Visualizing English Word Origins

Via: http://ideasillustrated.com/blog/2012/04/01/visualizing-english-word-origins/

I have been reading a book on the development of the English language recently and I’ve become fascinated with the idea of word etymology — the study of words and their origins. It’s no secret that English is a great borrower of foreign words but I’m not enough of an expert to really understand what that means for my day-to-day use of the language. Simply reading about word history didn’t help me, so I decided that I really needed to see some examples.

Using Douglas Harper’s online dictionary of etymology, I paired up words from various passages I found online with entries in the dictionary. For each word, I pulled out the first listed language of origin and then re-constructed the text with some additional HTML infrastructure. The HTML would allow me to associate each word (or word fragment) with a color, title, and hyperlink to a definition.

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