A wall of old words. Trace each lineage from its ancient root down to the English word it became — one pick per course. Not every path stops at every course: a borrowed (Latin) route leaps a layer, so where it does, pick the dashed skip tile instead of a brick.
A word's family tree, laid flat
Branch traces a single word from its deepest reconstructed ancestor — a Proto-Indo-European root spoken perhaps six thousand years ago — down through the centuries to the modern English word it became. The twist is that most roots reached English by two different roads, and the two descendants often look nothing alike.
Take the root *pōds, “foot.” Down the native Germanic line it shifted and softened into plain English foot. But the same root also travelled through Latin as pēs, ped- and was later borrowed back into English wholesale, in words like pedal and pedestrian. Foot and pedal are the same six-thousand-year-old word arriving by two roads.
Why don't the cousins match? Grimm's law — a regular set of sound shifts that reshaped the Germanic branch while Latin kept the older sounds. Where Latin has p, English has f (pēs / foot); where Latin has t, English has th (trēs / three); Latin c became English h (cornu / horn). Learn the pattern and the disguises fall away. Branch teaches you to see the tree behind the words.