The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition.
2000.
Word History Notes.
Word Histories. In addition to etymologies, which necessarily contain information in a compressed form, this Dictionary provides Word History paragraphs at entries whose etymologies are of particular interest. In these Notes the bare facts of the etymology are expanded to give a fuller understanding of how important linguistic processes operate, how words move from one language to another, and how the history of an individual word can be related to historical and cultural developments. For example, the history of the word alligator involves borrowing from Spanish into English, as its etymology reveals, but the Word History also describes the role of taboo deformation in the history of the word crocodile and in that of alligator as well. Usually the Word History also contains the date at which the word was first recorded in English.
