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From Dictionary.com:

Word History: Water is wet, even etymologically. The Indo-European root of water is *wed-, "wet." This root could appear in several guises-with the vowel e, as here, or as *wod-, or with no vowel between the w and d, yielding *ud-. All three forms of the root appear in English either in native or in borrowed words. From a form with a long e, *wēd-, which by Grimm's Law became *wēt- in Germanic, we have Old English wǣt, "wet," which became modern English wet. The form *wod-, in a suffixed form *wod-ōr, became *watar in Germanic and eventually water in modern English. From the form *ud- the Greeks got their word for water, hud-ōr, the source of our prefix hydro- and related words like hydrant. The suffixes *-rā and *-ros added to the form *ud- yielded the Greek word hudrā, "water snake" (borrowed into English as hydra), and the Germanic word *otraz, the source of our word otter, the water animal.

O.E. wæter, from P.Gmc. *watar (cf. O.S. watar, O.Fris. wetir, Du. water, O.H.G. wazzar, Ger. Wasser, O.N. vatn, Goth. wato "water"), from PIE *wodor/*wedor/*uder-, from root *wed- (cf. Hittite watar, Skt. udnah, Gk. hydor, O.C.S., Rus. voda, Lith. vanduo, Lettish ūdens, O.Prus. wundan, Gael. uisge "water;" L. unda "wave").

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16y ago

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