@Jasper, yes the full OED has lots of quotes which help with the witt (sense) of how the word was being noted. They keep that behind their subscription firewall. Thanks for the offer ... and feel free to chime in with quotes from it when a word comes up here.

The guy at Etymonline is friendly. If you can show him some kind of reference, he'll look it over. He's not into gessing ... He follows the path blaze'd by others. He has a reference for every word that he has done. But in the end, he ... like others ... has to make a choice and makes that choice rooted on the references. So if most of the references say that X has a Latin root, that is what he puts.

As always, the further back one goes, the murkier it gets. Then, as you said, there are cognates and sometimes the cognates are so near to one another that it truly can be a eenie-meenie-mighty-moe pick as to whether the root is Latin or Teut. ... like OHG trahton (not a Latinate ... Kluge) and Latin tractus ... so from whence OE traht? I think it's Teut. but others say it was borrow'd from Latin. Fall (OE fallan, feallan) and falter are Teut. ... fail, fault are Latin from fallere. Those are near to each other that one could beget the same words. ... Who knew that OE and ME elend, elend 'foreign' and English 'else' hav the same PIE root *el 'beyond, other' as Latin alien and alias, alius? That's why I'v started blogging some of these.

I do what I can with others like the MED (Middle Eng. Dict.) which is fully online and is free ... as is B-T Anglo-Saxon. Lots of byspels in those two. The gap comes after ME til about 1800 ... There are lots of old books (free) in Google Books ... some seekful ... some not. Gutenburg and Archive.org are great but you hav to know which book you're looking for ... you can't do a word seek on their database (kenbit-stow?) ... However, once you know which book you want to look in, you can do an online word-seek. There are other spots to look ... BYU has an amazing gathering of writings that is online but there are scannos so one still must be careful. Even with all those, it's still often hard to find a word that is found in old wordbooks (huru wordbooks of old words and provincial words) to see how it might hav been noted.

As for the French ... and the Spanish hav a like academy ... well, they're having about as much luck as the gainsayers did against the inkhorn words. For now, it's English's time in the sun and the world is sucking up English words all over. I spend a lot of time in S. America. Only yestern, I saw a gal with a t-shirt at the pizza shop with a shirt that read "on (heart) the flight" ... I wasn't truly gewiss as to what it meant. I think it meant something like "on the love boat" but I see that often here ... they make shirts with English on them ... and often bad English! Many goods and wares here are in English ... I saw in the pet shop yestern a bottle with something for cows to ward off bugs label'd as "pour-on".

Sorry for the long post ... I got a little carry'd away!

When about half of French is Anglo-Teutonish English, then they can whinge ... Look at the headline below ... It's mostly latinates.

Drop these ugly Anglicisms ASAP, urge French language police
Académie Française condemns use of abbreviation of as soon as possible, and adoption of score as a verb

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/08/anglicisms-asap-score-french-language-police

Richard Chenevix Trench in "English Past and Present" writes: ... they were made to drop their foreign termination, or otherwise their foreign appearance, to conform themselves to English ways, and only so were finally incorporated into the great family of English words.

Thus a word is not truly English til it loses it foreign look.

To WW's list, I'd add other words like 'czar' ... in Russian, the plural is 'czari' (цари́) and the genitiv ... 'czar's' is 'czarya' (царя́) ... There were two czari and the men czarya (the czar's men) ... The administration's last two health czari ...

Naw, they don't hit the ears right. Once a word is fully English'd, it should take an English plural. Learning the sundry plural shapes from sundry tungs would be great, big pain in the ass ... Not gonna do it!

@JLB ... Answer one of her emails with the mistake in it ... only send it to her and not anyone else. Softly tell her that you believe this to be a mistake but if she thinks it is good English then to please cite her source for saying so. Otherwise she should stop writing it when she sends out emails to the parents. Don't jump on her and tell her how you were taught ... blah, blah, blah ... You're trying to get to take a look at the mistake and stop doing rather than put her on the defensiv.

@Gallitrot,

Etymonline takes a truly wary, chary way ... The writer isn't an etymologist himself, he only writes what can be found in other works. So, if you can find another upspring for a word ... then you can write him and send him the info. He often goes deeper than many and givs other tidbits that are often found. Even tho he is wary, and I may not hold with what he has, he has, nonetheless, done an amazing job.

