I hope that the dictionary will issue paper edition:)
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I see it would be nice in a way, but I think it might defeat the purpose in other ways. Being able to continue to make changes is good, as is not having a publication deadline, …
One thing you might consider is to see which source books are most relied on by etymonline, and see if there’s a way to get your hands on any of those. (This might require some combination of patience, extra money, and very large libraries.)
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Indeed. I’m not sure I believe that printed reference materials make sense at all, anymore — for any topic, any subject. (But, then, I’m a computer programmer, a field where any book more than 3 years old is so uselessly outdated that it belongs in the fireplace, not on the bookshelf.)
But to the extent that some books in some other fields may still have some utility, seems to me the time one would begin to consider tattooing the work onto dead trees is when, say, > 80% of the entries go unmodified, from any given year to the next. (And they remain static because they’re “finished” and don’t need updating, not simply because nobody found time to fill in known, obvious information gaps.)
I don’t think my completely-fabricated “>80% yearly static entries” metric even remotely describes a currently-evolving reference work like Etymonline.
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