📜 Etymonline Word Etymology Scraper

🚀 Pull word etymologies from the Online Etymology Dictionary: headword, etymology essay, century of origin, related words.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-07 · 📊 11 fields per record · 50,000+ word etymologies · headword, part of speech, etymology essay, related cross-references, century of origin

The Etymonline Word Etymology Scraper pulls word histories from the Online Etymology Dictionary, the most cited free source for English word origins. Output includes the headword, part of speech, etymology essay (HTML and plain text), summary, century or period of origin, related cross-reference words, and direct URL to the source page.

The dictionary covers 50,000+ English words and phrases with etymologies tracing roots through Old English, Middle English, French, Latin, Greek, Norse, and beyond. The Actor has two modes: search by keyword to discover related words, or look up a specific list of words directly.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Linguists, writers, content marketers, NLP/ML pipelines, vocabulary apps, language learners, journalists	Linguistic research, word-of-the-day newsletters, vocabulary apps, NLP training corpora, content writing on word origins

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📋 What the Etymonline Word Etymology Scraper does

Five filtering workflows in a single run:

• 🔍 Search mode. Search a keyword and return ranked word results.
• 📚 Lookup mode. Pass a list of words and pull each one's etymology directly.
• 📜 Full essay text. HTML and plain-text etymology with cross-references resolved.
• 📅 Century detection. Heuristic extraction of the period a word was first attested.
• 🔗 Related words. Cross-references parsed from the body.

💡 Why it matters: clean, server-side filtering and fresh data on every run.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon: a 3-minute walkthrough showing how to go from sign-up to a downloaded dataset.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
maxItems	integer	10	Records to return. Free plan caps at 10, paid plan up to 1,000,000.
mode	string	"search"	search or lookup.
query	string	"hello"	Keyword to search across the dictionary.
words	string	newline list	Direct word lookup list.

Example: search words related to language.

{
    "maxItems": 50,
    "mode": "search",
    "query": "language"
}

Example: look up specific words.

{
    "maxItems": 10,
    "mode": "lookup",
    "words": "hello\nworld\nlanguage\netymology"
}

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📊 Output

Each record contains 11 fields. Download as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
🔤 word	string	"hello"
📛 headwordDisplay	string	"hello (interj.)"
🏷️ partOfSpeech	string	"interj."
📜 etymologyText	string	"greeting between strangers, especially through telephone..."
📜 summary	string	"greeting between strangers..."
📅 centuryFirstAttested	string	null
🔗 relatedWords	array	["hallo","holla","ahoy"]
🔢 relatedCount	number	3
🔗 etymonlineUrl	string	"https://www.etymonline.com/word/hello"

📦 Sample records

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
📚	50,000+ words. Most cited free etymology source online.
📅	Century detection. Heuristic period extraction for time-of-first-attestation analysis.
🔗	Cross-references. Related words parsed automatically.
⚡	Fast. 100 lookups in under a minute.
⚖️	Public source. Free public reference dictionary.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Filters	Setup
⭐ This Actor	$5 free credit	50,000+ words	Live per run	search or direct list lookup	⚡ 2 min
Manual etymonline browse	Free	Manual	Live	Web only	🕒 Manual
OED API	$$	Larger but paywalled	Live	Yes	🐢 Subscription
Wiktionary scraping	Free	Mixed quality	Live	DIY	🐢 Days

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Find the Etymonline Word Etymology Scraper on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick filters and maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start.
5. 📥 Download. Grab results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

📰 Content + Newsletters "Word of the day" content Vocabulary newsletter content Etymology-driven blog posts Trivia and curiosity articles	🎓 Education + Apps Vocabulary builder apps Language-learning supplements Etymology games Student reference tools
🤖 NLP + ML Etymological feature engineering Train word-history classifiers Build linguistic-history embeddings Corpus enrichment	🔬 Linguistics Research First-attestation studies Loanword analyses Period-of-origin distributions Cross-language tracing

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🔌 Automating Etymonline Word Etymology Scraper

Control the scraper programmatically:

• 🟢 Node.js. Install the apify-client NPM package.
• 🐍 Python. Use the apify-client PyPI package.
• 📚 See the Apify API documentation for full details.

The Apify Schedules feature lets you trigger this Actor on any cron interval.

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows.

🎓 Research and academia Computational linguistics Reproducible word-history snapshots Course materials Cross-period corpora	🎨 Personal and creative Personal vocabulary databases Etymology blogs Side projects Newsletter content
🤝 Non-profit and civic Cultural literacy outreach Educational accessibility Free reference compilation Heritage-language preservation	🧪 Experimentation Train word-history classifiers Prototype etymology chat agents Build linguistic visualizations Test text-mining pipelines

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🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open a ready-to-send prompt in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity
• 🅒 Copilot

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🧩 How does it work?

Search mode finds words related to a keyword via the dictionary's search index. Lookup mode fetches each word in your list directly. Each match returns the parsed etymology page.

📚 How many words are in the dictionary?

50,000+ English words and phrases, with new entries added regularly by the maintainer.

📊 How many fields per record?

11, including word, part of speech, etymology essay, summary, century of origin, related words, and source URL.

📅 How accurate is century detection?

Heuristic. The Actor extracts the first matching \d{2,4}c. pattern from the etymology text. Always verify against the source for citations.

🔗 Are related words bidirectional?

No. Relations are extracted from the current page's body. Reverse relations may not appear.

🔁 Can I schedule runs?

Yes. New entries are added regularly; weekly schedules capture additions.

⚖️ Is this data public?

Yes. Etymonline is a free public reference dictionary. The Actor reads only public pages.

💳 Do I need a paid Apify plan?

No. The free plan covers preview runs.

🆘 What if a word isn't in the dictionary?

The lookup is skipped silently with a debug log. Etymonline covers most common English words but isn't exhaustive for rare/specialized vocabulary.

🌐 Does it support languages other than English?

No. The dictionary tracks English words; entries reference foreign-language roots but only English headwords are indexed.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

Etymonline Word Etymology Scraper connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Make - Automate multi-step workflows
• Zapier - Connect with 5,000+ apps
• Slack - Get run notifications
• Airbyte - Pipe data into your warehouse
• GitHub - Trigger runs from commits
• Google Drive - Export datasets to Sheets

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

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🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form to request a new scraper, propose a custom data project, or report an issue.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Online Etymology Dictionary, its maintainers, or any cited reference work. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open data is collected.