英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

attitude [attitude 词源字典]: attitude: [17] In origin, attitude is the same word as aptitude. Both come ultimately from late Latin aptitūdō. In Old French this became aptitude, which English acquired in the 15th century, but in Italian it became attitudine, which meant ‘disposition’ or ‘posture’. This was transmitted via French attitude to English, where at first it was used as a technical term in art criticism, meaning the ‘disposition of a figure in a painting’. The metaphorical sense ‘mental position with regard to something’ developed in the early 19th century.
=> aptitude[attitude etymology, attitude origin, 英语词源]
attorney: attorney: [14] Attorney was formed in Old French from the prefix a- ‘to’ and the verb torner ‘turn’. This produced the verb atorner, literally ‘turn to’, hence ‘assign to’ or ‘appoint to’. Its past participle, atorne, was used as a noun with much the same signification as appointee – ‘someone appointed’ – and hence ‘someone appointed to act as someone else’s agent’, and ultimately ‘legal agent’.

Borrowed into English, over the centuries the term came to mean ‘lawyer practising in the courts of Common Law’ (as contrasted with a solicitor, who practised in the Equity Courts); but it was officially abolished in that sense by the Judicature Act of 1873, and now survives only in American English, meaning ‘lawyer’, and in the title Attorney- General, the chief law officer of a government.
=> turn
attract: attract: [15] Etymologically, attract means literally ‘pull something towards one’. It comes from attract-, the past participial stem of the Latin verb attrahere, a compound formed from the prefix ad- ‘to’ and the verb trahere ‘pull’. It was quite a late formation, of around the mid 15th century, coined on the model of other English verbs, such as abstract and contract, deriving ultimately from Latin trahere.
=> abstract, contract, retract, subtract
attrition: attrition: see throw
attune: attune: see tune
aubergine: aubergine: [18] Etymologically, the aubergine is the ‘anti-fart vegetable’. That was the meaning of its ultimate source, Sanskrit vātinganah, so named because it did not produce intestinal gas. This was borrowed into Persian as bādingān, and reached Arabic as (with the definite article al) al-bādindjān. It then made its way with the Moors into the Iberian peninsula: here it produced Portuguese beringela (source of brinjal [18], an Indian and African English term for ‘aubergine’) and, with the definite article retained, Catalan alberginia.

