Etymyriad
Etymyriad shows where words come from. Pick a word and it draws a family tree of
its ancestors and descendants, backed by a sourced, citable dataset.
etymology + myriad: a myriad of word origins.
Status
The Indo-European part of Wiktionary is loaded and browsable at
/tree/[lang]/[headword], which draws a bounded family tree around one word.
Architecture
docs/ARCHITECTURE.md covers the architecture, the data
model, and the reasoning behind them. docs/DESIGN.md
describes the UI's visual design.
Development
Prerequisites: Node 22+, uv, git, and a native Postgres server (see the local
Postgres notes in CLAUDE.md).
# 1. Start local Postgres, create the role/database (one-time), apply schema
sudo systemctl start postgresql
make db-init
make db-apply
# 2. ETL (Python 3.13, managed by uv)
cd etl && uv sync
uv run etymyriad all
# 3. Web app (frontend + API)
cd web && npm install && npm run dev
make help lists every target, including db-snapshot and db-restore for
rewinding a bad local load without a full ETL reload.
Licensing
etymyriad carries two licenses: one for the code, one for the data.
- Source code (
etl/, web/, db/): MIT, see LICENSE.
- Derived etymology dataset: CC BY-SA 4.0, inherited from its sources.
(see below)
Data sources and attribution
The dataset is built from:
- Wiktionary: the underlying lexical and etymological content, dual-licensed
under CC BY-SA 4.0 and the
GFDL.
- Wiktextract / kaikki.org (Tatu Ylönen): a machine-readable extraction of
Wiktionary, distributed under the same terms.
Because the dataset is a derivative of Wiktionary, any redistribution of the
data (a database dump, an export endpoint) must:
- Attribute Wiktionary and its contributors.
- Share alike: license the redistributed data under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Indicate changes made during normalization.
On the site, each word's detail card links to its Wiktionary page. Every edge
stores its Wiktionary origin in the edge.anchor column, and the source_ref()
function turns it into a full citation.
UI theme
The site's light/dark color palette is
Flexoki by Steph Ango.
