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Beside the fact that the tag has no usage guidance, isn't it a synonym of ?

The term "etymology" means:

(the study of) the origin of a word and the historical development of its meaning.

It effectively encompasses discussion around the origin of something.

Sanity check: are there questions about origins that can not be tagged ? I feel the answer is no, unless what is being discussed is not a word. Though we can consider the following:

  • origin of characters is covered by the tag
  • origin of other non-word language features is probably covered by specific tags, e.g. origin of a chengyu -> or similar
  • origin of other non-language items is probably going to be off-topic

Furthermore the tag has only 10 questions (I just edited it out of a few), against the 300+ of . So I feel we could retag to and burninate it without regret.

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  • "completed" in the sense of "burninated", I guess.
    – Becky 李蓓 Mod
    Jul 15, 2020 at 21:52

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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There are only 9 questions, so let's just look at them all:

  1. The "original" proverb of "Craftsman, know your tools" Not an question. Actually, doesn't even suit an tag, since it's not asking about origins.

  2. Thank You : 谢谢 vs 感谢 vs 跪谢 vs 多谢 It seems to suit the tag. The tags and seem to be words the OP thought of at the time of writing the question, and are not very relevant.

  3. Where was the heartland of the pre-historic Chinese branch of languages (or that of the entire language family)? The tag seems adequate.

  4. Where did the words for various colours originate from? Definitely is adequate.

  5. Colloquialism - "I go to school by bus" Again, is adequate. (It could use a better title.)

  6. what's origin of the Chinese character for time? Again, is adequate. (If you're bumping this one, can you also please fix how it describes 时间 as the "character for time"? 时间 is a word [not a single character].)

  7. Radicals vs glyph origins (specifically for character 肚 in 肚 子) Here is fine (it even contains the word "origin").

  8. What's the meaning/reason for sudden influx in usage of English word "word" in Chinese? I guess there's an argument for on this one, but it feels like it could survive without it.

  9. What is the origin of 洋罪? Here seems not only suitable, but necessary.

In my opinion, it seems fine to burninate this tag through sensible retagging. (When retagging and bumping questions to the front page, I encourage you to make other useful edits to the question and its answers.)

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    Thanks for this summary, all of it makes sense to me. I'll wait maybe one day, to give others the opportunity to chime in, in case we're missing something
    – blackgreen
    Jul 14, 2020 at 23:38
  • aaaand... done. [origin] has zero results. I've also edited a bunch of other content along the way. There's a few quite interesting questions among those
    – blackgreen
    Jul 15, 2020 at 18:05

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