Entries are in clear prose, with Greek terms transliterated into Roman spelling, and pronunciations added for difficult headwords. The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology is different on both counts - it is reasonably priced, and it is written in a way that is easy to consult without losing its scholarly integrity. There are other, more formal, dictionaries of etymology available for example in Europe Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, but they are frequently difficult for the non-linguist to understand, and they are uniformly expensive. (The best and most scholarly is probably John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, but I would also mention The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, which has longish articles on a small range of key words.) There are quite a number of books dealing with the origins of individual words, but most are highly selective in their choice of terms and they are variably reliable. Chambers have added the book to their stable of works on the language that includes the idiosyncratic and famous Chambers Dictionary and the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary, a new edition of which has also just come out. It has the same text as the original from the H W Wilson Company and indeed, to judge from the printing, seems to be a facsimile. This work is really going around under an alias, as it’s a British edition of the 1988 Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, a respected work from the US which until now has been available in the UK only by a pricey purchase from a transatlantic bookseller.
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