The hero in The Name of the Rose is a medieval English monk. He acts as sleuth, ‘‘Etymology’’ means the derivation of a word’s meaning. and is heard to note at one point in the story how, ‘The study of words is the whole of knowledge’. While we might wish he had gone a little further to mention chemicals, we would have to agree that many of our technical words can be traced back to Latin or Greek roots. The remainder of them originate from the principal scientists who pioneered a particular field of study, known as etymology
