英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

asthma [asthma 词源字典]: asthma: [14] The original idea contained in asthma is that of ‘breathing hard’. The Greek noun asthma was derived from the verb ázein ‘breathe hard’ (related to áein ‘blow’, from which English gets air). In its earliest form in English it was asma, reflecting its immediate source in medieval Latin, and though the Greek spelling was restored in the 16th century, the word’s pronunciation has for the most part stuck with asma.
=> air[asthma etymology, asthma origin, 英语词源]
astound: astound: [17] Astound, astonish, and stun all come ultimately from the same origin: a Vulgar Latin verb *extonāre, which literally meant something like ‘leave someone thunderstruck’ (it was formed from the Latin verb tonāre ‘thunder’). This became Old French estoner, which had three offshoots in English: it was borrowed into Middle English in the 13th century as astone or astun, and immediately lost its initial a, producing a form stun; then in the 15th century, in Scotland originally, it had the suffix -ish grafted on to it, producing astonish; and finally in the 17th century its past participle, astoned or, as it was also spelled, astound, formed the basis of a new verb.
=> astonish, stun
astronomy: astronomy: [13] Astronomy comes via Old French and Latin from Greek astronomíā, a derivative of the verb astronomein, literally ‘watch the stars’. Greek ástron and astér ‘star’ (whence English astral [17] and asterisk [17]) came ultimately from the Indo-European base *ster-, which also produced Latin stella ‘star’, German stern ‘star’, and English star.

The second element of the compound, which came from the verb némein, meant originally ‘arrange, distribute’. At first, no distinction was made between astronomy and astrology. Indeed, in Latin astrologia was the standard term for the study of the stars until Seneca introduced the Greek term astronomia. When the two terms first coexisted in English (astrology entered the language about a century later than astronomy) they were used interchangeably, and in fact when a distinction first began to be recognized between the two it was the opposite of that now accepted: astrology meant simply ‘observation’, whereas astronomy signified ‘divination’.

The current assignment of sense was not fully established until the 17th century.
=> asterisk, astral, star
asylum: asylum: [15] Greek sulon meant ‘right of seizure’. With the addition of the negative prefix a- ‘not’ this was turned into the adjective ásūlos ‘inviolable’, which in turn was nominalized as āsūlon ‘refuge’. When it first entered English, via Latin asylum, it was used specifically for ‘place of sanctuary for hunted criminals and others’ (a meaning reflected in modern English ‘political asylum’), and it was not until the mid 18th century that it came to be applied to mental hospitals.
at: at: [OE] The preposition at was originally found throughout the Germanic languages: Old English had æt, Old High German az, Gothic and Old Norse at. It survives in the Scandinavian languages (Swedish att, for instance) as well as English, but has been lost from German and Dutch. Cognates in other Indo-European languages, including Latin ad ‘to, at’, suggest an ultimate common source.
athlete: athlete: [18] The etymological idea underlying athlete is ‘competing for a prize’. Greek āthlon meant ‘award, prize’, whence the verb athlein ‘compete for a prize’. Derived from this was the noun athlētés ‘competitor’. The context in which the word was most commonly used in Greek was that of the public games, where competitors took part in races, boxing matches, etc. Hence the gradual narrowing down of the meaning of athlete to ‘one who takes part in sports involving physical exercise’, and even further to ‘participant in track and field events’.
atlas: atlas: [16] In Greek mythology, Atlas was a Titan who as a punishment for rebelling against the gods was forced to carry the heavens on his shoulders. Hence when the term was first used in English it was applied to a ‘supporter’: ‘I dare commend him to all that know him, as the Atlas of Poetry’, Thomas Nashe on Robert Greene’s Menaphon 1589. In the 16th century it was common to include a picture of Atlas with his onerous burden as a frontispiece in books of maps, and from this arose the habit of referring to such books as atlases (the application is sometimes said to have arisen specifically from such a book produced in the late 16th century by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator (1512–94), published in England in 1636 under the title Atlas).

Atlas also gave his name to the Atlantic ocean. In ancient myth, the heavens were said to be supported on a high mountain in northwestern Africa, represented as, and now named after, the Titan Atlas. In its Greek adjectival form Atlantikós (later Latin Atlanticus) it was applied to the seas immediately to the west of Africa, and gradually to the rest of the ocean as it came within the boundaries of the known world.
=> atlantic
atmosphere: atmosphere: [17] Etymologically, atmosphere means ‘ball of vapour’. It was coined as modern Latin atmosphaera from Greek atmós ‘vapour’ (related to áein ‘blow’, ultimate source of English air) and sphaira ‘sphere’. Its original application was not, as we would now understand it, to the envelope of air encompassing the Earth, but to a mass of gas exhaled from and thus surrounding a planet; indeed, in the first record of the word’s use in English, in 1638, it was applied to the Moon, which of course is now known to have no atmosphere. The denotation of the word moved forward with the development of meteorological knowledge.
=> air, sphere
atoll: atoll: [17] Atoll was borrowed from Malayalam atolu ‘reef’, the name used by Maldive Islanders for their islands, many of which are coral atolls
atom: atom: [16] Etymologically, atom means ‘not cut, indivisible’. Greek átomos ‘that which cannot be divided up any further’ was formed from the negative prefix a- ‘not’ and the base *tom- ‘cut’ (source also of English anatomy and tome), and was applied in the Middle Ages not just to the smallest imaginable particle of matter, but also to the smallest imaginable division of time; an hour contained 22,560 atoms.

