1234: sample and example Apr 26, 2018

There are plenty of words that sound alike but by random chance happens to have a similar phonetic composition as another word with a different meaning and etymology. These such homophones including 'dear' and 'deer' are fun but are not especially insightful. What tends to be more linguistically rich is looking at words that have one origin and have since split. For example, 'example'—as with most words beginning with 'ex-'—comes from Latin 'eximere' meaning 'take out', however, while 'ex-' is often a prefix, it actually does not relate to 'ample, but does have the same root as 'sample'. This diverged from the Old French 'essample' as a noun, however in many ways, 'sample' as a noun can usually be replaced by 'example', though it might sound a little weird.
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