§3. Part of speech or word class, enclosed in parentheses, is obvious, such as n. for noun, adj. for adjective, interj. for interjection. They are only labeled in case of possible ambiguity. Gender is marked only if there’s an interesting point to make; e.g. critique means “criticism” as a feminine noun, but “critic” as a masculine or feminine noun (depending on the person’s gender). A. Brachet in his Etym. Dict. French Lang. remarked that “[in the case a concrete substantive or noun took an abstract sense] the concrete substantive is often masculine, whereas the abstract was feminine”. This was also observed by non-specialists such as Simone de Beauvoir (“most abstract entities are feminine”, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley). Lack of morpho-semantic justification notwithstanding, that observation serves as a convenient mnemonic, which the reader will be reminded of wherever appropriate in this book.

§4. The keyword or keywords in a mnemonic, which provide a phonetic clue, are underlined. For example, the mnemonic for the headword vite (“quickly”) is “he has a quick wit”.

§5. Two or more headwords are in one entry (i.e. paragraph) if they belong to one lexeme ^[5] or one is derived from another, and their frequencies are not too far apart, and their spelling forms and meanings are not too different. They are listed in a position according to the frequency position of the first of these words in the Lexique corpus. Within this entry, the more frequent headword is given first. For example, tâche (“task”) and tâcher (“to try”) are two headwords in one entry, which is listed in the position according to the frequency of tâche, and tâche is given before tâcher because tâche is more frequent than tâcher; blessé and blesser are in the same entry positioned in the book according to the frequency of blessé, and blesser is given after blessé due to the lower frequency of blesser. (Normally a simple past participle of a verb would be omitted from this book. But blessé is included as a headword because of its relatively high frequency and a somewhat interesting note: it is a false friend of English bless.) Note that not all forms of the same lexeme are grouped under one headword; those with significantly different meanings, with stem changes, or with a large frequency difference may still be listed separately, if they warrant inclusion at all.

§6. The word “root” is only used to refer to the root of a word, synonymous with “stem” in most contexts, not to the source or origin of a word or etymon, as used in some other literature.

§7. Some common etymological rules are briefly outlined below. To remember the word, reverse the etymological evolution. Many English words came from Old French, whose ancestor is Latin. Once such a word entered English, it did not go through as much phonological change as in French, thus better preserving the original Latin form.

• The characteristic French oi (pronounced /wa/) has a number of sources. A prominent one is Latin long e (long means a full usually stressed vowel, by convention marked with a macron diacritic, which is omitted here for simplicity): e.g., regem (“king”) > roi; sedere (“to sit”, source of sedentary) > seoir (root of asseoir); tela (“web”) > toile (“cloth”). Other sources include the short i, as in fides (“faith”) > foi, and a long i in front of a guttural, e.g., nigrum (“black”) > noir; digitus (“finger”, Latin g pronounced as /ɡ/) > doigt. In short, when you see oi, try changing it to e or i to see if a cognate in English can be recognized.
• Latin ca to French che or cha: e.g. caballus (“horse”) > cheval.
• Latin o to French ou: e.g. tormentum > tourment (“torment”).
• Latin ct to French it, Latin cl to French il: e.g. lac (“milk”), lactis (“of milk”) > lait; lactuca (“lettuce”) > laitue; abstractus (“abstract”) > abstrait. Essentially c changed to i, because it went through c > g > j > i; the fact that g sometimes is pronounced like j in English makes the development less surprising.
• French é- often corresponds to English e- or e plus a consonant, which almost always is s, sometimes with a subsequent loss of e-: e.g. French forêt vs. English forest, dépouiller vs. despoil, école vs. school. In fact, other French vowels with a diacritic mark have this property as well, so that the mark serves as a clue that a consonant was omitted during the development from Old French or Latin to Modern French but preserved by English. For example, â in tâche corresponds to as in English task, while a in tache (“stain”) remains as a; ô in ôter maps to ous in English oust and so the word won’t be mistaken for English otter. Of course there are some words that don’t fall into this category, such as élude (“to elude”, “to avoid”), where prefix é- simply means “away”. But sometimes you can still try changing é- to ex- to find a match in English..

Needless to say, it takes some practice to make good use of etymology in learning new words. For example, you’ll need to think of or mentally reverse the development of the word in history (from oi to e or i, é to es or s), try splitting a word in different locations (pénombre into pén- + ombre instead of pé- + nombre), among other tricks. Hopefully this book offers essential if not minimal help in this regard.

Tip There are times when it is not obvious whether an English word exists that is related to a given word in another language. For example, cuisse as a French word means “thigh” and, as a rare English word, means “armor to protect the thigh”. But the latter hardly rings a bell to a general reader. Fortunately, Google, like many other search engines, provides a site-specific search that can help us. In this case, we can limit the search to an English dictionary website and see all (or most) of its pages that mention the non-English word, with search keywords like site:dictionary.com cuisse. One of the search results is the page for the word Quixotic, and we quickly find that the name of the protagonist in the famous Cervantes novel Don Quixote actually has a meaning; it’s named for “thigh”. This information, or rather knowledge, certainly helps you remember the French word cuisse better than using the rare or obsolete English word cuisse alone. In case of French mèche (“candle wick”; “fuse of a bomb”), we quickly find its Latin etymon to be *micca according to Wiktionary or any French etymological dictionary. A site-specific Google search for its Latin etymon with keywords site:dictionary.com micca, returns a web page (among others) that mentions English match (the igniting device). Indeed, match and mèche share the same Latin word as their origin, a fact that greatly helps us remember the French word. When Wiktionary or any other source does not list the multilingual descendants of the etymon of the French word being studied as in the case of micca, or as in the case of cuisse lists unhelpful English descendants (such as coxa, “part of an insect’s leg”), checking to see all that an English dictionary has to say about the French word or its etymon sometimes can reveal a helpful English word-French word relationship, which otherwise would require a lot of thinking or trial-and-error to uncover.

