The functional view of intuitive etymological explanations

People routinely make up stories to explain why things are called what they are called. These "intuitive etymological explanations" (IEEs) show up in children and adults, and even become cultural narratives shared across generations. Yet, they're typically wrong. As a result, scholars have historically ignored them or treated them as mere curiosities that are irrelevant to our linguistic competence and even interfere with our theories of language evolution. Contrary to this view, we propose that IEEs may be a functional activity that people engage in to learn and maintain a massive, ever-changing lexicon. In Experiment 1, we find preliminary evidence that IEEs, whether self-generated or culturally-transmitted, can support word learning in comparison to control conditions in which participants engage with contextual word use (both self- generated and culturally-transmitted). In Experiment 2, we find that, despite being incorrect, culturally-transmitted IEEs can support word learning more than true etymologies. Across two preregistered experiments, our results suggest that intuitive etymological explanations, though typically incorrect, may facilitate language use by building structures of form and meaning out of our linguistic experience.