But rather than whinge about other's works ... and there is lot to whinge about ... I'v started writing blogs call'd "Latin or Teutonish" where I lay what I know of a word and how etym of the word my go another way than most. Like Etymonline, I am not an etymologist. And I can only go by what I hav found free online (I don't hav a subscription to the OED) so there are gaps in what I know ...

Once you start reading sundry books on the etyms of words, you begin to acknow how much the writers don't truly know ... and can't truly know. They build witcrafty (logical) reasons rooted on sundry things such as when did the word first show up, the meaning, the sound, and does any sound chanj match the held philological chanj ... so on and so forth. Even with all that, it can be mighty murky with words.

And they're not steady with their analysis ... they don't always put the analysis in the same way to all words ... but then "they" is not one but many folks so while one might amazingly giv a word an Anglo-Teut. root; another, in the same kind of circumstance, will giv it a Latin root. Read some of Skeat's analyses. In the body of his work, he might giv a word a Teut. root but then chanj his mind in the addendum and giv it a Latin root. Sometimes his witcraft is spot on ... other times it is rambling and lacking ... but always fetching.

It means that you hav two and only two choices rather than say three choices ... three choosings ... three picks. As WW said, choice also means option.

I feel your pain ... your akes ... your wrack (wrack in OE also meant pain ... pain was also pine [from Latin] ... same word, pain is a doublet that came thru French). I hav a lot of Hispanic frends that I help and I to speed them along, I giv them all the latinates that match up with the Spanish words.

But for my Asian frends, I think the latinates befuddles them sometimes if they haven't alreddy learnd a Romance tung.

@Jayles ... good words for progress (the noun) are headway and strides; wakefulness also works for insomnia or saying, "I was restless."

I don't think that not knowing which latinates were in OE forholds folks. Everyone has to find out how deep they can go or want to go. However, can often work about the ones that were in OE as well. "Sake" in OE and ME had the meaning of "cause, case (legal)" so a hardcore Anglisher could swap in "sake" for "case" (in the legal witt) but now we're treading on unknown land for those who, sadly, lack a knowledge of older words or older meanings seldom noted.

Sadly also, the OED is often wrong in their etyms but then, out of the blue, matches up one that I wouldn't think it would hav otherwise. Anyway, I hav made a list of OE latinates and posted it. Truthfully, two lists. One list was too long for blogspot to take so I had to break it into two. The list grows a bit almost every week as I find more words or more info on the words that I hav.

huswifely - (adj) capable; economical; prudent (adv) capably; economically; prudently. ... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/huswifely

huswife - (verb) to manage with frugality

Liken to "economics": Greek oikonomikos, from oikonomia. Originally a noun, based on oikos ‘house’ (cognate with Latin vicus "district", vicinus "near"; Old English wic "dwelling, village") + nemein ‘manage’, the word denoted household management or a person skilled in this, hence the early sense of the adjective (late 16th cent.) ‘relating to household management’.

@HS ... ok, I'll bite. The threshold for Latinates ... for most Anglishers ... is when the Normans took over. Latinates in OE are given a by as they are thought of as mostly from the natural growth of the tung. After the Takeover, they're taken "case by case". And this isn't the same for all Anglishers.

Indeed, believ it or not, I'm one of the looser ones. If I find the root in OE or a Teutonish tung, then it is good to go for me even if it has gain'd other meanings over time.

Case, meaning a box, is found in OE as 'cæpse' from Latin 'capsa' ... the root for case and for capsule. For me, this is good enuff for both. Encase is nothing more than 'in' + 'case'. 'In' (en) is found both in Romanish (Latin) and the Teutonish tungs.

As it so happens, 'case', meaning a grammatical case, is also found in OE. So both meanings of 'case' are found in OE. From this 'case' also comes the meaning 'case' is in a 'legal case'.

While we can put the spelling changes off on French, that is a small thing given that even many Anglo words hav undergone a great deal of spelling changes over time and not all (but sum) owing to the French spelling.

Showcase is a Anglo-Latin blend with the root of the Latinate half found in OE.

There, feel better now about it? LOL