Are there resources or tools for "reverse etymology"?

Question

EtymOnline is an excellent resource for online etymology searches. If, however, I am looking for lists of words sharing a given Latin, Greek or other root (which I call "reverse etymology"), I do not know which tool I could use. Do you know any?

The only thing I could think of is, if I had access to an offline etymology dictionary, I could then perform a full-text search into its content.

Robb · Accepted Answer

This can be achieved with a touch of Google-fu.

We want to limit our Google search to search only the site,
http://www.etymonline.com/.

From reading the url structure of each result, we notice that definitions all contain ?term=, so can we refine the search with these bits of info:

site:etymonline.com inurl:term

Then, we add a space and the term we are looking for; if it appears in the text describing a word's etymology, we have a hit.

For example, we'd type the following if we wanted to search for phagos:

site:etymonline.com inurl:term phagos

Search results for "phagos"

We are a touch limited in that we must rely on the definitions containing that particular variant. For example, the above search returns 5 hits; however, a search for phagous returns 13 hits despite phagos and phagous sharing a common root.

Hope that helps!

EDIT: I've further played with this and noticed that occasionally it returns search pages which don't really add much.

These can be filtered out as they all contain the expression ?search=, so we can use:

site:etymonline.com inurl:term -inurl:search phagos

For anyone interested in understanding how that works, prepending a - negates the statement so -inurl:search evaluates to AND url does not contain "search".

RegDwigнt · Answer

Wiktionary maintains descendant lists, but they are far from complete. See e.g.:

cornu (Latin)
wódr̥ (PIE)
watōr (Proto-Germanic)

Mitch · Answer

The American Heritage Dictionary (used to be online, no more) had great etymology links back to the root of a word, which then had a link to all the words derived from the root. (so you could go backward and forwards in time).

Those old pages are available through the 'wayback machine' at

http://web.archive.org/web/20080209175233/www.bartleby.com/61/

AHD (at that archive site) also has accompanying articles for Indo-European and Semitic roots, and lists of those roots which then link forward to derivatives:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080211183126/www.bartleby.com/61/IEroots.html

Seems to be slow, but likely to be exactly what you want.

(A comment points out that the dictionary is still online, but it just doesn't offer the same list of IE roots or clickable etymology.)

Colin Fine · Answer

Not online, but I picked up a second-hand copy of Pokorný's Indo-European Dictionary some years ago, and I often refer to it for this. I'm sure that scholarship has moved on since, though.

David James · Answer

https://www.etymonline.com/word/*ad-?ref=etymonline_crossreference

As above, currently the roots are hotlines as well. Basically, you can search on a root word or particle and it shows all of the modern words derived from that root. Try searching for *per- in the search box.

Santropedro · Answer

This misses many hits, but still gives a lot of results:
METHOD 1:

1) Replace the word "still" for the word you want in the following link:

https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/still&limit=500

2) to filter bad results, do ctrl+f "still" (and variants that you suspect to match), those results will give you lots of words that are descendants.

METHOD 2: same as method 1, only to explain what the weird link means:
1) go to the "still" page on wiktionary
Should get you here:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/still

2)Click "what links here" (probably in the left side bar)
Should get you here:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/still

3) Click "500" to try to see all the results in the page.

4) do step "2" of METHOD 1.

laylinguist · Answer

There is a useful resource out there https://www.rabbitique.com that can help achieve just that. It is also multilingual, so you can search words in any language and then it finds the root and cross-lingual relatives.

Answered by laylinguist on September 27, 2021

Are there resources or tools for "reverse etymology"?

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