About Wanderwort

Wanderwort is German for a “wandering word”: a word that spread across many languages and regions, usually along with the thing it named. Coffee, sugar, chess and tea are classic examples. This game is about those journeys.

What you are looking at

Each word in the game has a route: the chain of languages it passed through on its way into English, oldest first. Coffee, for example, goes from Arabic to Ottoman Turkish, then to Italian and Dutch, and finally English. The map draws that chain as a line, from where the word started to where it ended up.

How the routes are built

The routes start from etymologies recorded in Wiktionary, the free dictionary written by volunteers, in the structured form published by the open etymology-db project. From a bank of 1,308 candidate words we kept the ones whose chain of borrowing is well documented and makes a good puzzle. Each route was then checked by hand, and each word got a short definition, the forms it took along the way and, where one exists, a notable quotation.

What the map does not claim

A language is not a point. Each pin marks a single representative place for where the language was spoken at the time, so that a route can be drawn at all. The lines show the order of borrowing, not the literal path a trader or a manuscript took. Dates are left out on purpose because, for most early stages, the evidence is a first attestation in writing, not the moment the word was first spoken.

Etymology is a field of evidence and argument. Where scholars disagree, we follow the account our source gives and say so in the notes when the doubt matters. If you think a route is wrong, we want to hear about it. The sources page explains how to report it.

Who makes it

Wanderwort is a small independent project at wanderwort.app. There is no paywall on the daily game. Write to us at hello@wanderwort.app.