words

Linguist Danny Bate with a beginner’s guide to etymology: which dictionaries to use (he’s a Wiktionary man), how to strip a word back to its roots, and how spelling gives away where a word came from. A Y standing in for a vowel usually points to Greek. The CH in chef sounds different from the one in chair because French lent us the two words centuries apart.

Along the way: the math in aftermath is mowing, not arithmetic, and a midwife is a “with-woman”. Nobody is quite sure where dog comes from.