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Can the term "etymology" be applied to a phrase or only individual words?


I have always heard the term used in referring to a single word. When browsing questions on this site, I've seen it used applied to entire phrases, and have suppressed the compulsion to edit them and replace the term with origin.



Answer



Merriam-Webster defines etymology thusly:



the history of a linguistic form (as a word) shown by tracing its development since its earliest recorded occurrence in the language where it is found, by tracing its transmission from one language to another, by analyzing it into its component parts, by identifying its cognates in other languages, or by tracing it and its cognates to a common ancestral form in an ancestral language [emphasis mine]



The key phrase there is "linguistic form". Words and morphemes are linguistic forms, but so are sentences and phrases. Sentences and complex phrases are not fixed enough to be really studied in an etymological sense, but common phrases, idioms, and other fixed forms are, so I see no problem with applying the term "etymology" to those things. Furthermore, the boundaries between affix, clitic, word, and phrase are very murky, and I don't see any reasonable criterion for allowing the first three to have etymologies, but not the fourth.


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