Greek etymologia combines etymon, the true or literal sense of a word judged by its origin, from etymos, true, real, with -logia, study. The discipline is as old as doubt about words: Plato's Cratylus, fourth century BCE, stages the first recorded debate over whether names are natural or conventional, Socrates dissecting dozens of words into fanciful components with a straight face scholars still argue about. Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, around 630 CE, organized everything his century knew around word derivations and remained Europe's reference for a thousand years. Modern scientific etymology dates to the nineteenth century's comparative method, Grimm's law and its successors, which turned derivation from art into traceable law.
Isidore's derivations were often wrong by modern lights, and he made etymology do theology: words were windows into the essence of things, so a wrong derivation could still teach a true lesson. The medieval world inherited the habit, etymology as moral proof rather than historical record, and the habit never fully died: it survives wherever a derivation is cited to win an argument the facts cannot. Plato's Socrates was likely mocking exactly this. The mockery is 2,400 years old. The practice it mocked is 2,400 years old too.
The claim, the etymological fallacy: a word's origin is not its meaning, and treating the root as the verdict is the error etymology exists to cure, which puts every origin story in this archive under the same suspicion as every word: documented trail or not, the first sense is not necessarily the true sense, just the oldest one we can still see. Verdict: the fallacy is real and the archive's three tiers are its own answer to it: the root is filed as a competing origin, never as the judge. Etymon means the true sense. The archive's whole method is noticing that truth and oldest are different words.
If etymon means the true sense, who decided which sense was true?