Knowing relations between words can help understand their meanings and build a more connected vocabulary network. Here, you can explore parents and offspring and discover the whole family.
- shows how many children or parents the word has
- get the translations and a link
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Sources for Etymology:
- Check "willkur" on DWDS.de
Biggest German Dictionary, great for etymology, usage frequency and collocations) - "willkur" on Wiktionary (English version)
(For etymological connections across European languages. Not always accurate) - Etymonline.com - Origins of English words
My favorite source for the origin of English words.
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Just was reading how the “-kür” in “Willkür” is related to the idea of choice. The “kur” in “Kurfurst” also has the same root apparently. Both are related to a old verb “kiesen” which has a wonderfully obscure Partizip 2 form “gekoren”.
https://www.dwds.de/wb/kiesen#2
Oh yeah, I wouldn’t have known what the actual infinitive of “auserkoren” is for instance.
I was also really surprised to see that it’s related to English “choose”.
That is surprising, i’d never have guessed that either
Wait, but it says that in the dwds-article you linked to. Indo-European root is *geus- with its sense of tasting, chosing. Origin of “gusto”, “disgusting” and German “kosten”.
I guess I’ll add that here as well :)
I don’t know how i missed that. Maybe i didn’t read the whole etymology – I think i saw ” nl. kiezen” and started to wonder if it related to “der Kiez” started reading the etymology of that instead…
It’s definitely a long chunk of text there for this one :).
I’m quite trained at skimming this for the part that I am interested in (the Indo-European root), but that’s just because I’ve been checking it a LOT over the years.
just wanted to mention i searched for willkürlich but this didn’t show up in the suggested words that i could have been looking for…