HOW WORDS MOVE.
HOW MEANINGS MUTATE.

Middle English salt continues with stable spelling into modern English while pronunciation changes.

The material sense remains while figurative savor, sailor, and chemical-class senses develop.

Old English sealt loses or reshapes inherited inflection while the stem stabilizes as Middle English salt.

The condiment and preservative meaning remains central.

English emoticon truncates and combines emotion with icon.

The representative-image component supplies the visual-sign side of a keyboard expression.

English icon borrows Late Latin īcōn with English stress and vowel adaptation.

Image and likeness extend into religious, symbolic, cultural, and computing senses.

Late Latin īcōn borrows and adapts Greek eikōn.

The representation, image, and likeness field remains central.

Latin ēmovēre contains ex- / ē- “out” alongside movēre “move.”

The outward-direction prefix supplies removal and displacement to the movement verb.

Middle English algorisme / augrim stabilizes as the historical headword algorism with regularized spelling and pronunciation.

Calculation with Hindu-Arabic numerals remains central; later use becomes chiefly historical.

Middle English leggen / leyen stabilizes as lay while pronunciation and spelling converge on the modern form.

Putting or setting down remains central while many constructions and figurative uses develop.

Old English lecgan continues into Middle English with palatal and spelling developments represented by leggen and leyen.

The causative set-down meaning remains stable.

Old Turkic kayguk develops into Turkish kayık through documented Turkic consonant-cluster reduction and vowel history; it does not descend from Inuit qayaq.

The small-boat referent remains central.

English borrowed Latin etymon with learned spelling and English pronunciation.

The source-word sense was retained and generalized across same-language, foreign-language, and derivational sources.

Latin etymon borrowed the Greek neuter noun with direct learned adaptation.

The true or original sense of a word remained the technical referent.

The neuter form ἔτυμον of the adjective ἔτυμος was used substantivally.

“The true” becomes the true sense of a word according to its origin.

French spelling regularized medieval variants such as ethimologie toward étymologie.

A learned word used for titles, word explanations, and wordplay developed the modern linguistic senses.

Old French transmitted the learned Latin form.

Scholarly explanation of a word’s origin continued.

Latin borrowed Greek ἐτυμολογία.

A Greek technical concept entered Latin grammatical tradition.

The compound joins ἔτυμος “true, real” and -λογία “account, study.”

A word’s “true sense” becomes an object of analysis.

The poetic form expands ἔτυμος as ἐτήτυμος; LSJ labels the relationship reduplication without requiring a separate deeper lexical parent.

The meaning remains true while the poetic form gains expressive or metrical shape.

French adapted Latin etymologicus as étymologique with French stress, vowels, and the learned -ique ending.

The Latin origin-conforming adjective developed the modern French senses “related to etymology” and “conforming to origin.”

Latin etymologicus adapted Greek etymologikos within learned grammatical vocabulary.

The adjective retained the sense of belonging to or based on etymology.

Greek ἐτυμολογικός adds the adjectival suffix -ικός to ἐτυμολογία.

The name of an inquiry becomes an adjective meaning belonging to or based on that inquiry.

English adds the person-forming suffix -ist to etymology.

The discipline name becomes the title of a specialist who studies word histories.

English adds verb-forming -ize to etymology.

The name of the inquiry becomes the act of discovering, stating, or studying etymologies.

The English adjective ends in productive -al under Merriam-Webster’s segmentation.

The suffix marks relation or pertinence.