Word.ws English Dictionary

quasi-etymological

quasi-etymological adjective: based on faulty etymological grounds or reasoning; employing the techniques of etymology but not in a rigorous, scholarly, or accurate manner.

Adjective

quasi-etymological (not comparable)

  1. Based on faulty etymological grounds or reasoning; employing the techniques of etymology but not in a rigorous, scholarly, or accurate manner.
    • There was argument, public, private, and bar-parlor, with heated championship of one term or another on near-scientific, quasi-etymological, and a number of other grounds, but gradually one term began to dominate this philological gymkhana.1951, John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, published 1954, page 41

Origin of quasi-etymological

From quasi- + etymological.

Questions about quasi-etymological

What does quasi-etymological mean?
Quasi-etymological means based on faulty etymological grounds or reasoning; employing the techniques of etymology but not in a rigorous, scholarly, or accurate manner.
What part of speech is quasi-etymological?
Quasi-etymological is an adjective.

Words near quasi-etymological in the dictionary

  1. quasi-dictator
  2. quasi-dictators
  3. quasi-differentiable
  4. quasi-divinity
  5. quasi-easement
  6. quasi-etymological
  7. quasi-fascist
  8. quasi-fascists
  9. quasi-federalist
  10. quasi-governmental
  11. quasi-governmentally

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: quasi-etymological (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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