§8. Some words have many meanings. But only the basic ones are given, and if possible to determine, the more common meanings are given first, unlike in most dictionaries where the basic or literal ones are listed before the derived. Different meanings are separated by semicolons instead of commas.^[6] After all, this is not a dictionary primarily for meanings, but instead for etymology as well as mnemonics to facilitate self-study of vocabulary. Which meaning or meanings are basic or are the reason for inclusion of this word into the Lexique word frequency list in that ranking position is not always easy to determine. For example, the word botte, ranked 1751, has meanings of “boot”, “bundle” and a few others. Only “boot” and “bundle” are included based on the fact that Google Translate ranks these two meanings high in frequency, and that a few basic French dictionaries (see References above) omit the others. Unfortunately, not all words are obvious, and a best-effort guess will have to be made.

§9. Usage examples are generally short and clear. Inclusion is often evaluated according to the frequency on Google Ngram. Idioms are occasionally included if they are frequent, and easy to interpret (i.e. from the literal to the current meaning). In the examples, a slash (/) indicates replaceable options. For example, je regarde la maison / la télé (“I look at the house / watch TV”). The translation in the parentheses will have the slash as well, but may not separate only the replaceable parts (in the above example, you don’t say “I look at TV” so “watch” must be added).

§10. Cognates are two or more words, each in its own language, which are regularly (i.e. following a common pattern or according to certain rules) derived from another common word (etymon) in a different language. This book traces word origin up to Latin, occasionally beyond Latin or to other languages. If a common word is found only in a remote ancient language such as Proto-Indo-European, for practical purposes, cognation is generally not acknowledged, but sometimes is briefly mentioned if it helps with word study. Cognates are not doublets, which are two words, both in the same language, that are derived from another common word in a different language. Technically, cognates are distinguished from loanwords, which are borrowed. If we use > and < to denote “developing into” and “deriving from”, respectively, and suppose French word F < Latin word L < Proto-Indo-European word PIE > Proto-Germanic word PG > English word E, we can say that F and E are cognates (as in the case of English do and French faire, from PIE *dʰeh₁-). On the other hand, primarily as a result of the Norman conquest of England in year 1066, a large number of English words directly came from Old French, which is the ancestor of Modern (as well as Middle) French, close to Latin. If both a French word F and an English word E are from one common Old French word, technically the English word can only be considered a loan or borrowing from Old French because Old French is not the proto-language of English. This book, however, may still loosely call E and F cognates since the word cognate itself is already not so strictly used among educated English speakers that are non-specialists. In this sense, sucre and sugar are considered cognates in this book as they are both from a common Old French word.

§11. If absolutely needed, pronunciation is indicated with International Phonetic Symbols, most of which are obvious. Those few an American reader may not be familiar with are /æ/ as a in map, /ɛ/ as ea in dead, /ə/ as a in canoe, /ɔ/ as o in joy, /θ/ as th in thin, /ð/ as th in that, /ʃ/ as sh in shy, /ʒ/ as s in usual, /j/ as y in yes, /tʃ/ as ch in china, /dʒ/ as j in joy. But not all these symbols are used in this book.

§12. The book assumes no strict format for each entry. Free text format is the best option to provide appropriate amount of usage notes and warnings, such as “Not to be confused”, “false friend”, “Note the first meaning, which may not be easy to guess”, to list a few. Unlike other sources that utilize etymology to assist in vocabulary study, this book makes a great effort to not miss any apparent disconnection between etymology and modern meaning of the word, and failing that, explicitly acknowledges it, usually followed by a best-effort mnemonic, as in “The meaning of ... may be due to ...”, “It’s not clear how the sense .... Use a mnemonic such as ...”. Even a seemingly casual mention of an interesting fact (as in “It’s interesting that ...”) is meant to strengthen the learner’s memory.

Everything done in this book is an attempt to achieve one goal only: help you remember the words. This is particularly helpful in initial encounter with a new word, when you use this book to gain advantage in the form of a clue or hint in order to avoid a completely blank mind when seeing the word again not long after you have learned it. But in the end, the reader is still required to study the words, combined with a large amount of reading or listening, which provides a rich context to the otherwise isolated word study. Etymology or mnemonics may indeed become a burden instead of an aid without genuine hard work.

For the usage frequency table based on the Lexique corpus and used by this book, my contact information, and other information, please visit http://yong321.freeshell.org/lfw/

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^[1] Cognates are words in different languages that are derived from the same word in their common parent language. Technically, they are different from loan words. This will be further explained later.
^[2] Alison Matthews and Laurence Matthews’s Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters, and Michael Gruneberg’s Spanish by Association, doing an excellent job as intended, provide good examples of memory by mnemonics only.
^[3] In this book, underlined text refers to the word or words that serve as the key in the mnemonic or a “linkword” as some people call it.
^[4] Lemma (lemme in French) is the canonical or dictionary form of a word; e.g., go is the lemma for goes, went, going, gone.
^[5] Lexeme is the set of words comprising the lemma i.e. canonical form (see above) and various inflected forms; e.g. go, goes, went, gone, going form a lexeme.
^[6] Most dictionaries list two words that happen to be spelled the same in two separate headword entries. This book merges them into one entry or paragraph, separates their meanings with a semicolon and points out that they are two distinct words.