WORD CONNECTIONS

The word word has a boring, predictable etymology but it still must be accounted for, if only for posterity's sake! It comes from Proto-Germanic wurda, which meant "word", and that comes from Proto-Indo-European were, which meant "to say". And that's it! Well, not quite. Were also gave way to a development in another language family: the Latin term verbum, which also meant "word" but later meant "verb", and, through Old French verbe, found its way into English in the fourteenth century as -you guessed it- verb. So word and verb are connected! It's weird that they come from different families; verbum mostly left descendents in Italic, and wurda in all the Germanic languages, so the overlap we have in English is pretty rare. Word is much more prevalent that verb in usage over time, but neither have particularly outlandish search interest on Google.