Etymonline English Dictionary

I hate to sound cheesy and typical and say this is the best app ever but it is lol 😂 I honestly use this app first and when I don’t have access to the app, I use the web browser. To truly understand the definition of a word the etymology is crucial, on top of knowing the suffix and prefix. When I first saw the etymology of the word, nice I was like oh my goodness !!!! it’s basically ignorant, stupid foolish, which makes total incomplete sense when you think about how being nice gets you nowhere. Anyway, the subscription I think is like two bucks a month but the year I think might be like maybe 15 or 20 bucks or something for the year it’s well worth it. I value honesty, and it may sound dramatic, but having the etymology of words, I have found it to be so crucially important in my life. It’s just amazing and I wish I would’ve found this sooner in any case. This sounds so dorky but I mean it.

The modern world has no shortage of dry wit, but Etymonline is both funny and incisive, making the expository paragraphs more compelling by their unique voice. The app itself is bare-bones, but easy to use. The cross-references in the entries are sometimes haphazard, but the ones borne of winding asides are reliably the most interesting, and make for a fun garden path to wander down. I frequently consult it in conversation with family and friends for a steady supply of amusement. (Did you know a “lord” is a bread-guard?) Nothing quite connects one to our linguistic forebears and punctures our pretensions about the hoary past like learning that their silly word-games are our standard English. (Robins are so named because the personal name alliterated with “redbreast;” the people aren’t named for the birds.) In sum, this is one of my most-used apps. It becomes a game all its own, the Pac-Man of language nerds. Follow the trail of tidbits and find the ghosts still wandering through the halls of diction.

I am almost 50 and I remember as a kid quite often hearing, “ Look it up yourself in the dictionary and you will never forget it !”. Now enter the “Google Smart Age”, as I like to call it. I work with a lot of 20 somethings .... ask them anything... most of them literally have to “ google it”, to give you most answers. I asked this college kid at work the other day , the definition of “Hypocrite”.....he googled it came back with a simple definition. Then I showed him this site and we dug into that word and the roots of it , usage in language etc.... a few hours later this kid actually responded “ Wow... this site is Amazing... I feel as if I have the knowledge of this one word as good as my PHD English Teacher ... when I recently had a discussion with her about the word in class”..... what happened in our society over the last 40+ years not teaching kids how to Think !!!!... just an AWESOME SITE !!!