Are there any online etymological dictionaries of Mandarin (not for characters but for spoken words) tl;dr Are you aware of any dictionaries that explain word etymologies (not merely character etymologies)?  Some links/references would be useful.



This is actually a collection of related questions, but I thought it would be good to keep them together.

Are there any online etymological dictionaries of Chinese?  All such dictionaries I can find deal with character etymologies, which is not at all the same thing as the etymologies of the real spoken language (which can do just fine without a writing system at all, I'm sure that not more than a 100 years ago literacy rate in China was far from great).

Generally, how well do character etyomologies reflect the true etyomologies of words?

Let me give a motivating example, which made me curious about it.  Yak in Mandarin is 牦牛 / 氂牛 / máo​niú, i.e. when spoken sounds just like "hairy cow" 毛牛, a very fitting description.  If it weren't for the characters, one would be tempted to suspect this is not an accident.  Yet if we look up the character (not word!) online, we only get "signific cluster, an ox 牜牛 that requires couxing 攵攴 from a branch 未", which suggests otherwise.



To avoid an all too common misunderstanding, I'd like to point out again that although a writing system can leave a deep mark on the oral language, a language can exist just fine without it.  I am sure that a 100 years ago the literacy rate in China was far below great, yet people could use the language just fine.  So again, when I say Chinese in this question, I mean the spoken Chinese language (take whichever variety you prefer), not the character based writing system (I have the impression that often answers about Chinese consider written Chinese first).
The ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese is searchable online here:

http://edoc.uchicago.edu/edoc2013/digitaledoc_index.php

Go to 'EDOC: Linear Output', select 'All' on the right-hand side (under 'ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese'), type in your characters, and click 'Display Phonetics'.  For more complicated searches, go to 'EDOC: Search'.

Also, to give a simple example to help clarify what the OP is referring to as "character etymologies" vs. "word etymologies", the ABC dictionary gives the following for 蜜 (mì):


  ‘Honey’ [Chuci]. || [T] MTang mir &lt; mir, ONW miit — [D] PMin *mit || [E]
  Thought to be borrowed from IE-Tocharian B mit ‘honey’ &lt; PTokharian *mjət
  (Behr Oriens 1999 / 2000: 36).


The above is a word etymology.  It is a loanword, of Indo-European origin, and is in fact related to English "mead", Lithuanian "medus", Greek "μέθη", Russian "мёд", and Farsi "می", for example.

A character etymology would decompose this character into 虫 (insect radical) and 宓 (phonetic), which is in turn decomposed into 宀 (roof radical) and 必 (phonetic). Both 虫 and 宀 can be traced back to the oracle bone script, while 必 can be traced back to the bronzeware script. (Source: hanziyuan.net)

The character and word etymologies are quite distinct - while all of the components of the character are of Chinese origin, the word itself is Indo-European.