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appraise [appraise 词源字典]: appraise: [15] Originally, appraise meant simply ‘fix the price of’. It came from the Old French verb aprisier ‘value’, which is ultimately a parallel formation with appreciate; it is not clear whether it came directly from late Latin appretiāre, or whether it was a newly formed compound in Old French, based on pris ‘price’. Its earliest spellings in English were thus apprize and apprise, and these continued in use down to the 19th century, with the more metaphorical meaning ‘estimate the worth of’ gradually coming to the fore.

From the 16th century onwards, however, it seems that association with the word praise (which is quite closely related etymologically) has been at work, and by the 19th century the form appraise was firmly established. Apprise ‘inform’, with which appraise is often confused (and which appears superficially to be far closer to the source pris or pretium ‘price’), in fact has no etymological connection with it.

It comes from appris, the past participle of French apprendre ‘teach’ (closely related to English apprehend).
=> appreciate, price[appraise etymology, appraise origin, 英语词源]
appreciate: appreciate: [17] Like appraise, appreciate originally comes from the notion of setting a price on something. It comes from late Latin appretiāre, a compound verb formed from ad- ‘to’ and pretium ‘price’. The neutral sense of ‘estimating worth’ was already accompanied by the more positive ‘esteem highly’ when the word began to be used in English, and by the late 18th century the meaning ‘rise in value’ (apparently an American development) was well in place.
=> appraise, price
apprehend: apprehend: [14] The underlying notion in apprehend is of ‘seizing’ or ‘grasping’; it comes ultimately from the Latin verb prehendere ‘seize’ (source also of comprehend, predatory, and prehensile). Latin apprehendere ‘lay hold of’, formed with the prefix ad-, developed the metaphorical meaning ‘seize with the mind’ – that is, ‘learn’; and that was the earliest meaning apprehend had in English when it was borrowed either directly from Latin or via French appréhender: John de Trevisa, for instance, in his translation of De proprietatibus rerum 1398 writes ‘he holds in mind … without forgetting, all that he apprehends’.

More familiar modern senses, such as ‘arrest’ and ‘understand’, followed in the 16th century. A contracted form of the Latin verb, apprendere, became Old French aprendre, modern French apprendre ‘learn’. This provided the basis for the derivative aprentis ‘someone learning’, from which English gets apprentice [14]; and its past participle appris, in the causative sense ‘taught’, was the source of English apprise [17].

The chief modern meaning of the derived noun apprehension, ‘fear’, arose via the notion of ‘grasping something with the mind’, then ‘forming an idea of what will happen in the future’, and finally ‘anticipation of something unpleasant’.
=> apprentice, comprehend, impregnable, predatory, prehensile
approach: approach: [14] Approach is etymologically connected with propinquity ‘nearness’; they both go back ultimately to Latin prope ‘near’. Propinquity [14] comes from a derived Latin adjective propinquus ‘neighbouring’, while approach is based on the comparative form propius ‘nearer’. From this was formed the late Latin verb appropiāre ‘go nearer to’, which came to English via Old French aprochier.

Latin prope, incidentally, may be connected in some way with the preposition prō (a relative of English for), and a hypothetical variant of it, *proqe, may be the source, via its superlative proximus, of English proximity and approximate.
=> approximate, propinquity, proximity
appropriate: appropriate: see proper
approve: approve: [14] The Latin source of approve, approbāre, was a derivative of probāre, source of English prove. Probāre originally meant ‘test something to find if it is good’ (it was based on Latin probus ‘good’) and this became extended to ‘show something to be good or valid’. It was this sense that was taken up by approbāre and carried further to ‘assent to as good’. When English acquired the word, via Old French aprover, it still carried the notion of ‘demonstrating’, but this was gradually taken over exclusively by prove, and the senses ‘sanction’ and ‘commend’, present since the beginning, established their primacy.
=> probity, prove
approximate: approximate: see proximity
apricot: apricot: [16] The word apricot reached English by a peculiarly circuitous route from Latin. The original term used by the Romans for the apricot, a fruit which came ultimately from China, was prūnum Arminiacum or mālum Arminiacum ‘Armenian plum or apple’ (Armenia was an early source of choice apricots). But a new term gradually replaced these: mālum praecocum ‘early-ripening apple’ (praecocus was a variant of praecox, from which English gets precocious). Praecocum was borrowed by a succession of languages, making its way via Byzantine Greek beríkokkon and Arabic al birqūq ‘the apricot’ to Spanish albaricoque and Portuguese albricoque.

This was the source of the English word, but its earliest form, abrecock, shows that it had already acquired the initial abrof French abricot, and the final -t followed almost immediately. Spellings with p instead of b are also found in the 16th century.
=> precocious
April: April: [14] Aprīlis was the name given by the Romans to the fourth month of the year. It is thought that the word may be based on Apru, an Etruscan borrowing of Greek Aphrō, a shortened version of Aphroditē, the name of the Greek goddess of love. In that case Aprīlis would have signified for the Romans ‘the month of Venus’. English acquired the word direct from Latin, but earlier, in the 13th century, it had borrowed the French version, avril; this survived, as averil, until the 15th century in England, and for longer in Scotland. The term April fool goes back at least to the late 17th century.
=> aphrodite
apron: apron: [14] As in the case of adder, umpire, and many others, apron arose from a mistaken analysis of the combination ‘indefinite article + noun’. The original Middle English word was napron, but as early as the 15th century a napron had turned into an apron. Napron itself had been borrowed from Old French naperon, a derivative of nape ‘cloth’ (source of English napery and napkin); and nape came from Latin mappa ‘napkin, towel’ (source of English map).
=> map, mat, napkin
apse: apse: [19] Apse ‘vaulted recess in a church’ is an anglicization of Latin apsis. This was a borrowing of Greek apsís or hapsís, which meant literally ‘a fastening together’ (it was derived from the verb háptein ‘join’). The notion that underlies its application to a vaulted space seems to be the joining together of arcs to form a circle; an early Greek use was as a ‘felloe’, part of the rim of a wheel, and this later came to mean, by extension, the wheel itself.