French turned this into aubergine and passed it on to English. In British English it has gradually replaced the earlier eggplant, named after the vegetable’s shape, which American English has retained.
auburn: auburn: [15] The colour of auburn has changed over the centuries. The word comes originally from Latin albus ‘white’ (whence English album, albino, alb, albedo, and albion), from which was derived in medieval Latin alburnus ‘off-white’. This passed via Old French alborne, auborne into English, still meaning ‘yellowishwhite’. From the 15th to the 17th century it was often spelled abrun or abrown, and it seems likely that its similarity to brown led to its gradual shift in meaning to ‘golden-brown’ or ‘reddish-brown’ over the centuries.
=> albino, album
auction: auction: [16] The etymological idea underlying auction is that of ‘increasing’ – as the sale proceeds, the price offered goes up. The word comes from Latin auctiō ‘increase’, a noun derived from auct-, the past participial stem of the verb augēre ‘increase’ (source of English augment [15] and author, and related to auxiliary [17] and eke). The sense ‘auction sale’ was already present in Latin.
=> augment, august, author, auxilliary, eke, wax
audible: audible: [16] Audible is one of a wide range of English words based ultimately on the Latin verb audīre ‘hear’ (which came from the Indo- European root *awiz-, source also of Greek aithánesthai ‘perceive’ and Sanskrit āvis ‘evidently’). Others include audience [14], audio- [20], audit [15] (from Latin audītus ‘hearing’; audits were originally done by reading the accounts out loud), audition [16], and auditorium [17].
=> obey, oyez
augur: augur: [14] In Roman times, an augur was someone who foretold the future by observing the flight of birds (or by examining their entrails). His method of divination was reflected in his title, for the Latin word augur, earlier auger, seems to have meant literally ‘one who performs with birds’, from avis ‘bird’ (as in English aviary [16] and aviation [19]) and gerere ‘do, perform’ (as in English gestation, gesture, gerund, digest, and suggest). (A parallel formation is auspice [16], whose Latin antecedent auspex meant ‘one who observed the flight of birds’; it was compounded from avis and the verb specere ‘look’, which is related to English species and spy.) A Latin derivative was the verb inaugurāre ‘foretell the future from the flight of birds’, which was applied to the installation of someone of office after the appropriate omens had been determined; by the time it reached English as inaugurate [17], the association with divination had been left far behind.
=> aviary, aviation, inaugurate
August: August: [OE] The month of August was named by the Romans after their emperor Augustus (63 BC–14 AD). His name was Caius Julius Caesar Octavian, but the Senate granted him the honorary title Augustus in 27 BC. This connoted ‘imperial majesty’, and was a specific use of the adjective augustus ‘magnificent, majestic’ (source of English august [17]); it may derive ultimately from the verb augēre ‘increase’ (from which English gets auction and augment).
=> auction, augment
aunt: aunt: [13] Aunt appears to come ultimately from *amma, a hypothetical non-Indo-European word for ‘mother’ (parallel to Indo-European *mammā, and like it reproducing syllables perceived to be uttered by babies), which at some point was borrowed into Latin. It first appears in the derived form amita ‘paternal aunt’, which passed into English via Old French ante (of which modern French tante is an alternation) and Anglo-Norman aunte.
aura: aura: see air
aurochs: aurochs: see ox
auspice: auspice: see augur
authentic: authentic: [14] Etymologically, something that is authentic is something that has the authority of its original creator. Greek authentikós was a derivative of the noun authéntēs ‘doer, master’, which was formed from autós ‘self’ and the base -hentēs ‘worker, doer’ (related to Sanskrit sanoti ‘he gains’). The adjective’s original meaning in English was ‘authoritative’; the modern sense ‘genuine’ did not develop fully until the late 18th century. (Greek authéntēs, incidentally, was pronounced /afthendis/, and was borrowed into Turkish as efendī, source of English effendi [17].)
=> effendi
author: author: [14] Latin auctor originally meant ‘creator, originator’; it came from auct-, the past participial stem of augēre, which as well as ‘increase’ (as in English augment) meant ‘originate’. But it also developed the specific sense ‘creator of a text, writer’, and brought both these meanings with it into English via Old French autor. Forms with -th- began to appear in the mid 16th century (from French), and originally the-th- was just a spelling variant of -t-, but eventually it affected the pronunciation.

While the ‘writing’ sense has largely taken over author, authority [13] (ultimately from Latin auctōritās) and its derivatives authoritative and authorize have developed along the lines of the creator’s power to command or make decisions.
=> auction, augment
autograph: autograph: [17] Greek auto- was a prefixal use of the adjective autós, meaning ‘same, self’. Many of the commonest auto- words in English, including autograph itself and also autocrat [19], automatic [18] (a derivative of automaton [17], which was formed from a hypothetical base *men- ‘think’ related to mental and mind), autonomy [17], and autopsy [17] (originally meaning ‘eye-witness’, and derived from Greek optós ‘seen’, source of English optic), are original Greek formations.

But the 19th and particularly the 20th century have seen a mass of new coinages, notably in scientific and technical terminology, including such familiar words as autism, autobiography, autoerotic, autofocus, autogiro, autoimmune, automotive, autosuggestion, and of course automobile (originally a French formation of the 1870s). Automobile has itself, of course, given rise to a completely new use for the auto- prefix, with the general connotation of ‘motorized transport’, as in autobus, autocar, autocycle, and the German autobahn.
autumn: autumn: [14] English acquired autumn from Latin autumnus, partly via Old French autompne. Where Latin got the word from is a mystery; it may have been a borrowing from Etruscan, a long-extinct pre-Roman language of the Italian peninsula. In Old English, the term for ‘autumn’ was harvest, and this remained in common use throughout the Middle Ages; it was not until the 16th century that autumn really began to replace it (at the same time as harvest began to be applied more commonly to the gathering of crops). Fall, now the main US term for ‘autumn’, is 16th-century too.
avail: avail: see value