Are there resources or tools for "reverse etymology"?

Solution 1:

This can be achieved with a touch of Google-fu.

We want to limit our Google search to search only the site, http://www.etymonline.com/.

From reading the url structure of each result, we notice that definitions all contain ?term=, so can we refine the search with these bits of info:

site:etymonline.com inurl:term

Then, we add a space and the term we are looking for; if it appears in the text describing a word's etymology, we have a hit.

For example, we'd type the following if we wanted to search for phagos:

site:etymonline.com inurl:term phagos

Search results for "phagos"

We are a touch limited in that we must rely on the definitions containing that particular variant. For example, the above search returns 5 hits; however, a search for phagous returns 13 hits despite phagos and phagous sharing a common root.

Hope that helps!

EDIT: I've further played with this and noticed that occasionally it returns search pages which don't really add much.

These can be filtered out as they all contain the expression ?search=, so we can use:

site:etymonline.com inurl:term -inurl:search phagos

For anyone interested in understanding how that works, prepending a - negates the statement so -inurl:search evaluates to AND url does not contain "search".

Solution 2:

Wiktionary maintains descendant lists, but they are far from complete. See e.g.:

• cornu (Latin)
• wódr̥ (PIE)
• watōr (Proto-Germanic)