Antiacademy English Dictionary

One of worst problems we find in lexicography is etymology: the difficulty, sometimes the impossibility, of tracing rationally the origin of vocables may demotivate us. You may become a lexicographer, without specializing as an etymologist. But, you never busy yourself in lexicography with a disregard of what is proposed as the etymon of words. The most unworthy dictionaries are the unetymological ones, because of their disorder and confusion. An objectivized work must be diversely principled. One of these principles is the distinction between the literality of a word and its metaphorical uses, which, in most cases, may be ascertained by etymology.