Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary - etymology

 noun  (plural -gies)  Etymology: Middle English ethimologie, from Anglo-French, from Latin etymologia, from Greek, from etymon + -logia -logy  Date: 14th century  1. the history of a linguistic form (as a word) shown by tracing its development since its earliest recorded occurrence in the language where it is found, by tracing its transmission from one language to another, by analyzing it into its component parts, by identifying its cognates in other languages, or by tracing it and its cognates to a common ancestral form in an ancestral language  2. a branch of linguistics concerned with etymologies  • etymological adjective  • etymologically adverb