Diachronica · historical linguistics for the curious
Where do words come from?
Type any English word. See where it travelled, who passed it along, and what it became in other languages.
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Languages it travelled through
For researchers
The corpus tools, the typological databases, the full family tree.
- KWIC concordance — corpus search across 5 historical periods
- Cognate atlas — Lexibank concept sets across 8,500+ languages
- Typology browser — phonology, WALS features, language types
- By macroarea — Africa, Eurasia, Papunesia, Australia, the Americas
- WALS feature map — pick a feature, see its global distribution
- Language family explorer — interactive D3 view of every documented family, branch, and isolate
- All visualizations — every way I've ever drawn the tree