The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology

Did you know:
--that the word nice meant foolish or stupid in the thirteenth century?
--that deer once referred to any animal?
--that cumberbund, pundit and bungalow, all relics of the Indian raj, have been in use in English since the 1600's?
--that such words as sandwich, boycott and malapropism take their names from people, both real and fictional?
--that sombrero, which comes to us from Spanish, originally meant an Oriental umbrella?
These are but a few of the thousands of fascinating tidbits to be found in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Etymology. Here the reader will find a clear and brief account of the origins, history, and sense-development of a major part of the modern English vacaburlary, including both basic words and a wide selection of derivative forms.
Begun under the supervision of the late G.W.S. Friedrichsen, this valuable reference book benefits from his many years of experience as an etymologist for the Oxford dictionaries.
About the Author:
T.F. Hoad is a Fellow of St. Peter's College Oxford.

C.T. Onions's Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford, rev. 1969, $45) is the source of this compact version, and for the most part the reductions are carefully chosen, as in eliminating the pronunciations of common words and technical terms. But this work is abridged: e.g., over two former pages, between dickens and dignity, entries for dictaphone, dies non , and dight have been deleted, and these deletions are representative. Secondary information has also been cut from individual entries. The result is a handy and compact desktop reference book, well printed and bound as expected from the Clarendon Press. However, both the original, and Ernest Klein's Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Lanaguage (Elsevier, 1971, $85) are in print, and larger libraries should have them as well. Stephen H. Cape, Indiana Univ. Lib., Bloomington
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.