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WIKTIONARY VIA KAIKKI / WIKTEXTRACT

Imported dictionary evidence

SOURCE-IMPORTED · UNREVIEWED

These are source reports, not reviewed *SET-U ancestry. A list of templates or numbered etymologies is not an ancestor chain. Scholarly disagreements remain in the original source text.

35,981 English word records · 45,491 etymology sections in this online subset

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1 source section across 1 headword matching “Shell”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.

Open the permanent entry for shell →
shellEnglish (en) · Unnumbered etymologySource text

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *(s)kelH- Proto-Indo-European *skol-yeh₂ Proto-Germanic *skaljō Proto-West Germanic *skallju Old English sċiell Middle English schelle English shell From Middle English schelle, from Old English sċel, sċell, sċiell, sċil, sċill, sċyl, sċyll, from Proto-West Germanic *skallju, from Proto-Germanic *skaljō (“shell; husk; rind; peel”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kelH- (“to cut; to separate, split”). Cognates Cognate with Dutch schil (“bark, rind, skin; crust; shell; slice”), Danish skæl (“scale; dandruff”), Faroese and Icelandic skel (“shell”), Norwegian Bokmål skjell (“shell; scale”), Norwegian Nynorsk skjel (“shell; bivalve; scale; carapace”), Gothic 𐍃𐌺𐌰𐌻𐌾𐌰 (skalja, “brick, tile”), French écaille (“scale; shell”), Friulian scae (“scale”), Italian scaglia (“scale; flake, sliver; splinter”); also Breton killi (“grove”), Cornish kelli (“grove”), Irish coill (“forest, wood”), Manx keyll (“forest, wood; grove, plantation”), Scottish Gaelic coille (“forest”), Welsh celli (“grove”), Latin scalpō (“to scratch; to carve”), Ancient Greek σκᾰ́λλω (skắllō, “to hoe, stir up”), Albanian çel (“to open up; to sprout; to hatch up; to rise”), Lithuanian skelti (“to crack, split”), Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Russian скала́ (skalá, “cliff, rock”), Czech skála (“rock”), Polish skała, skáła, szkała (“rock”), Slovak and Slovene skala (“rock”), Ukrainian скала́ (skalá), ска́ля (skálja, “cliff, rock”), Armenian քաղել (kʻaġel, “to pick; to gather; to mow”), Sanskrit कॢप् (kḷp, “to order; to manage; to perform; to create; to cut”). More at shale. Doublet of sheal. * (computing): From being viewed as an outer layer of interface between the user and the operating-system internals.

Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗

From Wiktionary contributors; extracted by Tatu Ylonen / Wiktextract / Kaikki.org. Extraction source · CC-BY-SA-4.0. Selected source text is reformatted for display; language and section identity are retained.

Source dump: 2026-10-01 · Extraction: 2026-10-30. These dates identify a dump snapshot, not an individual page revision.

Snapshot checksums and coverage
SOURCE SHA-256
5ff2c072f8099f2d2ce484bd6957bf179f046d2ad37bc36555edf8bb84cb5291
CORPUS SHA-256
c4c2a77325141846709230e11c2959332acd630d53e52905b72d36211251b081
IMPORT RUN
73216b9a9b78ed3830994bf853103716f5a4dc57099e371e9f8fdc468facca26
SUBSET SELECTION
English-only: shortest normalized query first, then binary lexical order; complete word-language and case-variant groups only. This is a bounded online subset, not the full acquired corpus.

INDEPENDENT SOURCE LIBRARY

More sources for this spelling

These are spelling matches, not a claim of identical senses or agreement. Historical accounts retain their own editions and limits; none is automatically promoted into reviewed ancestry.

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2REVIEWED RESULTS
0WORD DOSSIERS
0HISTORICAL NODES
0SOURCES
2CLAIMS
0WITNESSES
01

MODERN ENTRY POINTS

WORD DOSSIERS

0

No reviewed record in this collection contains “shell.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.

02

ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY

HISTORICAL FORMS

0

No reviewed record in this collection contains “shell.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.

03

WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED

CLAIMS & DISPUTES

2

SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 1

openproposedposition text

Why was a shellfish named through the mouse family?

The exact resemblance that carried the mouse-derived Latin word to a mussel is not securely identified in the reviewed record.

CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 1

RANK 88GRADE Aranked reveal

Mussel and muscle were once spelling twins.

Middle English could spell the shellfish muscle. The shellfish and anatomical words ultimately belong to Latin’s mouse-derived musculus family, though the naming resemblance itself is not fully recoverable.

04

BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES

SOURCES

0

No reviewed record in this collection contains “shell.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.

05

FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS

ATTESTATION WITNESSES

0

No reviewed record in this collection contains “shell.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.

06

SEARCH IS DISCOVERY, NOT PROOF

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