An etymological definition assigns a meaning to a word by disclosing the word's ancestry in both its own language and other languages. Most ordinary English words have ancestors either in old or middle English or in some other language such as Greek, Latin, or French, and the current English meaning (as well as spelling and pro-nunciation) is often closely tied to the meaning (and spelling and pronunciation) of these ancestral words. For example, the English word "license" is derived from the La