Etymology has been largely neglected since the beginning of this century. Professor Yakov Malkiel here sets out to rescue it from its fate. He enquires into the style, structure, presuppositions, and purposes of etymological enquiries over the last two centuries, and sets them against the practice of etymology in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. He also examines the complex and changing interrelationship between etymology and general linguistics in recent times, with the intention of revitalising etymological research. Professor Malkiel is undoubtedly one of the most distinguished practitioners of the discipline, and brings to this work a remarkable breadth and depth of scholarship. Wide-ranging and imaginative, Etymology will be welcomed by all historical linguists and Romance linguists.

"...Malkiel has important and refreshingly unpolemical things to say about the rise and decline of trends in scholarship and about the intrinsic worth of etymological research." Speculum-A Journal of Medieval Studies

"The writing of a broad synthesis of the etymological discipline could hardly have been entrusted to a more prominent philologist and linguist than Yakov Malkiel....Malkiel's book is destined to become a vade mecum of the etymological trade for years to come because of its exhaustive scope, its cogent analysis of past scholarship, its intelligent assessment of the current crises and the hope it holds out for a future resurgence." Frede Jensen, English Language Notes