Let's take the word hippopotamus as an example. This is an ancient Greek word and it contain two meanings one which is from the word hippos, which means horse and the other from the word potamus which means river. As you can see the word hippopotamus literally means river horse. If you look at words like telephone, telescope, microphone, and microscope, you will find that all of them originate from the Greek words tele (long distance), micro (small), phone (speak), and scope (look).

The word etymology itself comes from the Greek word ?t?µ?? or étymon which means true meaning and ????? or lógos, which means word. When we try to understand the etymology of any word, we will have to go over the history of its linguistic form. In doing so, we will start tracing the source of the word and through this process we will come to know of the roots of the word. The roots of a word could belong to a totally different language. Etymological research has resulted in discovering the word roots of many words which were traced all the way back to their origin, such as the Indo-European language family.

Studies in etymology deal with understanding how a word has come into a particular language, making word comparisons and understanding how the word has evolved over time to the way it is presently spoken.

Earlier, the study of etymology was based on philological tradition. Philology deals with the study of ancient texts. Today, etymological research has come far from it's initial methods and you will find such research being done in language families where there is little or no early documentation, for example etymological research has been done in languages such as Uralic and Austronesian.

Etymological research has come to understand that there are different types of word origins. Etymologists use a number of methods to study the origins of words, some of which are philological research, comparative method and semantic change.
About the Author:Joushua James - Origin Of Words