English dictionary, thesaurus, translations & etymology

Etymology — The origins of English words

Where do words come from? Trace the origin and history of any English word, from its Latin, Greek or Old English roots through to its modern meaning. Every etymology is sourced.

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From Old English "ha ha," an onomatopoeic exclamation of laughter, found across several Germanic languages.

From Ottoman Turkish, likely adapted from the Byzantine Greek phrase eis ten polin, "to the city" — how local Greeks commonly referred to Constantinople.

From un- + attended.

From Latin cubiculum, meaning "bedroom," borrowed via Late Middle English.

From Middle English bothe, borrowed from an Old Norse word related to Old English "bud" (a dwelling) — the same root gave German "Bude."

From Middle English whosoever, literally who + so + ever, built the same way as whatsoever and howsoever.

From the verb whop (to strike or beat) plus -ing, originally suggesting something that hits hard by its sheer size.

From the older verb whop, meaning to strike hard, plus the suffix -er.

From Middle English holly/holliche, built on whole plus -ly.

From an earlier form holesome, built from whole (in the old sense of "healthy") plus the suffix -some.

From wholesale + -er.

Evolved through a chain of older spoken forms — wo, woa — ultimately tracing back to the same root as the word who, used as a call to halt an animal.

An imitative word mimicking the hissing sound of something moving fast through the air; the "skilled person" sense likely grew out of the related phrase "whiz kid."

Built from white plus the suffix -ing, referring to the fish's pale flesh and the chalk's white colour.

From category plus the verb suffix -ize.

From classify + -ed.

From French classifier. By surface analysis, class + -ify.

A noun formed from the phrasal verb "give away," meaning to hand out for free or to reveal.

Built informally from "free" with the added -bie ending.

From bat + -ing; the stuffing-material sense comes from a related word "batt," meaning a sheet of fibrous material.

A written form of the reduced phrase "want to be," which became a fixture of pop culture slang after Madonna's "Wannabe"-style fan trend took off in the mid-1980s.

From Latin fraudulentus, from fraus, "fraud."

From Latin libra, the Roman unit of weight, whose abbreviation survived even though the English word became "pound."

From Latin denotare, from de- ("thoroughly") plus notare ("to mark").