Google Search Now Includes Etymology

https://www.google.com/search?q=etymology+onomatopoeia

by charlieirish • 13 years ago

100 65 13 years ago

kmfrk• 13 years ago

Has done for a while, but wasn't aware of using the "etymology" query; I used to hit the drop-down on "define:" queries.

Jongseong2• 13 years ago

Some initial remarks after playing around with this for a bit: Currently, this seems to only include the etymology for English words. Proper nouns are not included, except those also used as common nouns, like Newton. Nor are most compound words made up of simpler words or affixes such as mainland, snowman, simply, or even disuse. This is understandable because covering all these cases will dramatically expand the number of words that have to be dealt with, and this is probably the limitation of the original source used by Google for the etymology information, which was probably an etymological dictionary with the usual space constraints. But freed from such constraints, it should be feasible in the future to add in the etymological information for such compounds.

What I like is the tree structure of the presentation. This covers not only compound words but weirder cases of combination of disparate etymological sources—check out discombobulate or typhoon. But the tree structure is misleading in cases like apple, where Dutch appel and German Apfel are indicated as if they were parent forms instead of sister forms to the English apple. The branching should occur between Germanic and the daughter languages to make the relationship clearer. Also, note that this doesn't show the Germanic form for apple—it looks like it doesn't do hypothetical forms, restricting itself to attested forms.

A welcome feature would be being able to click through to different words at each stage of the etymology, to be able to trace through to even earlier stages or to see what other words are descended from the same roots.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

Proper nouns are not included, except those also used as common nouns, like Newton

It has Pyrex, but just says it's an invented word.

Pyrex is invented, but comes from Pyro (Fire) + Rex (King), which makes the use of it for heat proof glass easier to understand.

The new Google feature is really neat. I'm uneasy about these things being built into Google rather than Google pointing people to other websites.

gibwell3• 13 years ago

Google building more and more stuff directly into search has been going on since the early 2000s. Why are you uneasy now?

skj• 13 years ago

I think it would be neat if Google provided some crowd-sourcing to supplement the data it already has.

Maybe modify the graph widget that allows you to suggest a root for any word in the graph.

Jongseong2• 13 years ago

Another example where the tree diagram is incorrect:

https://www.google.com/search?q=etymology+oligarchy

The current tree diagram makes it look like the Greek oligarkhia came from Medieval Latin, not the other way round. The etymological information given below is "late 15th cent.: from Greek oligarkhia (probably via medieval Latin)", so it looks like a bug in generating tree diagrams from the information.

It would be helpful to have the Greek, Persian, Hebrew etc. forms in the original language orthography as well instead of just the romanized transcriptions.

sz4kerto3• 13 years ago

The compiler cannot compile itself yet.

https://www.google.com/search?q=etymology+etymology

alberto_rico• 13 years ago

Try again. That was fast.

sz4kerto3• 13 years ago

I mean it does not display that nice graph.

FreeFull• 13 years ago

Google gives me "late Middle English: from Old French ethimologie, via Latin from Greek etumologia, from etumologos ‘student of etymology,’ from etumon, neuter singular of etumos ‘true.’". It doesn't give the fancy tree diagram though.

NKCSS• 13 years ago

It works for me using Opera Next. Chrome, FireFox and IE: No go :)

jlgreco• 13 years ago

It won't do the word "computer" either, though it does do "compute".

ankit84• 13 years ago

Now I'll wait for a blog post from etymonline.com and wiktionary about how their traffic went to zero.

aaronetz• 13 years ago

As a native Hebrew speaker, I would love to see the reverse lookup. Enter a biblical Hebrew word and see how it propagated to other languages. Two words that I could come up with were leviathan and behemoth, but that was easy since these sound almost the same in Hebrew.

Bharath1234• 13 years ago

It seems they have pre-processed images of etymologies of most of the words and just indexing it.

personlurking3• 13 years ago

There's also the good ol' Etymonline (http://www.etymonline.com/) which I prefer over the Google search.

sz4kerto3• 13 years ago

There were other good ol' sites, calculators, FX rates, maps, dictionaries, timers. If the easiest one is 'good enough', it's going to destroy the rest.

personlurking3• 13 years ago

And just as they merge, so must the ways in which we connect to that information. Type > touch/voice > intuitive/AI/chipped. 'Resistance is futile' ;)

DanielStraight• 13 years ago

Which of course has a !bang on DuckDuckGo: !etym or !etymology

For a good comparison of how much more information Etymonline has, look up the word "silly". Etymonline gives a much better sense of the almost unbelievable shift in meaning over time.

personlurking3• 13 years ago

and, of course, "nice".

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&searc...

agumonkey2• 13 years ago

Chrom(ium|e) supports on the fly request to etymonline.com, e t y TAB and you're there. Very handy.

thom• 13 years ago

You've always been able to search for bugs on Google, silly.

alecsmart1• 13 years ago

It really worries me that whenever Google rolls out a feature within their search results, it destroys a business. For example, earlier currency conversion and dictionary word meanings required using third party sites. Now it can be done directly via their search. I no longer visit the old sites. Now with this, I will be less likely to visit etymonline.com. Quite similar to how including IE by default in Windows lead to lawsuits of unfair competition/monopoly. Is it wrong to believe something similar may happen with Google search.

gibwell3• 13 years ago

Google is in the business of organizing the worlds information and monetizing it through advertising.

