A Linguistic Treasure Box

English is a magpie language. Not content with its own nest, it happily ransacks others to expand its vocabulary and, historically, has depended on the generosity of foreign invaders. Book after book has been written on the subject. There have been general overviews (David Crystal’s English as a Global Language), dictionaries of derivations (John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins), concentrations on origins of particularly fascinating words (Craig M. Carver’s History of English in Its Own Words) and, the font of all citations, the Oxford English Dictionary. Poke an English word and it bleeds history.

Since the fifth and sixth centuries, when the Germanic-language tribes known as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes moved to Britain from the Continent, elbowed aside the Celts and cobbled together Old English as the base of a new language, English has benefited from an infusion of other Germanic tongues, of Latin-fuelled Romance languages...