component is a substantial undertaking. In the First Edition many entries whose origin was taken to be self-evident (typically native English formations) were not provided with etymologies. In the revised material each entry has a formal etymology. In addition, the names of languages cited in etymologies are now given in full rather than in an abbreviated form and these names have themselves been subjected to an overall review to ensure that the most appropriate modern terminology is used.

References are no longer made to hypothetical reconstructed Indo-European forms. Instead, etymologies refer to recorded cognates formed from the assumed base. The detailed ulterior history of a group of related words is consolidated under the entry for one of these words, with cross-references at the other entries pointing to this discussion.

But the most significant changes relate to the analytical content of the revised etymologies, which for the most part update text which appeared in the First Edition of the Dictionary, and therefore represented the state of scholarly knowledge approximately one hundred years ago. This work has been greatly assisted by the publications (both in book and in machine-readable form) and advice of scholars throughout the world. A notable aspect of the current revision is the availability of Anglo-Norman forms of words which the original editions of the Dictionary regarded as borrowings directly from Central French. This has been made possible largely through the publication of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, which has provided systematic documentation of this important link between Old and Middle French and (particularly) Middle English. Further as-yet-unpublished medieval and later documentation has kindly been made available to the Oxford English Dictionary by Dr David Howlett, editor of the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (currently in progress in Oxford), supplementing material which is available in a much-abridged form in R. E. Latham's Revised Medieval Latin Word-list. A full list of major dictionaries and related works which have contributed to the revision of the Dictionary will be published in due course. A summary of the current etymological work may be found in Philip N. R. Durkin, "Root and branch: revising the etymological component of the Oxford English Dictionary", in Transactions of the Philological Society, vol. 97, no. 1, pp. 1-49.

The overall effect of incorporating information on word-forms and meanings from donor languages, together with dates of attestation in those languages wherever possible, is to give a much fuller picture of the process of transmission of individual words into English. These sources also allow the editorial staff to plot contemporaneous borrowings into other languages in Europe and elsewhere, showing that English is part of a network of languages which share in the process of borrowing and semantic development, and that the process of borrowing itself has often been far more complex in particular cases than the Oxford English Dictionary has previously been able to demonstrate.

A typical example of the etymological information which can be adduced from recent work in various languages on the precedents and cognates of an English term is provided by the word magazine. Detailed discussion of the word's transmission history has not previously been available in the Dictionary. The word magazine derives ultimately from an Arabic term meaning ‘a storehouse’, which appears in a post-classical Latin form magazinus in an Italian document dated 1214. The Italian form magazzino (recorded from 1348) is the source of Middle French magasin (recorded from 1409, and from 1389 in the form maguesin). The English word derives from the French, and is first recorded in 1583, in the sense ‘a place where goods are kept in store’. Many of the later English senses parallel earlier meanings in other European languages, but it is of some interest that the meaning ‘periodical publication’ is an English innovation, not recorded in its French form until later. Needless to say, one of the essential components of a viable etymology for a loanword such as magazine is an established record of cultural contact between speakers of the languages involved, as is here the case with Arabic, Italian, and French. Not surprisingly, the Arabic word also appears in various forms in early Spanish.

Words which begin with the letter M in many ways constitute an interesting cross-section of the English language in terms of its etymological origins. In the first revised range (from M to mahurat) it is perhaps surprising that only two words have been continuously part of the language since Germanic times (mad, though with the loss of an earlier prefix, and madder). Four others are Old English terms; two (mægbot and maegth) have been revived by historians and two (Macedonish and Magnificat) are loanwords. It is notable that there are no certain direct loans from early Scandinavian (‘Old Norse’), although three words are either loans from that source or native formations.

Approximately 420 (40%) of the main entries in the first revised range entered English as borrowings from other languages. A quarter of these were borrowed from classical Latin and from post-classical Latin (using the latter term to embrace all Latin writings from late Antiquity to the present). A further thirty-three are classified as scientific Latin; these are principally taxonomic terms created by modern scientific writers from Latin or Latinate elements. Nineteen words derive from ancient Greek.

There are many borrowings from the post-classical Romance languages. French provides almost seventy (including madam, magic, and magnificent), in the earliest cases dating from the years following the Norman invasion of 1066 and the subsequent establishment of Anglo-Norman rule in the British Isles. Five of these were borrowed from Old French, twenty-nine from Middle French (1325-1600), and a further thirty-five from modern French. In addition, a further ten are borrowed from Anglo-Norman.

Borrowings from elsewhere in Europe are well attested: the Netherlands (five), Italy (fifteen), Spain (sixteen, as well as four from American and Mexican Spanish), Portugal (six), and Germany (twenty-one). Examples include macaroni, machete, madrigal, maestro, mafia, and mahlstick.

The revised entries also provide terms from the native languages of North America (e.g. maccarib, macock, and mahala), the Indian subcontinent (e.g. machan, mahant, mahout, mahua), South Africa (e.g. maanhaar, maas, mabela, mahewu), Australia (e.g. Macquarie, and perhaps mado), New Zealand (mahoe), and elsewhere. In some cases, words which could previously only be ascribed to unspecified indigenous languages or language groups can now be traced more precisely to the language of origin (macaca).

The remaining 60% of main entries arose by various word-formation routes within English. Some 28% arose by suffixation, 4% by the compounding of two independent words, and about 12.5% by prefixation. The remainder arose by other methods (such as blending, back-formation, clipping, etc.) or are of unknown or uncertain origin. (These figures should not be taken as representing the full range or number of word-formations within the revised material, as they do not cover the derivation of subordinate entries and of individual senses which developed subsequent to a word's arrival in English.)