Project Gutenberg's The Romance of Words (4th ed.), by Ernest Weekley

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Title: The Romance of Words (4th ed.)

Author: Ernest Weekley

Release Date: December 21, 2007 [EBook #23958]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANCE OF WORDS (4TH ED.) ***

Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Stephen Blundell and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Transcriber's Note:

Unique page headings have been retained, marked as [Page Heading]
and positioned prior to the relevant paragraph.

Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.
Significant amendments have been listed at the end of the text.

Greek text has been transliterated and is shown between {braces}.

Non-ASCII characters are represented as follows:
[)a] a with breve
[)e] e with breve
[)u] u with breve
[=a] a with macron
[=e] e with macron
[=i] i with macron
[=o] o with macron
[=u] u with macron
[oe] oe ligature
[/s] long s

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE ROMANCE OF NAMES

"Mr Weekley inspires confidence by his scholarly method of handling
a subject which has been left, for the most part, to the amateur or
the crank."--_Spectator._ THIRD EDITION. 6s. net.

SURNAMES

"Under Professor Weekley's guidance a study of the origin and
significance of surnames becomes full of fascination."--_Truth._
SECOND EDITION. 6s. net.

AN ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF MODERN ENGLISH

"One knows from experience that Mr Weekley would contrive to avoid
unnecessary dullness even if he was compiling a railway guide, but
that he would also get the trains right."--Mr J. C. SQUIRE in _The
Observer_. Crown 4to. L2. 2s. net.

A CONCISE ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF MODERN ENGLISH

The abridgment has not involved any diminution in the vocabulary; in
fact, many new words such as _copec_, _fascist_, _insulin_, _rodeo_,
etc., are here registered for the first time. Large Crown 8vo. 7s.
6d. net.

WORDS ANCIENT AND MODERN

"We cordially recommend to the discriminating rea