Today I received a book that I ordered from Amazon that will no doubt feed my love of words. It’s called Dictionary of Word Origins, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. It doesn’t give definitions of words, but instead traces how they came to be in the form that they’re in today, and how their definitions changed over time. I expect that this is a book that I’ll dip into randomly, just to partake of the many tidbits inside. For example, the word “hermit” comes from the Greek word for “solitary”, and it migrated to English via medieval Latin and old French.
While this particular bit of info is a little on the tame side, I know from studying the history of the English language that words can perform some complex gymnastics on the way to their modern forms, so I look forward to digging up those little nuggets of information.