• genealogy •

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: 1. The ancestral descent of a person or family or an account of such a descent. 2. the study of ancestral descent.

Notes: Today's is a word whose mispronunciation in the US has led to over 37 million instances of its misspelling (geneology) on the Web compared to 248 million correct spellings. One wonders, when does the mispronunciation and misspelling make this word a legitimate US dialectal variant? You decide. Genealogy comes with a normal adjective, genealogical, and adverb, genealogically. A person who pursues the study of genealogy is a genealogist.

In Play: "When Kenny Bunkport isn't talking about his Rolls-Royce, he's bragging about his genealogy." It's like talking to an elite car mechanic moonlighting as a genealogist. The Web has now made genealogical research available to everyone with its worldwide distribution of huge databases. Using it could be dangerous: "In doing research into his family's genealogy, Lance Boyle discovered that his great-great-grandfather was hanged as a horse thief."

Word History: Today's Good Word comes ultimately from Greek genealogia "genealogy", based on genea "family, race" + logos "speaking, discourse, study". We have already seen the root of this word in many words in our series. Genê-> originally meant "to give birth", hence its appearance in our Latin borrowings genus, generate, and genesis. Pregnant comes to us from Latin praegnan(t)s "pregnant" based on prae "before" + gn- "birth", a variant of genê. In Sanskrit we find janati "begets, bears", janah "race", jatah "born" from the same root. In the Germanic languages it became Kind "child" in German and kind, kin.