英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

accomplish [accomplish 词源字典]: accomplish: see complete
[accomplish etymology, accomplish origin, 英语词源]
accord: accord: [12] In its original source, Vulgar Latin *accordāre, accord meant literally ‘heart-toheart’ (from Latin ad ‘to’ and cord-, the stem of cor ‘heart’). It passed into Old French as acorder, and was borrowed comparatively early into English, turning up in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1123. Its general sense of ‘being in agreement’ has been narrowed down in English and other languages to the notion of ‘being in harmony musically’, and either Italian accordare or French accorder provided the basis for German akkordion (from which English got accordion), the musical instrument invented by Buschmann in Berlin in 1822.
=> cordial
account: account: [14] Account is of Old French origin. It was formed from compter, conter ‘count’ (which derived from Latin computāre) and the prefix a-. Its original meaning in English, too, was ‘count’ or ‘count up’; this had disappeared by the end of the 18th century, but its specialized reference to the keeping of financial records is of equal antiquity. Account for, meaning ‘explain’, arose in the mid 18th century.
=> count
accoutre: accoutre: [16] Accoutre is related to both couture and sew. English borrowed it from French accoutrer, which meant ‘equip with something, especially clothes’. A stage earlier, Old French had acoustrer, formed from cousture (whence couture) and the prefix a-. This came from Vulgar Latin *consūtūra, literally ‘sewn together’, from con- ‘together’ and sūtūra ‘sewn’ (whence English suture); sūtūra in turn came from the past participial stem of Latin suere, which derived from the same Indo- European root as English sew.
=> couture, sew, suture
accretion: accretion: see crescent
accumulate: accumulate: [16] Accumulate was borrowed from Latin accumulāre, a compound verb formed from the prefix ad-, here meaning ‘in addition’, and cumulāre ‘heap up’ (the source of English cumulative). Cumulāre itself derived from cumulus ‘heap’; English adopted this with its original Latin meaning in the 17th century, but it was not until the early 19th century that it was applied (by the meteorologist Luke Howard) to mountainous billowing cloud formations.
=> cumulative, cumulus
accurate: accurate: [16] ‘Accuracy’ is connected with ‘curing’, in the sense not of ‘making better’ but of ‘looking after’ – as in ‘the cure of souls’. The adjective comes from Latin accūrātus ‘done carefully’, which in turn derived from a verb (cūrāre ‘care for’) formed from the noun cūra ‘care’ (other English words from this source are curate, curious, procure, and secure). The notion of doing something carefully led on naturally to the notion of exactness.
=> curate, curious, procure, secure
accuse: accuse: [13] Accuse comes via Old French acuser from the Latin verb accūsāre, which was based on the noun causa ‘cause’ – but cause in the sense not of ‘something that produces a result’, but of ‘legal action’ (a meaning preserved in English cause list, for instance). Hence accūsāre was to ‘call someone to account for their actions’.

The grammatical term accusative [15] (denoting the case of the object of a verb in Latin and other languages) is derived ultimately from accūsāre, but it arose originally owing to a mistranslation. The Greek term for this case was ptósis aitiātiké ‘case denoting causation’ – a reasonable description of the function of the accusative. Unfortunately the Greek verb aitiásthai also meant ‘accuse’, and it was this sense that Latin grammarians chose to render when adopting the term.
=> cause, excuse
accustom: accustom: see custom
ace: ace: [13] Ace comes from the name of a small ancient Roman coin, the as (which may have been of Etruscan origin). As well as denoting the coin, Latin as stood for ‘one’ or ‘unity’, and it was as the ‘score of one at dice’ that it first entered English.
ache: ache: [OE] Of the noun ache and the verb ache, the verb came first. In Old English it was acan. From it was formed the noun, æce or ece. For many centuries, the distinction between the two was preserved in their pronunciation: in the verb, the ch was pronounced as it is now, with a /k/ sound, but the noun was pronounced similarly to the letter H, with a /ch/ sound.

