
Who Did This? (2017) - dredmorbius
https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/bio
======
ssivark
Love this. Etymonline is one of my favorite websites, and often my first-
choice dictionary (even though its word corpus is smaller than other
dictionaries), because IME understanding the roots and origins of a word help
me remember and use it better. It's the one dictionary I _enjoy_ looking up.

Just in case someone hasn't seen it before... ;-) If you're an etymonline fan,
I would venture that you might find interesting "You’re probably using the
wrong dictionary" by James Somers:
[http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary](http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary)

~~~
egypturnash
I can’t upvote this enough, that dictionary link is so wonderful. I’ve had the
1913 Webster’s dictionary on my Mac for years thanks to that blog post and
it’s so useful for helping to find just the right word.

~~~
dredmorbius
Webster-1913 is also included in the default dict/dictd English-langauge
dictionary on Debian, Ubuntu, etc.

[https://packages.debian.org/buster/dict-
gcide](https://packages.debian.org/buster/dict-gcide)

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sswaner
I loved this bio. In particular, it reinforced the value of blogs and websites
that are independent of closed systems like Medium, Facebook, etc. This site
exists as a passion and gift to the world. With the Internet Archive it is
much harder for this to disappear compared to serving the same content on
Facebook.

It was a joy to read the bio of the creator and to learn of the interests,
background and desires that led the the dictionary. Adding to my list of
favorite sites.

------
smichel17
A handful of sentences that really stood out to me:

> Ask me why I did it and I'll give you a solid answer. And tomorrow I'll give
> you a different one. They're all correct. I tease myself along through the
> drudgery with a combination of guilt and vanity. If I did this right, I can
> say at the end of life I bundled up my worst qualities -- obsessiveness,
> impudence, narcissism -- and made something vaguely useful with them.

> It is useless to try to hide these things. Any site done by one person is
> going to be in some deal eccentric and reflect the ego and cultural
> limitations of the creator. It is liable to the sort of blunders only an
> individual can make; because if you had had another mind riding shotgun with
> you you wouldn't have gotten so far lost or missed that turn. A dictionary
> written by one person hangs the maker's mind naked in public, exposed in all
> its intellectual flab and moles.

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longtom
I've been several times disappointed by the lack of references in this
dictionary. For example, it claims the meaning of some words shifted around a
particular time without linking to data that proves so.

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FabHK
Quick tip: On DuckDuckGo, you can search on etymonline with !ety (or !etym).

~~~
myself248
You can also add search shortcuts to pretty much any browser now. I just did
it in Firefox, it's as simple as this:

Go to etymonline.com and right-click in the search box itself.

Hit "Add a keyword for this search". In the dialog that pops up, I put "ety"
as the keyword.

That's it. Now when I open a new tab, I can just type

ety pathos

And there we are.

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sixdimensional
I was lucky to have a class on linguistics when I was in school. It was there
where I learned the concept of etymology and realized how interesting the
origin of words is.

I am constantly amazed at how relevant it is every day. I am a currently an
enterprise architect, and every day, the "naming things is hard problem" is
front and center.

Understanding how the use of words developed historically, say, even within a
single organization/culture, and how to research that is an amazing skill and
really helpful. That is in addition to understanding how to use tools like
etymonline or other famous etymological dictionaries to find out the origins
of even old words, that we have been using for thousands of years.

You'd be surprised by the insight, and even sometimes inspiration you find
when you see the origins of words. Things are not always as they sound/seem.

Thinking practically, consider the implications of these skills for data
modeling/data dictionaries, business glossaries, naming variables, etc. Really
valuable and interesting!

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lordleft
I love this site; I refer to it constantly. Thank you for creating and tending
to it so lovingly.

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hprotagonist
etymonline is a perpetual delight.

The maintainer answers emails fast, too: i asked him to provide a RSS feed for
blog posts 6 weeks ago and it was live 90 minutes later!

~~~
edjrage
Just nitpicking - it's _her_ (at least according to the linked page, second
last paragraph).

~~~
FearNotDaniel
> When I played World of Warcraft I found I generally chose a rogue. Human.
> Female.

Doesn't say anything about the author's actual sex, gender or preferred
pronouns in real life. Only the character they like to play in a video game.

In the footer though, it does say:

> © 2001-2020 Douglas Harper

Make of that what you will.

~~~
phyzome
If the author played a female orc, would edjrage have assumed the author was
an orc? :-)

~~~
myself248
On the internet, no-one knows you're a human...

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dghughes
I always seem to end up on etymonline.com at least once per day. Another good
site is Omniglot.com.

~~~
myself248
At the extreme other end of the function-vs-fun scale, I find myself on
OneLook.com for wildcard searches in the way that most modern search engines
don't seem to grok anymore.

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dang
It's a great resource for HN:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=etymonline&sort=byDate&type=comment)

~~~
dredmorbius
This brings a grin:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22082281](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22082281)

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avindroth
This website is responsible for my SAT vocabulary. I could never memorize word
lists, but I could remember words if I looked it up on etymonline.

Some of the interesting words I still remember:

Maverick

Confluence

Applause

Inculcate

Assiduous

Ever since then it’s been a pleasure guessing at word roots of many new words
I face.

~~~
redis_mlc
FYI: that word list would be considered pretty basic by pre-Internet high
school students.

Having said that, I've read some WW2-era high school math textbooks that had
college-level chapters on polynomials.

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btrettel
On this subject, what are some other good website about pages?

