English Word Origins

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Ideas Illustrated is a blog devoted to "exploring the intersection of information, design and programming." Mike Kinde, the author of the blog, in an effort to expand his skill set, presents a variety of different infographics he has created. His posts also provide an analysis of both the data source/s and the final design.

As an example, the entry Visualizing English Word Origins offers up an intriguing graphic that takes a passage of text and isolates the origin of each word. By colour coding individual languages, he produces a visual representation of the influence other languages have played in the evolution of English. With the help of Douglas Harper's Online Etymology Dictionary he constructs a word origin infographic (shown above) using an excerpt from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. This one passage consists of 73% Old English words and the remaining 27% represent words from a dozen other languages. It is another fine example of how colour can help convey complex information.


The infographic uses the following colour code:

PINK Old English

RED Middle English

ORANGE Anglo-French

LIGHT ORANGE Old French

PALE ORANGE Middle French

YELLOW Classic & Medieval Latin

BLUE Old Norse

LIGHT BLUE Danish light blue

GREEN Scandinavian

LIGHT GREEN Indigenous American

GREY Dutch

Greyellowhite #41

Aurora Borealis