Latin is one of the major ancient Indo-European languages and one of the cornerstones of Indo-European studies. Since the last comprehensive etymological dictionary of Latin appeared in 1959, enormous progress has been made in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European, and many etymologies have been revised. This new etymological dictionary covers the entire Latin lexicon of Indo-European origin. It consists of nearly 1900 entries, which altogether discuss about 8000 Latin lemmata. All words attested before Cicero are included, together with their first date of attestation in Latin. The dictionary also includes all the inherited words found in the other ancient Italic languages, such as Oscan, Umbrian and South Picene; thus, it also serves as an etymological dictionary of Italic.

"Specialists will learn much from this work."

"This is an impressive, handsomely produced volume. It deserves to be in any serious linguistic library."
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury, New Zealand, reviewed for the The Linguist List, 7 April 2009.

"This new, important dictionary cannot be neglected by anyone interested in the history of words."
Wolfgang David Cirilo de Melo, (Universiteit van Gent), Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2009.11.27

Michiel de Vaan (Ph.D. 2002) teaches comparative Indo-European linguistics, historical linguistics and dialectology at Leiden University. He has published extensively on Germanic, Albanian, and Indo-Iranian linguistics and philology, including The Avestan Vowels (2003) and Germanic Tone Accents (ed. 2006).