 The prototypical example of speculative etymology is perhaps the Cratylus (383a-d), where Plato presents his well-known naturalist thesis about word meaning. According to Plato, natural kind terms express the essence of the objects they denote and words are appropriate to their referents insofar as they implicitly describe the properties of their referents (see the entry on  Plato’s Cratylus).  For example, the Greek word ‘anthrôpos’ can be broken down into anathrôn ha opôpe, which translates as “one who reflects on what he has seen”: the word used to denote humans reflects their being the only animal species which possesses the combination of vision and intelligence. For speculative etymology, there is a natural or non-arbitrary relation between words and their meaning, and the task of the theorist is to make this relation explicit through an analysis of the descriptive, often phonoiconic mechanisms underlying the genesis of words. More on speculative etymology in Malkiel (1993), Fumaroli (1999), and Del Bello (2007).