About Etymology Map
What this is
Etymology Map lets you type an English word and see the languages it passed through on its way here: each stage plotted on a real world map, in the order it traveled, with the word's form and meaning at every step along the way. The goal is to make etymology tangible: not just a list of language names, but an actual journey you can trace with your eyes.
How the data is put together
This is not a hand-compiled reference in the traditional sense. Each entry was researched and drafted with AI assistance (using Claude, from Anthropic), drawing on established etymological knowledge and then structured, stage by stage, into the language, era, and approximate location you see plotted on the map. Entries are reviewed for accuracy rather than published in bulk, and the project favors a smaller, carefully checked collection over a larger, sloppier one. Every entry in the collection has also been fact-checked against reference sources such as the Online Etymology Dictionary (etymonline.com) and the Oxford English Dictionary, and corrected where a source showed the recorded chain was wrong, incomplete, or repeated a popular but debunked folk etymology. Etymology is also a field with genuine scholarly debate in places (word origins aren't always settled science), so entries should be read as a reasonable, well-sourced account rather than an infallible one, and corrections are still welcome.
The collection currently contains a number of words spanning dozens of source languages.
Built with
Etymology Map is built with plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript and is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Each word has its own page, generated ahead of time from the collection, and there are no accounts or sign-ins. A small Cloudflare function adds up the anonymous daily counts described in the Privacy Policy. The world map is rendered using:
- d3-geo: map projections and path generation
- topojson-client: decoding the world's coastline data
- world-atlas: the underlying land/coastline geometry
The typeface is Inter by Rasmus Andersson and the Inter Project Authors, used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and hosted on this site.
Thanks to their maintainers for making these freely available.
Design
This website was designed by Ecem Akbulut, whose creativity and attention to detail brought our vision to life. See more of her work on Behance.
How we choose new words
The site keeps anonymous counts of which words people look at and which searches come up empty. These totals aren't tied to anyone; they simply show us the popular words that are still missing, so we can add them next and keep improving the site. See the Privacy Policy for exactly what is counted.
Feedback and corrections
Spotted an inaccurate etymology, a typo, or a word you'd like to see added? Reach out at [email protected].