The average English speaker knows 50,000 words. Yet stripped down to its origins, this apparently huge vocabulary is much smaller, derived from Latin, French and the Germanic languages. Each year an estimated 800 new words enter the English language: acronyms (yuppie), blended words (motel) and foreign terms (savoir-faire). The Bloomsburry Dictionary of Word Origins provides a concise history of over 8,000 of the most commonly used words, spanning from derivations as simple as \"a\" and \"one\" from \"an\", to the most obscure lexical relations. laid out an A-Z format with detailed cross-references, written in an authoritative and accessible style, this is a valuable historical guide to the English language.
