It is the duty of the competent lexicographer, in any language, to reduce the apparent confusion to order by discovering the nucleus, the natural etymological meaning from which all the rest have come by change and transfer, and by drawing out the others [words] in proper relation to their original and to one another, so as to suggest the tie of association by which each was added to the rest- if he do not find (as is not very rarely the fact) that the tie is doubtful or undiscoverable.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.111