Wikipedia:WikiProject Linguistics/Etymology

Welcome to the Etymology Task Force! This task force is a part of WikiProject Linguistics, and is aimed at improving Wikipedia's coverage of etymology. The scope of this task force includes articles about etymology itself and related topics (e.g. etymology, loanword), articles about the origins of particular words (e.g. List of U.S. state name etymologies, names of the Greeks), and etymology sections within articles on other topics (e.g. Ginkgo biloba).

Participants
If you wish to participate in WikiProject Etymology, please add your name to the list below. You can do so by adding the Wikitext   (or   if you would like to insert a comment about who you are or your areas of expertise) to the end of this section. You can also add User Etymology to your user page, and your name will automatically appear in the Etymology Task Force participants category.
 * - Native Hebrew Speaker; Loves Germanic Languages And Especially Latin
 * 17:19, 28 January 2012 (UTC) - Native Romanian speaker; interested especially in ancient Dacian and Thracian etymologies
 * — I know a lot about Ancient and Koine Greek, and Classical Latin, and a little about old Germanic languages (Old English, Old Norse, Gothic). Pester me with questions if you have any.
 * – Deeply into Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, Altaic, and Algonquian among others, proto languages in general. I have a habit of inserting etymologies, or improving them, wherever I see a chance to.
 * - Currently a BA. Ling., for all intents and purposes a hobbyest for anonymity's sake, interested in comparative/socio-historical and theoretical+typological+computational linguistics.
 * - PhD, MArch
 * - fluent in English, advanced in French, learning Korean, knows some German, Spanish and Swedish. Creating my own conlangs.
 * - Indo-Europeanist, lifelong etymologist.
 * - Celtic languages
 * - Native Bahasa Indonesia speaker
 * – Iranian languages, Arabic, English
 * 17:19, 28 January 2012 (UTC) - Native Romanian speaker; interested especially in ancient Dacian and Thracian etymologies
 * — I know a lot about Ancient and Koine Greek, and Classical Latin, and a little about old Germanic languages (Old English, Old Norse, Gothic). Pester me with questions if you have any.
 * – Deeply into Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, Altaic, and Algonquian among others, proto languages in general. I have a habit of inserting etymologies, or improving them, wherever I see a chance to.
 * - Currently a BA. Ling., for all intents and purposes a hobbyest for anonymity's sake, interested in comparative/socio-historical and theoretical+typological+computational linguistics.
 * - PhD, MArch
 * - fluent in English, advanced in French, learning Korean, knows some German, Spanish and Swedish. Creating my own conlangs.
 * - Indo-Europeanist, lifelong etymologist.
 * - Celtic languages
 * - Native Bahasa Indonesia speaker
 * – Iranian languages, Arabic, English
 * – Deeply into Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, Altaic, and Algonquian among others, proto languages in general. I have a habit of inserting etymologies, or improving them, wherever I see a chance to.
 * - Currently a BA. Ling., for all intents and purposes a hobbyest for anonymity's sake, interested in comparative/socio-historical and theoretical+typological+computational linguistics.
 * - PhD, MArch
 * - fluent in English, advanced in French, learning Korean, knows some German, Spanish and Swedish. Creating my own conlangs.
 * - Indo-Europeanist, lifelong etymologist.
 * - Celtic languages
 * - Native Bahasa Indonesia speaker
 * – Iranian languages, Arabic, English
 * - Native Bahasa Indonesia speaker
 * – Iranian languages, Arabic, English

Open tasks

 * Put on the talk pages of articles within the scope of the project.
 * article improvement
 * Add etymologies to the articles in Category:Articles with missing etymologies, or improve those in Category:Articles with incomplete etymologies; tend to Category:Stub-Class etymology articles and check Category:Suffixes for missing etymologies.
 * help clean up and reference our many frayed lists of etymologies. Help organizing the category structure and the "etymological dictionary" part of Wikipedia into an accessible format.
 * accessibility and standardization
 * help maintaining Portal:Linguistics contributing etymological material.
 * develop standard guidelines for etymology sections for WP:MoS (Guide to layout).
 * collaboration with wiktionary: Wiktionary has wikt:Category:Etymology and contains extensive material in the wikt:Appendix: namespace, such as wikt:Appendix:List of Proto-Indo-European roots. Wikipedia needs a portal or navigation aid to facilitate access to this material as well as that on Wikipedia itself.
 * Add wiktionary on articles dealing with specific etymologies. Conversely, link to these articles from wikisource using wikt:Template:Wikipedia.

