The etymologies-the word histories -have long been treated as a kind of step-child among the elements of a dictionary. They are often given with many confusing abbreviations and symbols, and it is very rare that the full story of a word, even the main line of its ancestry, is carried as far back as present knowledge would permit.
At the inception of the project we enlisted the aid of Calvert Watkins of Harvard, who is one of the great Indo-European scholars. Working with him became so exciting that we decided to make every effort to exhibit the total ancestry of our language.