[dredmorbius]

The English etymology is more indirect, but essentially means the same thing, by way of Latin and Greek:

c. 1600, from French syntaxe (16c.) and directly from Late Latin syntaxis, from Greek syntaxis "a putting together or in order, arrangement, a grammatical construction," from stem of syntassein "put in order," from syn- "together" (see syn-) + tassein "arrange" (see tactics).

https://www.etymonline.com/word/syntax

(One of my favourite wwebsites.)

[blattimwind]

> The English etymology is more indirect, but essentially means the same thing, by way of Latin and Greek:

... meaning you can't understand many terms if you only know English, because they are actually french/latin/greek. "Cache" is actually an example of this.

[dredmorbius]

Or, putting on my optimist's glasses: learn enough English etymology, and you'll learn Latin, Greek, German, French, Italian, Hindi, Celtic, Klingon, ...

[matt-snider]

It's really interesting reading up on etymologies like that - thanks for the link!

This is what I meant about the meaning being obscured too much, so it has to be simply memorized as one chunk.

[dredmorbius]

I ... can spend a lot of time at Etym Online. Some fun finds: vodka, pollution, pen, fiction, dough.

[zerb]

What do you think of Wiktionary? That's been my go-to for a long time.

[dredmorbius]

Strictly on a UI/UX basis, it beats most other online dictionaries for not being annoying A.F.

I haven't done a close evaluation, but itcompares favourably generally.

I also use dict (Debian), which is mostly Foldoc and 1913 Webster. As well as several dead-tree dictionaaries & etymological dictionaries. Those stand up surprisingly poorly to online references in several cases, though the OED still proves useful.