English guides to etymology from Skeat to Durkin

This paper examines six guides to the etymology of English, written for nonspecialist readers between 1887 and 2009. Four are by etymological lexicographers (two by W. W. Skeat and one each by Anatoly Liberman and Philip Durkin) and two by philologists with strong etymological interests (A. S. C. Ross and W. B. Lockwood). The paper seeks to present their contents, to compare them with each other, and to contextualize them both in the internal history and in the social history of scholarship