Paste English and dig down through its word strata, from modern topsoil to the Old English bedrock.
Text to dig
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Strata
0%Germanic index share of classified words that are Old English or Norse
Compared with typical prose
Stacked by stratum, left to right: Old English, Norse, French, Latin, Greek, other loans, modern; unknown words left out.
Grammar Fossil Dig
Every word in your text is sorted by where English got it, and the text is then drawn once per stratum: the top layer keeps only the modern coinages and far-flung loans, the next only the learned Latin and Greek, then the Norman French, then the Old Norse, and at the bottom the Old English bedrock, with the other words left as faint blanks so each layer still reads in place.
Hover or tap a word to see its stratum, the language it came from and the recorded source form; Collapse switches to a single reading view with every word coloured, and the stats card gives the shares and a Germanic index next to three reference texts.
A word counts by its nearest recorded donor, so a Latin word that came through Old French is French here, and the inspector shows the deeper source; words outside the list are stemmed to a known root, or guessed from their ending (dashed underline), or left unknown.
Data: about 21,500 frequent English words classified from etymology-db (2023-12), a parse of English Wiktionary's etymology templates, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0; the word list is the most frequent English words in Peter Norvig's count_1w.txt (Google Books n-grams). Sample texts are public domain; the Chaucer rendering and the paper abstract were written for this page. Wiktionary's parse is not perfect, so expect the odd misfiled fossil.