Episode 2 - Dwarf

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I hold in my hot little hands a brand new copy of Anatoly Liberman’s Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology.

Today I’m going to use the word dwarf as a kind of vehicle to describe what I see between this book’s covers.

To begin with let me read to you the full etymology for dwarf as reported in the American Heritage Dictionary:

[from] Middle English dwerf, from Old English dweorh

That’s it, the whole entry.

Compare this with Anatoly Liberman’s information which I estimate to run in excess of 12,000 words of text. I think it’s safe to say that Professor Liberman’s treatment of this word dwarfs the etymologies in other dictionaries.

I’ll get to what he has to say in a moment, but first I want to tell you about the philosophy behind this dictionary of English etymology.

Not all dictionaries are particularly strong on etymology and part of the reason is that etymology takes up valuable space on the page where not all dictionary buyers are as keen on the subject as you and I might be.

Also, even though the word etymology means “the true sense of words,” in practice there is often a lot of opinion involved in what the true history of a word might be. For this reason, as Professor Liberman explains, the compilers of even strong English etymology dictionaries have tended to include etymologies where they themselves were convinced by the research and arguments of experts. But all too often felt justified in claiming an etymology was unknown when there was no clear winner among a host of theories on a word’s background. The result is, that for you and me who don’t know multiple languages alive and dead, we have no idea what the competing theories might have been.

Even when the dictionary editor does believe one line of thinking, we have no way of knowing why he or she believes that.

Anatoly Liberman has taken a different approach. He feels that what we have in English, as far as etymology dictionaries go, lags far behind those of many other languages because past efforts have not brought together and openly sifted-through the various theories and pieces of evidence.

Because he’s been willing to do so, each entry in his dictionary is comparatively huge. Consequently, when finished his dictionary will also be a rather ponderous size.

But it isn’t finished yet.

The book that I cradle in my arms is subtitled An Introduction because in it Professor Liberman treats a total of fewer than 60 words.

That’s not very many by most dictionary standards.

You might even say that it’s a bit of a dwarf of a dictionary that way.


In this, and in my earlier mention, I’ve used the word dwarf to mean something small. That’s certainly its current meaning, and in fact the Oxford English Dictionary first cites the word back in the year 700 as meaning a person of less than normal dimensions.

But Professor Liberman has taken a long view and applied his best judgment to the scraps of evidence that trail back into pre-history and come up with the idea that dwarf didn’t always mean small.

In fact, in some ways in an ancient world view, dwarves were seen on a par with the gods.

What etymology my usual dictionaries do have on dwarf agrees with him that it is an ancient Germanic word. He feels that the evidence points further back to a time when the mythical beings that came to be dwarves were conceived to be helpers to the gods and of normal stature.

Our current mythology associates dwarves with caves and Professor Liberman suggests that this may be because one of the earlier forms of the word dwarf sounded a lot like the then contemporary Germanic word for “mountain.” Imagining a race of beings that lived in caves in the mountains would support their being of a smaller scale.

As I said, his entry for the word dwarf goes on for many pages and I can’t cover it all here.

What’s more, it isn’t always easy going. There’s some deeply academic content that sometimes takes a will to get through.

But Professor Liberman has tried to make it easy. He opens the book with a section called The Etymologies at a Glance where he boils the analysis down to a single paragraph for each word. But once you get interested in a word it’s definitely worth plowing on into the main bulk of the entry because there is obviously more meat there than he could fit into one paragraph.

He also breaks the main entry into somewhat logical parts. In relation to dwarf he spends some time discussing the word’s association to insanity; the ancient thinking being that people who were “a little off” had been affected by the gods—or in this case the sub-gods, dwarves.

When you think that this first portion of Professor Liberman’s Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology holds entries for fewer than 60 words, the hope of ever seeing a full and complete dictionary itself seems a little insane.

But think back to the Oxford English Dictionary. Its first publication took more than 20 years to produce and only went up to the word ant.

To get close to a complete etymology dictionary Anatoly Liberman will need some help, so here’s the help that you can give him.

Convince his publisher that they weren’t insane to produce the thing by buying a copy.

Or, get your local library to buy three.

The etymology gods—or at least their dwarves—will smile on you. Plus it’ll give me more to talk about