Dictionary of Word Originです。高校教師として勤務していた時、ALTから紹介された本です。語源を勉強するということは「単語の意味の幅」が容易に掴めると同時に英語の語源を形成するギリシャ語やラテン語にも明るくなる効果があります。

Introduction

The average English-speaker knows aound 50,000 words. That represents an astonishing diversity- nearly 25 times more words than there are individual stars visible to naked eye in the sky. And even 50,000 seems insigificant beside the half a million recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. But looked at from a historical perspective,that diversity becomes more apparent than real. Tracing a word's development back in time shows that in many cases what are now separate lexical items were formerly one and the same word. The deep prehistory of our language has nurtured little word-seeds that over the millenna have proliferated into wodely differentiated families of vocabulary.