Searchable ancestry
Thirty-six roots. Hundreds of descendants.
Morphological forensics
Put a word on the table.
Meaning does not stand still
Word archaeology beneath the respectable vocabulary
The Root
Underground.
Follow words through conquest, prayer, scholarship, commerce, error and the streets. Every definition has ancestors; some have criminal records.
Etymology explains a word’s documented history, not its mystical destiny. Reconstructed forms are marked with an asterisk because they are inferred by historical linguists rather than preserved in writing.