ถ้อยคำอะมูเล็ตamulet

Pliny's Natural History pins the Latin word to a thing: an amuletum is an object that protects a person from trouble. Beyond that the Latin is dark. The Online Etymology Dictionary calls its origin uncertain, floats a link to amoliri, 'to avert, to carry away', and turns down the Arabic derivation that gets repeated in popular writing.

English took the word late, and then dropped it. The Online Etymology Dictionary records amalettys in the middle of the fifteenth century, probably through French, and then nothing again until about 1600. A hundred and fifty years of silence, and then it came back to stay.

The split with talisman is the argument the word carries. Wikipedia's amulet article states flatly that talismans and amulets have interchangeable meanings, and in the next breath that an amulet is generally worn for protection and made from a durable material. Its talisman article keeps the functions apart: protection against evil on one side, good fortune on the other. Museum labels follow one convention or the other without announcing which.

Inference — the category is European and it was laid over the world from outside. An Egyptian wore a wedjat; a Bangkok collector buys a phra khrueang by temple and by monk; a visitor to a Kyoto shrine takes home an omamori. None of them reaches for a word meaning amulet-in-general. The wide word belongs to the cataloguer, and it is the word on the spine of this project. Saying so is the least the reader is owed.