Etymology Explorer › English

Where does “mealy” come from?

I need to work through this etymology chain carefully, but I notice there's a significant problem: the chain provided (meal, mole, moll, Moll, Mary, Latin -ia, PIE -kos, PIE -kos) doesn't logically lead to "mealy." The chain appears to trace back through suffix morphemes rather than a coherent root development, and "mealy" (meaning resembling meal/powder, or pale) would more straightforwardly derive from "meal" + "-y" suffix, not through the path shown. Given the instruction to "state only what the chain supports" and not invent steps, I cannot construct an accurate one-sentence etymology from this chain as presented. The chain itself seems corrupted or mislabeled for the headword "mealy." I should note: **I cannot responsibly write the summary sentence because the etymology chain provided does not support a coherent deriv

mealy (English): Resembling meal

Definitions

  1. Resembling meal

Ancestry of “mealy”, step by step

StepLanguageWordMeaning
1English-yAdded to nouns and adjectives to form adjectives...
2Middle English-yDesignates an adjective, in many cases formed by...
3Old English-iġ-y, -ic
4Proto-West Germanic-gForms adjectives from nouns and verbs with a...
5Proto-Germanic-gaz-y
6Proto-Indo-European-ḱos-y, -ic

Words derived from “mealy”

  • mealiness
  • unmealy
Every word from Proto-Indo-European -ḱos →