If you are in the information business, Google is in competition with you.

ryanhuff• 13 years ago

While I think this is beyond dispute (gathering information for indexing), with some of their more recent moves, we may want to extend that to recognize that Google is also in the content production business.

the_watcher• 13 years ago

Google's job is not to keep those other sites in business. They serve their own users (this is arguable, I know, but I think my point here is clear), by making it easier to access information. This makes my life as a Google user easier, so it's something they should pursue.

austinz• 13 years ago

Looking forwards to the day Google includes electronic component datasheets in its search results and puts all those stupid unusable SEO-gaming datasheet repository websites out of business.

jmpe• 13 years ago

Amen.

If you need an example, Google "TFK426". No, it's not a tuning fork, it's an 8-pin DIL.

Same goes for the brokers: "SAA1084P".

Those are just 2 examples I found last Friday. They're components on an old PLC I need to fix and they're just laughing in my face. I suspect they're opamps but I'll probably never know and I'll end up telling someone to just buy a new system.

Zoomla• 13 years ago

Google is slowly going towards "I'm feeling lucky"-and-you-don't-even-need-a-search-term-but-the-ads-are-still-targeted (http://imgur.com/hiOnsKI). But I wonder why there is no ads on Google's homepage (they often already know what you were looking at).

xatnys• 13 years ago

Neat. Wonder how they're generating those images. Using go + doing it as they're queried maybe (similar to http://blog.golang.org/from-zero-to-go-launching-on-google )?

af3• 13 years ago

startpage.com does not have this "feature".

vermillion9• 13 years ago

It seems more and more clear with every new announcement, that Google has adopted the "embrace, extend and extinguish" strategy and it's taking it farther than what we thought possible in the past.

These are worrisome news for every believer in choice and freedom. Google, a former supporter of free software, is now determined to exert its power to get rid of competitors and then lock us in. Our only option is to not give in to momentary convenience, but to cultivate the habit of comparing alternatives and choosing by ourselves instead.

hajderr• 13 years ago

You mean www.duckduckgo.com ?

vermillion9• 13 years ago

I actually have DuckDuckGo as my default search engine, but as Google extends its reach, we have to find alternatives for other services too. Google's decision to display its own products prominently and bury the rest is downright evil in my book.

gibwell3• 13 years ago

There are many googlers who sincerely support free software, but Google the company is a business that has no particular interest in preserving other businesses or even business models.

Why would anyone expect Google not to eliminate its competitors?

vermillion9• 13 years ago

You're attacking a straw man.

I don't object to Google fighting its competitors, but it must play by the rules. Google is not a country, but part of society and this imposes certain obligations.

icebraining9• 13 years ago

So, what standard is Google extending with proprietary capabilities?

vermillion9• 13 years ago

I never mentioned the word "propietary" in my comment. I said that Google's decision to display its own products prominently and bury the rest is downright evil.

Now that you say standards.. that reminds me of Google's (non-existent) MathML support.

cromwellian2• 13 years ago

Why should open, factual data, require Google to send users to third party websites, thereby increasing the latency and number of clicks for all users? The data for these almost surely comes from openly available word databases.

If I ask my computer or phone for the definition or history of the word 'Foo', I don't want to be sent off to historyoffoo.com as the top link, I just want it to give me the answer, followed perhaps by links to other stuff.

Do you think if you ask what time is it, Google should respond first and foremost that you need to click and go to dateandtime.com to see the answer?

Google's mission is the organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, not to organize only the world's websites into 10 blue links.

The ultimate goal of Google is to built the Starship Enterprise's Computer. Could you imagine Captain Picard's frustration if he said "How long to Starbase Alpha at Warp 9" and the Computer replied "I can't give you the direct answer, but please visit StarbaseMaps.com and it will be able to answer your question."

This becomes all the more clearer if you imagine voice or mobile user, where multi-step latency is huge and queries should be answered in the fewest steps possible. Why it is evil for Google to do this, but not Apple+Siri I can't fathom.

BrandonMarc3• 13 years ago

Does Apple profit from ads embedded in Siri?

mariuolo• 13 years ago

Looks like a normal search to me...

drmarianus• 13 years ago

I'm a little sad it doesn't include the Proto-language root.

shiftb• 13 years ago

My wife has been using this for about a month to help teach Greek and Latin roots to her 7th grade language arts students. It's a great tool for them to use since they already know how to google.

agumonkey2• 13 years ago

All in all, people really seeking etymology data won't use this, I don't think a single website is a reference, so one needs to combine many sources.

Personally I blend etymonline.com, http://www.lexilogos.com/etymologie.htm, http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/, www.wiktionary.org, and others to get a broader view.

This news will be little free publicity for them too, although I'd wish google to include a little set of premade links into his in-search proxy box. That would be a nice little touch, or maybe a commercial pain.

BrandonMarc3• 13 years ago

That would be nice, though I wonder if it would last if the even did it.

It used to be, if you searched for a map, Google would show a link to its own map (with thumbnail) + links to other mapping services (mapquest, maporama, etc). It used to be ...

notjustanymike• 13 years ago

I googled war.

https://www.google.com/search?q=etymology+onomatopoeia#q=ety...

War never changes.

Google Search Now Includes Etymology

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