The Hutchinson Dictionary of Word Origins

Authoritative etymologies of hundreds of English words, including recently coined terms.
One particular development of the new world was an interest in the words themselves. Scholars began to ask the question already asked above: where do words come from? More precisely, what was their original meaning, and how have they evolved? The learned term etymology was coined (from Greek) to describe the study of word origins and meanings. Certain scholars set themselves up as specialists and produced either dictionaries with etymologies or purely etymological dictionaries...