This paper examines six guides to the etymology of English, written for nonspecialist readers between 1887 and 2009. Four are by etymological lexicographers (two by W. W. Skeat and one each by Anatoly Liberman and Philip Durkin) and two by philologists with strong etymological interests (A. S. C. Ross and W. B. Lockwood). The paper seeks to present their contents, to compare them with each other, and to contextualize them both in the internal history and in the social history of scholarship.

Is French fou ‘bishop’ really fou ‘demented’? Chessmen’s names in Romance languages.
The purpose of the paper is to present and explain the etymology of some chess terms (‘chess’, ‘checkmate’) and the chessmen’s names (‘king’, ‘queen’, ‘bishop’, ‘knight’, ‘rook’ and ‘pawn’) in seven Romance languages. Numerous words referring to chess in Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian and Romanian are analysed and compared so as to show their common history and some interesting linguistic facts that occurred during their formation.

The purpose of this article is to show that the variety and irregularity of the Indo-European ‘crane’ words is apparent rather than actual, and that their derivational history is in fact quite simple. In brief, they can be reduced to only a couple of related PIE lexemes, rather than a whole constellation of “dialectal” forms.