About
What this site is, and how it is made.
What etymologist.ai is
etymologist.ai is a free, open reference for the origins of English words. For any word in our database you can trace its etymological journey backward through Middle English, Old English, Latin, Greek, Proto-Germanic, and — where the evidence allows — into reconstructed Proto-Indo-European. Where a word has cognates in other languages, we surface them. Where a longer story is worth telling, we publish a full article alongside the structured entry.
Who it is for
Curious readers, students, writers, language teachers, and linguistics enthusiasts. The structured data is intended to be skimmable in seconds; the long-form articles reward a few minutes of attention. We try to be useful both to someone who wants a quick answer and to someone who wants the full story.
How it is made
Entries are generated with the assistance of large language models and then structured into a consistent schema: definition, language of origin, etymological journey, cognates, proto-root reconstruction, and notes on cultural context. We are transparent about model use — this is AI-assisted scholarship, not a replacement for peer-reviewed comparative linguistics. Where scholars disagree, we present the debate rather than pick a side. Disputed reconstructions are marked as disputed.
What we cite
Our entries draw on the established body of etymological reference work, including Pokorny’s and Rix’s Indo-European reconstructions, Watkins’ American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, Douglas Harper’s Online Etymology Dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, and Wiktionary’s collaborative annotations. We do not claim to replace these references; we aim to make their insights more interconnected and easier to navigate. For details on confidence levels and pipeline structure, see our methodology.
A note on honesty
Etymology is part science, part detective work. Some words have a clean paper trail back two thousand years; others vanish into pre-literate mist. We try to distinguish settled scholarship from informed reconstruction, and reconstruction from speculation. If you spot an error, we want to know about it — see Contact.