Se denomina etimología al estudio del origen de las palabras, de la cronología de su incorporación a un idioma, así como de la fuente y los detalles de sus cambios estructurales de «forma» y de significado. En idiomas de larga historia escrita, la etimología es una disciplina relacionada con la filología y con la lingüística histórica, que comprende el estudio del origen de las palabras mediante investigación de su significado original, de su estructura, así como de su evolución diacrónica, es decir, posibles cambios ocurridos en el transcurso del tiempo. Asimismo, para obtener alguna fuente directa, por ejemplo la escritura, mediante métodos de lingüística comparativa se pueden reconstruir datos relativos a lenguas sumamente antiguas. Así, por medio de análisis de otros idiomas relacionados, los lingüistas pueden establecer inferencias acerca de la lengua de la que son originarias y de su vocabulario.

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Etymology (/ˌɛt.ɪˈmɒl.ə.dʒi/) is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. By extension, the term "the etymology (of a word)" means the origin of the particular word. For a language like Greek with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during earlier periods of their history and when they entered the languages in question. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about languages that are too old for any direct information to be available. By analyzing related languages with a technique known as the comparative method, linguists can make inferences about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. In this way, word roots have been found that can be traced all the way back to the origin of, for instance, the Indo-European language family. Even though etymological research originally grew from the philological tradition, currently much etymological research is done on language families where little or no early documentation is available, such as Uralic and Austronesian. The word etymology is derived from the Greek word ἐτυμολογία (etumología), itself from ἔτυμον (étumon), meaning "true sense", and the suffix -logia, denoting "the study of". In linguistics, the term etymon is used to refer to a word or morpheme (e.g. stem or root) from which a later word is derived. For example, the Latin word candidus, which means "white", is the etymon of English candid.

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