English etymology dictionary usable on Windows

Question

There's this video where a guy explains meanings of medical terms:

https://youtu.be/TMy0vJfKvzI?t=178

He explains the word "hypokalemia" as:

• "hypo" - meaning "low"
• "kal" - meaning "potassium" (K)
• "emia" - meaning "presence in blood"

I was wondering if there's a site/software that does this for all words (in english language, not just medical terms).

OS: Windows

Price limit: $100 (per year in case of a subscription model)

Answer 1

A start for a DIY piece might be this dictionary along with its companion for suffixes.

There are a few Python codes at Python codes -- they produce output like:

construct
['con', 'struct']
- prefixes: ['con']
- root: struct
['con']
struct

So combining the definitions from the first link with something like the codes in the second might help answer your question. It also looks like one would want to add a local dictionary for medical and other professional terms.

Best wishes ... cheers, drl

Answer 2

In my experience each dictionary varies in its ability to break the words down, because that's usually not done by an automatic tool but manually by the dictionary's composer.

It's not easy to automate this because some affixes got changed a bit when applying to the roots (most commonly occur when the 2 merging ends are 2 vowels), and sometimes what looks like an affix isn't a real affix. For example -emia actually contains the suffix -ia, but should you split the infix -em- as well? In Latin there are a lot of infixes like -m-, -n-, -an-, -de-... which are almost impossible for the machine to know where to split

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As a result it's better to compare the result from various sources

It seems TheFreeDictionary often does the best work of showing the full etymology. This is what you get for hypokalemia:

[hypo- + New Latin kalium, potassium (from Medieval Latin kali, alkali, potassium, from Arabic qily, ashes, lye, potash; see alkali) + -emia.]

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/hypokalemia

You can click the hypo- and -emia links to get more detailed meanings

Meriam-Webster also gives the same information for hypokalemia but not for many other words

Wiktionary is a good source of etymology, too. It's often the one with most detailed information about a word across languages.

Answer 3

I simply use Google. For instance:

  sophisticated etymology

Google will give you the word origin and detailed analysis.