Definition of "etymon" [et•y•mon]

• An earlier form of a word in the same language or in an ancestor language. For example, Indo-European *duwo and Old English twā are etymons of Modern English two. (noun)
• A word or morpheme from which compounds and derivatives are formed. (noun)
• A foreign word from which a particular loan word is derived. For example, Latin duo, "two,” is an etymon of English duodecimal. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "But then, instead of calling the etymon "Hindi-Urdu cakor" or "Hindustani cakor," they invented a completely spurious distinction between what look to the untutored eye like two different preforms, apparently because their transcription system for Hindi uses c for the unaspirated \ch\ (presumably using ch for the aspirated consonant), whereas the one for Urdu uses ch for the same phoneme (and presumably chh for the aspirated one)."
• "I think maybe the key here is that while people will go in with degree's in relevant stubjects, others, such as etymon maybe, will go in with just the poor and simple smarts!!"
• "In fact, I'm starting to get the strong notion that the real reason why some Indoeuropeanists like Julius Pokorny had included Sanskrit kapr̥t- 'penis' into his cognate series under the 'goat' etymon was just to make it look less like a substratal loanword restricted to Western Europe and more like a fully attested IE root in order to fill out his 1959 book Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch."