The Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch or FEW is the principal etymological

Etymology

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...

 dictionary of the Gallo-Romance languages

Gallo-Romance languages

The Gallo-Romance branch of Romance languages include French and the other langue d'oïl dialects, Occitan , Catalan, Franco-Provençal, Gallo-Italic, and other languages - Other possible classifications :...

 (such as French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

). It was the brainchild of the Swiss

Swiss (people)

The Swiss are citizens or natives of Switzerland. The demonym derives from the toponym of Schwyz and has been in widespread use to refer to the Old Swiss Confederacy since the 16th century....

 philologist

Philology

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

 Walther von Wartburg

Walther von Wartburg

Walther von Wartburg was a Swiss philologist and lexicographer. He was the author of the Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch ....

.

History

The first edition of the FEW, written in German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, was started in 1922, with the objective of tracing the origin, history and change of all words in the French lexicon, including Gallo-Romance languages: Occitan and Provençal

Provençal language

Provençal is a dialect of Occitan spoken by a minority of people in southern France, mostly in Provence. In the English-speaking world, "Provençal" is often used to refer to all dialects of Occitan, but it actually refers specifically to the dialect spoken in Provence."Provençal" is also the...

. Since 1952, the Swiss National Science Foundation

Swiss National Science Foundation

The Swiss National Science Foundation is a science research support organization mandated by the Swiss Federal Government. The SNSF was established in 1952 as a foundation under private law. Its secretariat is based in Bern....

 has supported this ambitious project, with the help of the French Centre national de la recherche scientifique

Centre national de la recherche scientifique

The National Center of Scientific Research is the largest governmental research organization in France and the largest fundamental science agency in Europe....

 (CNRS) since 1983. The first edition of the FEW was finished in 2002.

Structure

The FEW comprises 25 volumes, 160 fascicles, and more than pages.

• Volumes 1–14: Latin, Greek, and some pre-Roman onomatopoeic etymology.
• Volumes 15–17: Germanic
  Germanic peoples
  The Germanic peoples are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group of Northern European origin, identified by their use of the Indo-European Germanic languages which diversified out of Proto-Germanic during the Pre-Roman Iron Age.Originating about 1800 BCE from the Corded Ware Culture on the North...
  
   etymology.
• Volume 18: anglicism
  Anglicism
  An Anglicism, as most often defined, is a word borrowed from English into another language. "Anglicism" also describes English syntax, grammar, meaning, and structure used in another language with varying degrees of corruption.-Anglicisms in Chinese:...
  
  s.
• Volume 19: Orientalia
• Volume 20: loanword
  Loanword
  A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
  
  s from other languages (Breton
  Breton language
  Breton is a Celtic language spoken in Brittany , France. Breton is a Brythonic language, descended from the Celtic British language brought from Great Britain to Armorica by migrating Britons during the Early Middle Ages. Like the other Brythonic languages, Welsh and Cornish, it is classified as...
  
  , Basque
  Basque language
  Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...
  
  , Hebrew
  Hebrew language
  Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
  
  , and so on).
• Volumes 21–23: Material of unknown or uncertain origin, loanwords from other Romance languages, as well as corrections and new research.
• Volumes 24 and 25: New revisions of the letter "A".

There is a much-abridged version, the , published by the Presses Universitaires de France.

External links

• Presentation about the FEW at atilf.fr