else: [OE] Else shares its sense of ‘otherness’ with related words in other parts of the Indo- European language family. It comes ultimately from the base *al-, which also produced Latin alter ‘other’ (source of English alter) and alius ‘other’ (source of English alibi and alien) and Greek állos ‘other’ (source of the prefix allo- in such English words as allopathy, allophone, and allotropy). Its Germanic descendant was *aljo- ‘other’, whose genitive neuter case *aljaz, used adverbially, eventually became English else. => alibi, alien, alter
