Description: The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, Third Edition traces over 13,000 words representing nearly 1,350 basic roots to their origins in Proto-Indo-European, the prehistoric ancestor of English. It is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the history of English and its place within the Indo-European language family.
Brief description: Calvert Watkins is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Linguistics and the Classics, Emeritus, at Harvard University, and Professor-in-Residence in the Department of Classics and the Program in Indo-European Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He specializes in Indo-European comparative linguistics, especially Latin, Greek, Celtic, Hittite, and comparative morphology and poetics. He wrote the "Appendix of Indo-European Roots" for the first edition of The American Heritage Dictionary and has revised it for the third, fourth, and fifth editions.