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Rating: 
Summary: A deep dive in the ocean of English words
Review: A bought this book in a very unpretentious manner, thinking it would a mere aditional item in my library, mainly focused on dictionaries and languages. I was totally mistaken.
This is in fact a book that lets you deep-dive in the ocean of the English words and everyone can use it many ways. You can read it all the way to the end, flipping ramdomly all the pages, or you can utilize it whenever you want to search for the very early origin of some English word you just read about.
It is amazing! To go beyond Latin or Greek in the search of the meaning of a word, and almost never be let down by the dictionary, which even includes a English word index to facilitate your search? Yes, and a lot more.
This is one that I truly recommend for everyone interested in learning a little more on the origins of English.
Rating: 
Summary: English-, Germanic-, Greek-centric. VERY disappointing
Review: I bought this book expecting a dictionary which would give equivalents of various lexical items throughout the Indo-European language family, with representation from at least one language from each branch. Instead, what we have here is a book whose title SHOULD have been "Dictionary of English word equivalents in Germanic and Greek". About 95% of the "Indo-European" explained here comes from these languages. Next in frequency is Latin.There are only a handful of references to Celtic, Sanskrit and Russian (only very basic and obvious correlations for the latter), plus only one Iranian word I could find. Armenian? Albanian? Tocharian? Baltic? Anatolian languages? Hah, forget it! This book can only be recommended to those people interested in English or Germanic word origins, rather than those interested in a truly balanced overview of Indo-European. For everything else it is totally inadequate.
Rating:
Summary: An amazing book, taking word histories to a new level
Review: I want to begin this review by disagreeing with the person who wrote that this book is Euro-centric, or Germano-centric. It is, of course, because -- as the cover blurb shouts out -- this is a book about the prehistoric roots of English. Not many English words are derived from Sanskrit or Farsi; there are a number, but nowhere near the number of English words derived from Germanic, Celtic, etc. I would love to see a future book which traces these Indo-European roots in all the known Indo-European languages, but at this point, we have to face the fact that the scholarship still hasn't been done; in many cases it hasn't even begun. (Are scholars in Tehran beginning to grapple with Farsi etymologies, and to trace those etymologies back to Indo-European roots? How about scholars in France?) So, the critic I am disagreeing with has committed the basic sin of book criticism: he has jumped on the authors of the present book for NOT writing the book that he would like to see. Well, they didn't intend to write that book, and they didn't say that they had. What they have done: they have compiled the largest popular collection of Indo-European roots for English words. I have been able to use this book successfully while tracing Thai words which go back to Indo-European roots. (!!) Thai is not an Indo-European language, but it has lots of Sanskrit loan words, and Sanskrit is an Indo-European language. This book is a must-have for anyone interested in linguistics or the histories of words -- I would almost say, for anyone interested in history, period. Highest possible recommendation!!
Rating:
Summary: An amazing book, taking word histories to a new level
Review: I want to begin this review by disagreeing with the person who wrote that this book is Euro-centric, or Germano-centric. It is, of course, because -- as the cover blurb shouts out -- this is a book about the prehistoric roots of English. Not many English words are derived from Sanskrit or Farsi; there are a number, but nowhere near the number of English words derived from Germanic, Celtic, etc. I would love to see a future book which traces these Indo-European roots in all the known Indo-European languages, but at this point, we have to face the fact that the scholarship still hasn't been done; in many cases it hasn't even begun. (Are scholars in Tehran beginning to grapple with Farsi etymologies, and to trace those etymologies back to Indo-European roots? How about scholars in France?) So, the critic I am disagreeing with has committed the basic sin of book criticism: he has jumped on the authors of the present book for NOT writing the book that he would like to see. Well, they didn't intend to write that book, and they didn't say that they had. What they have done: they have compiled the largest popular collection of Indo-European roots for English words. I have been able to use this book successfully while tracing Thai words which go back to Indo-European roots. (!!) Thai is not an Indo-European language, but it has lots of Sanskrit loan words, and Sanskrit is an Indo-European language. This book is a must-have for anyone interested in linguistics or the histories of words -- I would almost say, for anyone interested in history, period. Highest possible recommendation!!
Rating: 
Summary: Great book for language lovers
Review: It's a great book for fans of Indo-European, of course. The other reviewers have commented on that. I must comment on one aspect of the book which is disapointing: the binding. It is the most poorly-bound hardback I have seen recently. Parts of the binding are falling apart. Also, some of the ink transfered from one page to the opposite page. These kinds of flaws should never happen with modern bookbinding technologies. It is a shame that such a wonderful book was let down by the printers. Don't let this stop you from buying it, though.
Rating:
Summary: authoritative English word origins
Review: The original and revised editions of this text bring to a wider public the results of over two centuries of work in historical linguistics. For many decades the typical books on Indo-European were dense tomes of closely-argued etymological debate and learned controversy over the finer points about how the original language may have sounded. Of greater interest to most readers with an interest in word origins and the history of English are the reconstructed words themselves and the progress of a word or word-root through 60 centuries of use and transformation to the present day. As Watkins notes in his introduction, this dictionary "is designed and written for the general English speaking public and not for specialists in the field of Indo-European linguistics." The author, a Harvard professor of Classics and Linguistics, popularizes without diluting. By restricting his focus to English and its close Germanic relatives and forbears, Watkins can include a comprehensive catalog of 1300+ word roots and their development without causing the book to run to thousands of pages. Some of the most interesting entries are the "language and culture" notes for particularly significant words. Especially in the slim paperback edition, this is a welcome book for anyone in love with words and curious about their origins.
Rating: 
Summary: very good but....
Review: This excellent and concise dictionary is wonderful and affordable. The only criticism I have is that it is too English-oriented. Only IE roots and their reflexes which appear in English (even if in weird and wonderful ways) show up in this dictionary. Worse, there is no way to look up the IE root of words in other languages. This would be OK if there were good alternatives, but Pokorny is extremely expensive and partly superceded, and bilingual dictionaries don't include etymologies. Not even most student-edition monolingual dictionaries include etymologies, especially not tracing back to IE. My guess is that the marketing department at Houghton Mifflin believes that these features have limited appeal, but imagine the book being recommended in foreign-language classes.... True, most commonalities with Romance languages come from post-IE borrowings, and English is a Germanic language, but as far as I know, there is not even a good reference source for these. If the Italian word 'fretta' (haste) appears on your vocabulary list, how are you going to know to look under English 'friction' for its relationship? Similarly: German 'loeffel' (spoon) <> English 'lap (up)'; French 'aube' (dawn) <> English 'albino' <> IE *albho-; Irish 'dubh' (black) <> English 'deaf' <> IE *dheu-bh-; German 'hals' (neck) <> English 'collar' <> IE *kwel-; Spanish 'ladrillo' (brick) <> English 'lateral'; etc.
Rating:
Summary: Great book for language lovers
Review: Watkins has created a fine book. This is not a dictionary as much as it is a word hoard. An easy to use list of Aryan root words and examples of how they appear in Latin, Hindi, German, Norse, Greek, Russian, English, etc. A great aid for anyone studying Western tongues.
Wyatt Kaldenberg
Rating:
Summary: Very Helpful Book on Aryan root words
Review: Watkins has created a fine book. This is not a dictionary as much as it is a word hoard. An easy to use list of Aryan root words and examples of how they appear in Latin, Hindi, German, Norse, Greek, Russian, English, etc. A great aid for anyone studying Western tongues.
Wyatt Kaldenberg
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