About the book: 1967 / Lev Vasilyevich Uspensky is a classic of scientific and educational literature for children and youth, linguist, translator, author of books on entertaining linguistics. “A Word about Words”, “Riddles of Toponymy”, “You and Your Name”, “According to the Law of Letters”, “On the Roads and Paths of Language” - many of these books were written in the 50-60s of the 20th century, but they and have not lost their meaning to this day. Here is one of these books - “Why Not Otherwise?” Etymological dictionary for schoolchildren. It is not enough for a person to understand what this or that word means. A person, moreover, wants to know why it means exactly that, and not something completely different. Take it out and put it in - how each word got its meaning, where it came from. The author tried to include in the dictionary as many of the most common school words as possible: “desk” and “teacher”, “cramming” and “cheat sheet”, “physics” and “chemistry”. You will learn about the origin of various words, get acquainted with the work of an etymologist: what difficulties he encounters; What tricks and tricks does he resort to in his hunt for the ancestors of our words?.