This chapter surveys the state of etymological research into the Romance language family, both for the entire family and for individual Romance languages. Concerning inherited lexicon, a current paradigm debate reflects the traditional methodological assumption that Romance is set apart and does not need to rely on comparative reconstruction. The standard of research being somewhat uneven between the different Romance languages and between different parts of the lexicon, several desiderata for the future of Romance etymology are spelled out, the most important one being the plea for etymologising individual lexical units (triplets made up by a signifier, a signified, and syntactic properties) instead of whole vocables (sets of lexical units whose signifiers are identical and whose signifieds and syntactic properties display a significant intersection).