Words have always been how I best understand the world around me-if I know the language, I can know the story. Etymology is the study of word history; it is the process of looking at a word in its parts and pieces, but then is also the process of seeing beyond the parts and into the whole, recognizing that words are always greater than the mere sum of their parts. The significance of language, of a single word, is such that it can change the entire perspective of a story, an idea, a question. The words in these stories emerged from stories in my life: sometimes mine, sometimes the stories of others, but always in such a way that the stories of that single word really influenced how the entire story or idea unfolded and became meaningful in new ways. I saw that each of these essays on these singular words-their etymologies and histories-could be bound together into writings on the body, the mind, the heart, and the soul that simply used words and language as a way to try to understand what it means to be alive.