[…] accidental correspondences occur between words which have no historical connection […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.170

[…] but the word, in each case, gives him [child] a definite nucleus, about which more and ever more knowledge may be grouped […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.29

[…] most general and grandest of movements of signification, which carries words from a more material and substantial value toward one that is more conceptual and formal […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.114

[…] our minds are so used to working by and through words that they cannot even conceive of the plight they would be in if deprived of such helps.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.23

[…] our words are, almost universally, class-names […] in practice, having named an individual thing, we apply the same name to whatever other things are enough like to form a class with it.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.78

[…] relationship, in words as in men, implies a descent from a common ancestor. And what is true of the words of two languages is true of the languages themselves: languages made up of related words must be descended from a single common language.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.169

[…] the disappearance from before the attention of a community of the conceptions designated by certain words occasions the disappearance of those words. If anything that people once thought and talked about comes to concern them no longer, its phraseology goes into oblivion- unless, of course, it be preserved, as a memory of the past, by some of those means which culture supplies.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.99

[…] there are subjects of decency or delicacy, with reference to which we have to pick our expressions very carefully, if we would not offend or disgust. It is one of the most striking illustrations possible of the dominion which words have won over our thoughts, that we will tolerate in indirect, figurative, merely suggestive expression what would be repulsive in direct statement […] a term perhaps becomes after a time, by frequent use, too directly significant, and we have to devise a new one , less lively.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.113-114

[…] there is in every language a certain amount of obsolescent material, in various stages: some words that are only unusual, or restricted to particular phrases […]; some that belong to a particular style, archaic or poetical; some that have become strange and unintelligible to ordinary speakers, though formerly in every-day use; some that survive only in local dialects. And the older records of any tongue, if preserved, show words in greater or less number that are gone past recovery.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.102

[…] there must be in every existing language, at any time, processes of differentiation not yet fully carried out, words and forms of words in a state of transition, altering but not altered, words and phrases under trial, introduced but not general; words obsolescent but not yet obsolete […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.154

[…] to hold that formed words, divisible into radical and formative elements, were first in the uses of speech, is just as defensible as to hold that men began to labor with hammers and saws and planes and nails, and to fight with iron-headed lances and bows and catapults.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.226-227

[…] words, the instruments of thougth […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.23

A word is produced by a highly intricate succession of acts on the part of the vocal organs; a careless and unheeded omission of any one of them results in a mutilation of the word, or a slight relaxation of the energy of articulation affects the character of one on the sounds in the compound; and as the word answers its purpose just as well as before, it passes without notice, and the act is repeated, and becomes first customary, then constant.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.147-148

A word may change its form, to any extent, without change of meaning; it may take on an entirely new meaning without change of form. As matter of fact, the words are few or none which have not done both.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.49

A word, a whole family of words, perishes by simple disuse, and is as if it had never been, unless civilization is there to make a record of its departed worth.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.266

By words he [child] is made to form dim conceptions, and draw rude distinctions, which after experience shall make truer and more distinct, shall deepen, explain, correct.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.13

Each word may be not unfitly compared to an invention; it has its own place, mode, and circumstances of devisal, its preparation in the previous habits of speech, its influence in determining the after-progress of speech-development […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.309

How great […] is the sum of enrichment of language by these means [alterations of meaning], may be seen by observing the variety of meanings belonging to our words. If each of them were like a scientific term, limited to a definite class of strictly similar things, the number which the cultivated speaker now use would be very far from answering his purposes. But it is the customary office of a word to cover, not a point, but a territory, and a territory that is irregular, heterogeneus, and variable.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.110

If convenience require that the word learned and hitherto only used in a certain sense or group of senses, and having a certain form, be applied to an additional sense, or change its application from the old to new, and be shaped a little differently, the thing is done, and no one can hinder it; if practical use is for any reason no longer served by a word, it drops out of use and is no more […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.144-145

If we were to count in our words only those degrees of difference of meaning for which in other cases separate provision of expression is made, the 100,000 English words would doubtless be found equivalent to a million or two.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.111

It belongs to the the highest development of speech that the word written and read should have something like the same power as the word spoken and heard […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.294

It is […] in the nature of a word to have its figurative as well as its literal uses and applications; we inherited our vocabulary in that condition; and, by new discoveries of analogies and new transfers of meaning, we are all the time adding to the confusion […] we use each word as we have learned it, leaving to the lexicographer to follow up the ramifications to their source in its primitive or etymological meaning.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.87-88

It is simply impossible to exhaust the variety of significant change in linguistic growth: there is no conceivable direction in which a word may not be made; there is no assignable distance to which a word may not wander from its primitive meaning.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.82

It may […] happen that an important word dies out, without provision of any full substitute […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.101

Nor is it by foreign importation alone that words of native growth become superfluous, and are dropped out of a language. There are cases in abundance of a word’s simply going out of fashion, becoming obsolescent and then obsolete, by an act of super session attributable only to what we call chance or caprice.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.101

Not only the parts of the same words, in their combination, but also separate words in their collocation, affect one another; and the influence expresses itself particularly in their final elements.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.71

Our five seventh of classical material are mainly words of learned use only, which the young child does not acquire in order to “speak English,” and which the uneducated man never learns; a host of them are of rare occurrence even in books. But any one of them may come, under the conditions of practical life, to be as familiar as material of less artificial origin […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.119

Our words are too often signs for crude and hasty, for indefinite and indefinable, generalizations. We use them accurately enough for the ordinary practical purposes of life […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.29

Speakers know not and care not whence their words came; they know simply what they mean; even the wisest of us can trace the history of only a small part of his vocabulary, and only a little way.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.297

The word exists ‘θέσει’, ‘by attribution,’ and not ‘φύσει’, ‘by nature,’ in the sense that there is, either in the nature of things in general, or in the nature of the individual speaker who uses it, any reason that prescribes and determines it.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.19

The words were […] already in existence, as general terms, ready like the people who should wear them, to be selected and set apart to this specific office. What should come of it further, whether the new titles should rise to importance and attain wide currency, depended on the after-fate of the system to which they belonged.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.47

The young mind is always learning words, and things through words […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.13

There are those still who hold that words get themselves attributed to things by a kind of mysterious natural process, in which men have no part […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.145

We […] saw that words were assigned to their specific uses (so far as it is possible to trace their history) each at some definite time in the past, and for reasons which were satisfactory to the nomenclators, though they did not make the name either a definition or a description of the conception […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.77

We should dwell […] upon the curious fate which while some words fade to the thinnest skeleton, almost shadow, of substantial value, crowds others with pregnancy and force […] upon the contrast between words which from a low or an indifferent origin rise to dignity, and those which from a respectable origin sink into contempt […] between words which become so conventionally inexpressive that we seek for newer and more positive phraseology, and those which, dealing with delicate subject, become too directly suggestive, and are replaced in refined usage by others which hint more remotely at the intended sense; between words which for no assignable reason become the fashion, and others which as causelessly come to be looked askance at and avoided.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.97

When men learn a strange language, by a practical process, they are apt especially to make bad work with its endings; if they get the body of the word, its main significant part, intelligibly correct, they will be content to leave the relations to be understood from the connection.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.104