Languages and literature

摘要

The subtitle of this work is a clue to its nature - the book is not, in essence, a standalone etymological dictionary. Rather, it represents a few sample entries from what the author hopes may be a new way of presenting English etymology. In the work's substantial introduction, Liberman (professor of Germanic Philology at the University of Minnesota) shifts back and forth between reference to "the present dictionary" and "the proposed dictionary", indicating this volume's function as a beachhead and base from which to proceed with a more extensive campaign. Given that the dictionary contains only 55 entries, there is clearly room for expansion in this vein.