I love this! I had no idea about the Etymological Wordnet and it probably would have saved me a ton of time developing my app for finding "interesting" cognates: https://etymologyexplorer.com
I've always loved the same thing—finding hidden connections between everyday words. I recently did this with "vain". It comes from Latin vanus, meaning "empty". More obvious with the "in vain" meaning, but the modern day comes from the idea of an exaggerated self image, with no substance behind it. It has a ton of "empty" cognates: vanish, evanescence, vanity (table), vaunt, vacuous, vacuum, vacation, void, devastate, wanton, wane
Yes, this is the site that inspired me! I was frustrated that it was so hard to navigate to cognates (word cousins) or from roots to descendants. So mine is focused on navigating between words like that
If people are interested in diving deeper into etymologies, I made an app that allows you to visually explore all the roots, descendants, or relatives of a word: https://etymologyexplorer.com
Yes, this is the site that inspired me! I was frustrated that it was so hard to navigate to cognates (word cousins) or from roots to descendants. So mine is focused on navigating between words like that
I'm fascinated by the hidden connections in our language—like "galaxy" being connected to "galactose" because of the Milky Way.
I used NLP to convert written etymology paragraphs from wiktionary into a database of words and connections.
Also interesting are the Proto-Indo-European roots, like "h₂enh₁", which is a 10k-year-old reconstructed word meaning "breath", that has about 1k modern day descendants ranging from "animate" and "unanimous" to "anemone".
I've been working on a tool that lets you see connections between words in your own language and one you're learning. It is based on following etymology trees up and back down. It has helped me a lot and I enjoy browsing around in it.
For example you can see the connection between Spanish 'mano' ("hand") and English 'manufacture', 'manipulate', etc.
I made this because I'm really interested in how similar words relate to one another. I used NLP to convert written etymology paragraphs from wiktionary into a database of words and connections.
The most interesting thing has been finding Proto-Indo-European roots, like "h₂enh₁", which is a 10k-year-old reconstructed word meaning "breath", that has about 1k modern day descendants ranging from "nose" to "anemone".
That's interesting about Xanthippe and the fancy-fancy horse names. I had recently learned about the etymology of Hippopotamus (water horse) so I was excited to see another use.
As a plug, I'm really into etymologies as well and made EtymologyExplorer for visually navigating roots and descendants https://www.etymologyexplorer.com/
An app called EtymologyExplorer that allows exploration of word origins.
It shows word family trees in a visual layout. I made this because I'm really interested in how words relate to one another. For example "magnanimous" can be understood through its relatives "magnificent" and "unanimous"
Working on it has been both a blast and a slog (~6 years on & off). I used DL NLP (thanks fast.ai!) to convert written etymology paragraphs into a database of words and connections. The accuracy is roughly 99%. There are about 1.4M words and 1.3M word-pair-connections across 13k languages. The most interesting thing has been finding Proto-Indo-European roots, like "h₂enh₁", which is a 10k-year-old reconstructed word meaning "breath", that has about 1k modern day descendants ranging from "nose" to "anemone".
I'm just started making some revenue from sales of premium (to removes ads), which I'd like to grow. I'm also thinking of adding more visualizations to show interesting connections.