English File. Teacher Resources, Children's Books, Student Activities for Teachers. Ideas Illustrated » Blog Archive » 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.