It was not until the early 19th century that the noun came regularly to be pronounced the same way as the verb. It is not clear what the ultimate origins of ache are, but related forms do exist in other Germanic languages (Low German āken, for instance, and Middle Dutch akel), and it has been conjectured that there may be some connection with the Old High German exclamation (of pain) ah.
achieve: achieve: [14] Achieve is related to chief. It comes from Old French achever ‘bring to an end’, or literally ‘bring to a head’, which was based on the phrase a chief ‘to a head’ (chief derives ultimately from Latin caput ‘head’). The heraldic meaning of achievement, ‘coat of arms’, comes from the notion that the escutcheon was granted as a reward for a particular achievement. Over the centuries it has evolved an alternative form, hatchment [16].
=> chief, hatchment
acid: acid: [17] The original notion contained in the word acid is ‘pointedness’. In common with a wide range of other English words (for example acute, acne, edge, oxygen) it can be traced back ultimately to the Indo-European base *ak-, which meant ‘be pointed or sharp’. Among the Latin derivatives of this base was the adjective ācer ‘sharp’.

From this was formed the verb acere ‘be sharp or sour’, and from this verb in turn the adjective acidus ‘sour’. The scientist Francis Bacon seems to have been the first to introduce it into English, in the early 17th century (though whether directly from Latin or from French acide is not clear). Its use as a noun, in the strict technical sense of a class of substances that react with alkalis or bases, developed during the 18th century.
=> acacia, acne, acrid, acute, alacrity, ear, edge, oxygen
acknowledge: acknowledge: see know
acne: acne: [19] It is ironic that acne, that represents a low point in many teenagers’ lives, comes from acme, ‘the highest point’. The Greeks used akme, which literally meant ‘point’, for referring to spots on the face, but when it came to be rendered into Latin it was mistransliterated as acnē, and the error has stuck. (Acme comes, incidentally, from an Indo-European base *ak- ‘be pointed’, and thus is related to acid, edge, and oxygen.)
=> acid, acme, edge, oxygen
acolyte: acolyte: [14] Acolyte comes, via Old French and/or medieval Latin, from Greek akólouthos ‘following’. This was formed from the prefix a- (which is related to homos ‘same’) and the noun keleuthos ‘path’, and it appears again in English in anacolouthon [18] (literally ‘not following’), a technical term for lack of grammatical sequence. The original use of acolyte in English was as a minor church functionary, and it did not acquire its more general meaning of ‘follower’ until the 19th century.
=> anacolouthon
acorn: acorn: [OE] Acorn has no etymological connection with oak; its nearest linguistic relative in English is probably acre. The Old English word was æcern, which may well have derived from æcer ‘open land’ (the related Middle High German ackeran referred to beech mast as well as acorns, and Gothic akran developed more widely still, to mean simply ‘fruit’).

There are cognate words in other, non- Germanic, Indo-European languages, such as Russian yagoda ‘berry’ and Welsh aeron ‘fruits’. Left to develop on its own, æcern would have become modern English achern, but the accidental similarity of oak and corn have combined to reroute its pronunciation.
=> acre
acoustic: acoustic: [17] Appropriately enough, acoustic may be distantly related to hear. It first appeared in English in Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning 1605, borrowed from Greek akoustikós. This in turn was derived from the Greek verb for ‘hear’, akoúein, which, it has been speculated, may have some connection with *khauzjan, the original Germanic source of English hear, not to mention German hören and Dutch horen (as well as with Latin cavēre ‘be on one’s guard’, and hence with English caution and caveat).
=> caution, caveat, hear
acquaint: acquaint: [13] Acquaint is connected with quaint, distant though they may seem in meaning. It comes via Old French acointer from medieval Latin accognitāre, which was based ultimately on cognitus, the past participle of cognoscere ‘know’. Cognitus gave English cognition, of course, but also quaint (cognitus developed into cointe, queinte in Old French, and came to mean ‘skilled, expert’; this led later to the notion of being skilfully made or elegant, which eventually degenerated into ‘agreeably curious’).
=> cognition, quaint
acquire: acquire: [15] The original source of acquire, Latin acquīrere, meant literally ‘get something extra’. It was formed from the verb quaerere ‘try to get or obtain’ (from which English gets query, the derivatives enquire and require, and, via the past participial stem, quest and question) plus the prefix ad-, conveying the idea of being additional. English borrowed the word via Old French acquerre, and it was originally spelled acquere, but around 1600 the spelling was changed to acquire, supposedly to bring it more into conformity with its Latin source.
=> query, quest, question