Word for Word

An unusual book that traces the origins of words that come from common sources but scarcely resemble one another at all, like armadillo, arthritis, arithmetic, harmony, reason, and ritual or bucolic, bovine, beefy, buttercup, bugle, buffalo, and Presbyterian.

Believe it or not, each of these sets of words goes back to a common ancestor, and sixty such relationships are examined in detail in Word for Word; the etymology of each word is given, as far back as its Indo-European root.

There is so much information densely compacted into the pages of Word for Word that, for the sake of convenience in quickly finding details, the listings in the 105-page Index refer to individually numbered lines in the text. The Index lists all words discussed, including entries, source words, and meanings.