Surprising Shared Word Etymologies

June 11th, 2021 10 minute read. I find word etymologies fascinating. A little while ago I bought a book called Dictionary of Word Origins which details the history of thousands of words, and in reading it I'm always delighted to learn about the various historical connections between words, especially when the modern forms of the words have little to do with each other. Recently I realized that with the use of a few publicly available datasets I might be able to write a program that would automatically identify surprising shared word etymologies. The first couple datasets I needed were a list of common English words and a database of word etymologies from which I could construct an ancestral tree. A pair of words has a surprising shared etymology if the two words are etymologically related and they have a large semantic distance from each other. What I was left with was a list of mostly interesting and surprising shared word etymologies! The leap from a word meaning "Imaginary" to a word meaning "Fantastic" struck me as odd initially, but apparently it comes from the sense of the word "Imaginary" as "Unreal".