Method
Etymology has a folklore problem: a good story travels faster than the evidence. Lexodus grades every hop of every journey separately, so you can see exactly which part is solid and which part is a guess.
What Lexodus does not claim
No language is the mother of all the others — not Hebrew, not Sanskrit, not Latin. Those ideas are old ones, and historical linguistics set them aside long ago: the world's languages fall into many families with no demonstrated common ancestor. What words do is travel. Coffee came through Arabic and Turkish, chocolate through Nahuatl and Spanish, tea through Hokkien and Dutch, amen through Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Each journey here starts at the oldest form we can name, which is not the same as the word's true beginning. Most journeys end in English; the Into Hebrew words run the other way, tracing what Arabic, Yiddish, Russian, Turkish and English lent to the Hebrew spoken in Israel.
How sure is each step?
The line style on the map matches the grade of the hop it draws.
- Certain
- Standard references agree.
- Probable
- Mainstream view; one stage or route is inferred.
- Possible
- A serious proposal, not consensus.
- Disputed
- Popular claim that specialists reject or can't prove.
A word's overall grade is its weakest link on the road to English (or to Hebrew): a journey is only as trustworthy as its shakiest hop.
How a word moves
- inherited
- Passed down within one language's own history, e.g. Old French to French.
- borrowed
- Taken over through contact between speakers.
- learned (from texts)
- Copied from a written source — usually scripture — by scholars and translators.
- translated piece by piece
- Translated piece by piece instead of borrowed: scapegoat is Tyndale's reading of ʿăzāzēl.
- name became a word
- A person or place whose name became an ordinary word, like bedlam from Bethlehem.
Dates and places
Each year is the approximate earliest attestation of that form in that language, rounded honestly. Each dot sits at a representative cultural center for the language at the time — Jerusalem for Biblical Hebrew, Alexandria for Koine Greek, Vilnius for Yiddish — not at a border. The timeline spaces hops evenly so short modern journeys stay readable; the labels carry the real dates.
Sources
Entries are researched against standard references — the Online Etymology Dictionary, Wiktionary's etymology sections and the dictionaries they cite, and name references for given names — and each word lists what it drew on. Found a mistake? That is exactly the kind of feedback this project wants.