Etymological characteristics of the vocabulary

Etymology is the study of the origin of words. English vocabulary consists of two layers – the native stock and the borrowed stock of words.

Native words comprise only 30% ofvocabulary but the native words form the bulk of the most frequent words. The native element in English embraces a large number of high-frequency words: the articles, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, auxiliaries, words denoting everyday objects and ideas.