I can say off the bat that Etymonline has a narrower focus of words than Wiktionary (there are fewer English words, and there aren’t etymologies for non-English words except incidentally). And that’s more than fine. Something I like about Etymonline is that, because of its narrower scope, it can potentially be more readable to link somebody to an etymology that isn’t crowded out by e.g. synonyms, related words, rhymes, etc.
Something Wiktionary recently got that I see as lacking in Etymonline is an etymology tree (see: Wiktionary’s ‘apraxia’ and Etymonline’s ‘apraxia’). The Etymonline entry for ‘milk’ (see below) seems to have one, but Wiktionary’s seems more consistent and traversible.
Something small that I actively dislike about Etymonline is that there’s no ‘References’ section at the bottom. They do inline citations (for example, in ‘milk’, they reference ‘Watkins’), but then you often have to actively take an aside to the principal sources page. I also don’t like that the content is under a proprietary license given it’s primarily regurgitating a handful of other authors’ work.
TL;DR: Etymonline is fine, but given it’s the work of non-academics as well, I think it largely can be/has been overtaken by Wiktionary. I’ll bring up ‘milk’ again as a counterexample, though, where I think Etymonline does it better. They (correctly) note that the “plant milk” meaning goes back to the 1200s, whereas this isn’t discussed whatsoever on Wiktionary – where a reasonable user might wonder when people started using “milk” for plant milk. I think overall, you’re likely to have a fine experience using either.
I can say off the bat that Etymonline has a narrower focus of words than Wiktionary (there are fewer English words, and there aren’t etymologies for non-English words except incidentally). And that’s more than fine. Something I like about Etymonline is that, because of its narrower scope, it can potentially be more readable to link somebody to an etymology that isn’t crowded out by e.g. synonyms, related words, rhymes, etc.
Something Wiktionary recently got that I see as lacking in Etymonline is an etymology tree (see: Wiktionary’s ‘apraxia’ and Etymonline’s ‘apraxia’). The Etymonline entry for ‘milk’ (see below) seems to have one, but Wiktionary’s seems more consistent and traversible.
Something small that I actively dislike about Etymonline is that there’s no ‘References’ section at the bottom. They do inline citations (for example, in ‘milk’, they reference ‘Watkins’), but then you often have to actively take an aside to the principal sources page. I also don’t like that the content is under a proprietary license given it’s primarily regurgitating a handful of other authors’ work.
TL;DR: Etymonline is fine, but given it’s the work of non-academics as well, I think it largely can be/has been overtaken by Wiktionary. I’ll bring up ‘milk’ again as a counterexample, though, where I think Etymonline does it better. They (correctly) note that the “plant milk” meaning goes back to the 1200s, whereas this isn’t discussed whatsoever on Wiktionary – where a reasonable user might wonder when people started using “milk” for plant milk. I think overall, you’re likely to have a fine experience using either.