Learning Italian Words Through Etymology and Mnemonics
A New Approach to Vocabulary Study

Learning Italian Words Through Etymology and Mnemonics is the third book in the “Learning Foreign Language Words” series (the first being Learning Spanish Words, the second Learning French Words). It makes use of etymology to help you remember Italian words, and failing that, suggests a mnemonic. This is the only book on the market that combines these two approaches. The amount and depth of etymology is carefully chosen to be practical and not overwhelm an average reader. The suggested mnemonics aim to help an educated English-speaking person. An adult or young adult who likes learning vocabulary with some word analysis instead of rote memory will find this book helpful and a joy to read. With about 3000 words selected from 10000 in the itWaC corpus sorted in frequency order, this book can be used either as a dictionary or for leisure reading. The mnemonics for the words are particularly helpful for short-term memory needed in taking an exam, while the etymological, cultural, or other interesting information provided for most of the words will serve you for years to come.

Different Study Methods 

⎢                                ⎡ Etymology ⎤
               ⎡ Word analysis <-⎢           ⎥-> this book
               ⎢                 ⎣ Mnemonics ⎦
Study method <-⎢
               ⎢
               ⎣ Rote memory (e.g. flash cards)

Sample Pages

The main text of this little dictionary arranges the words in the order of their usage frequency, per the itWaCItalian Web Corpus, "a 2 billion word corpus constructed from the Web limiting the crawl to the .it domain", which can be downloaded here (warning: big file) frequency list. Each headword is preceded by the sequence number (frequency rank) of the word in the list. The book is being updated on a daily basis. As of December 2025, the book has 222 pages (not including the index), with the word sequence number up to 3515.

Author Biography and Contact

I have a Ph.D. in Chemistry and M.A. in Philosophy. I have taught myself linguistics with an emphasis on morphological and phonological changes in the history of Romance languages, and have learned to read in multiple European languages. Please contact me by email to yong321@yahoo.com or by filling the form with comments or corrections.

Availability

This book will remain unpublished indefinitely. In the meantime, the full manuscript can be requested on a donation basis. With a $15 or more donation through Venmo (use my venmo username @Yong-Huang-13 or email yong321@yahoo.com), Zelle or Quickpay, Paypal, or by other means, you will receive a copy of the e-book, on the condition that the received copy is only shared within your immediate family. In the future, a few days before Christmas, you will receive an indexed, updated version of the book for free, every year.

Brief Timeline and Blog

In addition, I regularly post thoughts to my author blog on Goodreads. Note: This is a blog not about this single book, but about the “Learning Foreign Language Words” series.


Yong Huang
July 2022 — December 2025