The average English speaker knows around 50,000 words. That represents an
astonishing diversity – nearly 25 times more words than there are individual stars
visible to the naked eye in the night sky. And even 50,000 seems insignificant
beside the half a million recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. But looked at
from an 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 terms were formerly one and the same word. The deep prehistory of
our language has nurtured little word-seeds that over the millennia have
proliferated into widely differentiated families of vocabulary.
The purpose of this book is to uncover the often surprising connections between
elements of the English lexicon that have become obscured by centuries of
language change – the links in our word-web that join such unlikely partners as, for
instance, beef and cow, bacteria and imbecile, and bishop and spy.