Its use by classical writers on physics and philosophy, such as Democritus and Epicurus, was sustained by medieval philosophers, and the word was ready and waiting for 19th-century chemists when they came to describe and name the smallest unit of an element, composed of a nucleus surrounded by electrons.
=> anatomy, tome
atone: atone: [16] As its spelling suggests, but its pronunciation disguises, atone comes from the phrase at one ‘united, in harmony’, lexicalized as atone in early modern English. It may have been modelled on Latin adūnāre ‘unite’, which was similarly compounded from ad ‘to, at’ and ūnum ‘one’.
=> at, one
atrocious: atrocious: [17] Traced back to its ultimate source, atrocious meant something not too dissimilar to ‘having a black eye’. Latin āter was ‘black, dark’ (it occurs also in English atrabilious ‘melancholic’ [17] – Greek mélās meant ‘black’), and the stem *-oc-, *-ox meant ‘looking, appearing’ (Latin oculus ‘eye’ and ferox ‘fierce’ – based on ferus ‘wild’, and source of English ferocious – were formed from it, and it goes back to an earlier Indo-European base which also produced Greek ōps ‘eye’ and English eye).

Combined, they formed atrox, literally ‘of a dark or threatening appearance’, hence ‘gloomy, cruel’. English borrowed it (in the stem form atrōci-) originally in the sense ‘wantonly cruel’.
=> eye, ferocious, inoculate, ocular
attach: attach: [14] When English first acquired it, attach meant ‘seize’ or ‘arrest’. It is Germanic in origin, but reached us via Old French atachier. This was an alteration of earlier Old French estachier ‘fasten (with a stake)’, which was based on a hypothetical Germanic *stakōn. The metaphorical meaning ‘arrest’ appears to have arisen in Anglo-Norman, the route by which the word reached English from Old French; the original, literal sense ‘fasten, join’ did not arrive in English until as late as the 18th century, as a reborrowing from modern French attacher.

A similar borrowing of Germanic *stakōn into Italian produced the ancestor of English attack.
=> attack, stake
attack: attack: [16] Attack reached English via French attaquer from Italian attaccare ‘attach, join’, which, like Old French atachier (source of English attach) was based on a hypothetical Germanic *stakōn (from which English gets stake). Phrases such as attaccare battaglia ‘join battle’ led to attaccare being used on its own to mean ‘attack’. Attach and attack are thus ‘doublets’ – that is, words with the same ultimate derivation but different meanings.
=> attach, stake
attain: attain: [14] Unlike contain, maintain, obtain, and the rest of a very long list of English words ending in -tain, attain does not come from Latin tenēre ‘_hold’. Its source is Latin tangere ‘touch’ (as in English tangible and tangent). The addition of the prefix ad- ‘to’ produced attingere ‘reach’, which passed via Vulgar Latin *attangere and Old French ataindre into English.
=> tangent, tangible
attempt: attempt: [14] Attempting is etymologically related to tempting. The Latin verb attemptāre was formed with the prefix ad- from temptāre, which meant ‘try’ as well as ‘tempt’ (the semantic connection is preserved in modern English try, with the contrasting senses ‘attempt’ and ‘put to the test’). The Latin form passed into Old French as atenter (hence modern French attenter), but was later latinized back to attempter, the form in which English acquired it.
=> tempt
attend: attend: [13] Etymologically, attend means ‘stretch to’. It comes originally from Latin attendere, a compound verb formed from the prefix ad- ‘to’ and tendere ‘stretch’ (a descendant of an Indo-European base *ten-, *ton- ‘stretch’ which also produced, among others, Latin tenēre ‘hold’ – source of English contain, maintain, obtain, etc – and English tendon, thin, and tone).

By metaphorical extension ‘stretch to’ became ‘direct one’s attention to’, which was the original meaning of the verb in Old French atendre and subsequently in English. The sense ‘take care of’ developed in the 15th century, ‘be present’ much later, in the 17th century. The noun derivative attention [14] comes from Latin attentiō. Tend meaning ‘look after’ comes mainly from attend, but also partly from intend, in both cases with loss of the first syllable.
=> contain, maintain, obtain, tendon, thin, tone
attest: attest: see testament
attic: attic: [18] In classical architecture, an Attic order was a pilaster, or square column (the naḿe comes from Attica, a region of ancient Greece of which Athens was the capital). This type of column was often used in a relatively low storey placed above the much higher main façade of a building, which hence became known in the 18th century as an attic storey. It was a short step to applying the word attic itself to an ‘upper storey’; the first record of it in this sense comes in Byron’s Beppo 1817: ‘His wife would mount, at times, her highest attic’.
attire: attire: see tyre