Indo-European Words

American Terms with Long Roots

The star (*) before an Indo-European root indicates that the word is hypothetical. Linguists believe that's how the Indo-Europeans said it, but since they didn't write it down anywhere, we can't be sure.

blog

go ballistic

groovy

hacker

hash

Internet

megabyte

pluto

shindig

slacker

subprime

The Story of Indo-European

If you learned a European language in high school you surely would have noticed that a fair number of the vocabulary words sounded surprisingly like English. Their similarity is not a coincidence. Read more.

Sir William Jones and the Common Source

A pivotal moment in the search for an ancestral tongue occurred in 1786, when a brilliant language scholar named Sir William Jones addressed a gathering of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Sir William, one of the very few Westerners of the time to have studied Sanskrit, argued that the resemblances between that ancient Indian language and Latin and Greek were too striking to be the result of chance. Read more.

Language and Change

Different languages evolve in different directions. Even Indo-European languages that are closely related historically have many dissimilar words. Read more.