| I know of no such programs. I doubt very much whether they exist.
The information's available (though often, of necessity, partial); it's
widely dispersed. I know of no one volume that even begins to amass all
the necessary information. There is an Oxford Dictionary of English
Etymology, but all I know about that is it seldom has the information I
try to find in it.
A problem is that the `information' (especially the most interesting)
is often speculative [I'm not talking about popular etymology here, I'm
talking about informed speculation] and - to have any academic
credibility - it has to be presented by the expert who advances the
speculation; so getting it into some kind of database would involve a
huge academic effort to produce a software tool that no one would want
to buy (NB: Radix malorum est cupiditas - => radical, malaise,
essential, cupidity [Greek and Latin ones are fairly easy, but English
words must have hundreds of parents].) A willing amateur couldn't do
it; it's not just a question of taking a known/reliable/finite corpus
of data and putting it on line.
Sorry, I don't think there's a good side to this news [except for those
- particularly academics with a turf to protect/mystify - who wouldn't
want such a database compiled anyway]. It's one of those attractive
ideas that just won't come to fruition (NB, incidentally - `fruition'
has no direct relation with `bearing fruit', besides being derived from
`frui' - to enjoy; the weight of many years of misapprehension, of
course, has made the relation - in a way - more direct [tho' only in
the sense that children clapping their hands keeps fairies alive]).
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| that the widely f�ted on-line OED isn't available to punters. At
present, it's available only within OUP; there are plans to offer
it as a service [not to sell it, either on CD or on any other medium].
I haven't heard of any progress in those plans, but I'm not holding
my breath.
What may confuse people is that the OED _is_ available in a `Compact'
_edition_, with all the same words as the full work, photographically
reduced (I forget the factor - either 4, 9, or 16 to a page). You
read it with a magnifying glass.
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