Current projects

 * At the moment, a number of editors are trying to standardize the etymologies for words ending in -logy. If you want to be involved in this project, please join the discussion on the talk page of -logy.

Featured content [[Image:LinkFA-star.png]]

 * List of U.S. state name etymologies
 * Macedonia (terminology)
 * Names of the Greeks

Good articles

 * Arab street
 * Dump months

Articles needing attention
Please feel free to list here whole articles or sections of articles where the treatment of etymology requires particular attention.
 * Please check out new article on Robert Pembroke. Cheers! --Technopat (talk) 18:02, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
 * etymological dictionary
 * Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch
 * Tahash–accuracy of use and interpretation of sources is controverted. 45 centuries of semantic change represented. Needs expert evaluation.  --Michael Paul Heart (talk) 06:07, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Please check the stub Meal ticket (idiom), which I created. I can't contribute because it's out of ma area of expertise, in fact I created the article because I wanted to know about the subject. Asinthior (talk) 16:00, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Tamil loanwords in Biblical Hebrew and the related Tamil loanwords in other languages appear to have some pov issues around tamil nationalism, and the former is of very poor quality (the grammar is spotty, loanwords are cited only transliteration, sometimes unvocalised, and sometimes seemingly inconsistent with the grammar suggested by the translation). Several of the examples also seem to be stretched at best and, one of the cited works also calls several of the examples provided by one of their other sources "highly controversial", something the article does not bring up Tristanjlroberts (talk) 14:39, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Run it up the flagpole; lacks both an etymology section and references. Firestar464 (talk) 05:52, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

New articles
Please feel free to list newly created etymology-related articles here (newest at the top). Interesting or unusual etymologies can be suggested for the Did you know? box on the Main Page; see Template talk:Did you know.
 * Please check out new article on Robert Pembroke. Cheers! --Technopat (talk) 17:58, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Has anyone seen the Classical article? It was a disambiguation page but I've beefed it up a bit and it now attempts to cover the etymology of the word and explain how the different meanings of the word are related.  Maybe you could say it is being etymological about its disambiguation. Yaris678 (talk) 17:30, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

WikiProject Linguistics template
If an entire page is within the scope of the task force, the corresponding talk page should be tagged with the template.

The task force uses the standard WikiProject assessment criteria. For the class parameter, use, and for the importance parameter, use.

Etymology section template
If only a part of an article is within the scope of the task force (e.g. an etymology section), use the template.


 * The class parameter has three possible values, "good", "incomplete", and "missing".
 * good is for articles whose etymologies are complete and reliably referenced.
 * incomplete is for articles where an etymology is given, but is unreferenced, or only one etymology is given when there are multiple possibilities.
 * missing is for articles that don't give an etymology, but should.
 * The importance scale uses the usual importance values (Top/High/Mid/Low/NA), but is assigned in a slightly different way from other WikiProjects. It is based on how many other articles link to the article. This can be found by clicking "What links here", and is mapped to importance as follows:
 * top is for articles with more than 250 references to them (i.e. more than 5 pages of links in the "What links here" page)
 * high is for articles with more than 50 references, or more than 1 page of links in the "What links here" page
 * mid is for articles with 10 or more references
 * low is for articles with less than 10 references

User template
The template User Etymology can be placed on the user pages of members of the project.

Other templates
The template Etymology may be used to format etymologies within article text.

Categories
Articles about a particular word's etymology should be placed in Category:Etymologies or one of its subcategories.

Articles dealing with the field of etymology itself belong in Category:Etymology

Resources

 * The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edition (2000) is available online at education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/; Indo-European roots at ahdictionary.com.
 * Julius Pokorny's Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (1959) and other Indo-European etymological resources are available online at www.indoeuropean.nl. The availability of the website is unreliable; it's very often down.
 * Online Etymology Dictionary
 * Dictionary.com, whose entries are based on the 2006 edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, has etymologies for most English words.
 * The Tower of Babel has a number of etymological databases compiled by Sergei Starostin and others, but note that many are not widely accepted.

Related projects

 * WikiProject Linguistics