Further metaphoricization led to the sense ‘orbit’, and, more semicircularly, ‘arch’ or ‘vault’. The Latin/Greek form apsis itself was borrowed into English at the beginning of the 17th century, and remains in use as a technical term in astronomy, ‘extreme point of an orbit’.
apt: apt: [14] Apt comes from Latin aptus ‘fit, suited’, the past participle of the verb apere ‘fasten’. Other English words from this source are adapt, adapt, adept, inept, and (with the Latin prefix com-) couple and copulation. Related words are found in Indo-European languages of the Indian subcontinent: for instance, Sanskrit āpta ‘fit’.
=> adapt, adept, attitude, couple, inept
aquamarine: aquamarine: [19] Aquamarine means literally ‘sea water’ – from Latin aqua marīna. Its first application in English was to the precious stone, a variety of beryl, so named because of its bluish-green colour. The art critic John Ruskin seems to have been the first to use it with reference to the colour itself, in Modern Painters 1846. (The French version of the word, aiguemarine, was actually used in English somewhat earlier, in the mid 18th century, but it did not long survive the introduction of the Latin version.) Latin aqua ‘water’ has of course contributed a number of other words to English, notably aquatic [15] (from Latin aquāticus), aqualung (coined around 1950), aquarelle [19] (via Italian acquerella ‘water colour’), aquatint [18] (literally ‘dyed water’), aqueduct [16] (from Latin aquaeductus), and aqueous [17] (a medieval Latin formation); it is related to Old English ēa ‘water’ and īg ‘island’, and is of course the source of French eau, Italian acqua, and Spanish agua.
aquarium: aquarium: [19] Aquarium is a modern adaptation of the neuter form of the Latin adjective aquārius ‘watery’ (a noun aquārium existed in Roman times, but it meant ‘place where cattle drink’). Its model was vivarium, a 16th-century word for a ‘place for keeping live animals’. This was the term first pressed into service to describe such a place used for displaying fish and other aquatic life: in 1853 the magazine Athenaeum reported that ‘the new Fish house at the London Zoo has received the somewhat curious title of the “Marine Vivarium”’; and in the following year the guidebook to the Zoological Gardens called it the ‘Aquatic Vivarium’.

Within a year or two of this, however, the term aquarium had been coined and apparently established.
aquiline: aquiline: see eagle
arbitrary: arbitrary: [15] Arbitrary comes ultimately from Latin arbiter ‘judge’, via the derived adjective arbitrārius. It originally meant ‘decided by one’s own discretion or judgment’, and has since broadened, and ‘worsened’, in meaning to ‘capricious’. The Latin noun has of course contributed a large number of other words to English, including arbiter [15] itself, arbitrate [16] (via the Latin verb arbitrārī), and arbitrament [14]. Arbitrage in the sense ‘buying and selling shares to make a profit’ is a 19thcentury borrowing from French, where it means literally ‘arbitration’.
=> arbitrate
arbour: arbour: [14] Despite its formal resemblance to, and semantic connections with, Latin arbor ‘tree’, arbour is not etymologically related to it. In fact, its nearest English relative is herb. When it first came into English it was erber, which meant ‘lawn’ or ‘herb/flower garden’. This was borrowed, via Anglo-Norman, from Old French erbier, a derivative of erbe ‘herb’.

This in turn goes back to Latin herba ‘grass, herb’ (in the 16th century a spelling with initial h was common in England). Gradually, it seems that the sense ‘grassy plot’ evolved to ‘separate, secluded nook in a garden’; at first, the characteristic feature of such shady retreats was their patch of grass, but their seclusion was achieved by surrounding trees or bushes, and eventually the criterion for an arbour shifted to ‘being shaded by trees’.

Training on a trellis soon followed, and the modern arbour as ‘bower’ was born. The shift from grass and herbaceous plants to trees no doubt prompted the alteration in spelling from erber to arbour, after Latin arbor; this happened in the 15th and 16th centuries.
=> herb
arc: arc: see arch
arcane: arcane: [16] Arcane comes from the Latin adjective arcānus ‘hidden, secret’. This was formed from the verb arcēre ‘close up’, which in turn came from arca ‘chest, box’ (source of English ark). The neuter form of the adjective, arcānum, was used to form a noun, usually used in the plural, arcāna ‘mysterious secrets’.
=> ark
arch: arch: [14] English acquired arch via Old French arche and a hypothetical Vulgar Latin *arca from Latin arcus ‘curve, arch, bow’ (from which English also got arc [14]). When it first came into the language it was still used in the general sense of ‘curve, arc’ as well as ‘curved structure’ (Chaucer in his Treatise on the astrolabe 1391 wrote of ‘the arch of the day … from the sun arising till it go to rest’), but this had died out by the mid 19th century.

Vulgar Latin *arca also produced Italian arcata, which entered English via French as arcade in the 18th century. Arch meaning ‘saucy’ is an adjectival use of the prefix arch- (as in archetype).
=> arc