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Etymology
When you enable Etymology Features under Advanced Settings, Lexicanter will reveal to you a new tab called Etymology and slightly change the appearance of entries in the lexicon. These features are a powerful and convenient way to document the lineages of your language's words.
You'll be greeted by a small panel on the left with a search bar and two lists, labelled Internal and External. If this is your first time opening this tab, External is probably empty. We'll get back to that.
Internal will be populated by a list of all of the words in your lexicon. If you click on one of these, you'll see the large panel on the left is updated. The word you clicked on will appear floating in the upper-middle of the panel, and its lexicon entry will appear slightly below. Further below, there are two columns, labelled Ancestors and Descendants, each with a checkbox labelled Manual Entry, unticked by default, and below that, a blank dropdown.
When you click on either of those dropdowns, you'll be greeted with, once again, your entire lexicon. You should be able to use the keyboard to navigate this list, but since some lexicons can be massive and overwhelming, the search field at the top of the left-hand panel narrows down not only the list in that column, but also the lists you see in the dropdowns on this tab. After selecting a word from your lexicon, pressing the Link button will link the currently selected word to the ancestor/descendant word. As you add more ancestors and descendants, you'll see how the tree graph is drawn in this panel. To remove a word from another words ancestors/descendants, find it in the list which appears in the respective column and click the Sever button to sever the tie.
In many cases, you'll need to link to a word which is not in your lexicon. It may be from an ancestor language, or even from an unrelated language. For these cases, you can enable Manual Entry. When Manual Entry is enabled, you will see two text fields instead of a dropdown. The first of these text fields is for the related word itself, and the other text field is for specifying the source – that is, what language the word comes from. When you create entries this way, they will appear in the External list in the left-hand panel. External words also appear in the drop-downs after they are created.
When a word is selected, but it has no ancestor or descendant tethers, a button will appear that allows you to delete the entry altogether. For words in your lexicon, this will not delete the word from your lexicon - it will simply clear the space for its etymology data out of the file data. This has no permanent effect, as you can select the word from the list to create its etymology entry again, but it may help to put at ease those of you who are particularly conscious about your file sizes. For external entries, this will delete the entry altogether. This is how you can remove words from the External list in the left-hand panel.
When Etymology features are enabled, another option will appear in the Advanced Settings section: a button which allows you to import related lexicons. Using this button, you can select another Lexicanter file to import a lexicon from. The entirety of the lexicon will be saved to your External etymology entries. You can manage the external lexicons in your file under Advanced Settings.
On every lexical entry which is part of an etymology tree, a short, simplified version of that word's ancestry will appear beneath its senses. This makes it easy to see a word's history at a glance when viewing your lexicon.