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advantage [advantage 词源字典]: advantage: [14] Advantage comes from Old French avantage, which was based on avant ‘before’; the notion behind its formation was of being ahead of others, and hence in a superior position. As with advance, the intrusive -dbecame established in the 16th century, on the analogy of words genuinely containing the Latin prefix ad-. The reduced form vantage actually predates advantage in English, having entered the language via Anglo-Norman in the 13th century.
[advantage etymology, advantage origin, 英语词源]
adventure: adventure: [13] Adventure derives ultimately from a Latin verb meaning ‘arrive’. It originally meant ‘what comes or happens by chance’, hence ‘luck’, but it took a rather pessimistic downturn via ‘risk, danger’ to (in the 14th century) ‘hazardous undertaking’. Its Latin source was advenīre, formed from the prefix adand venīre ‘come’. Its past participle stem, advent-, produced English advent [12] and adventitious [17], but it was its future participle, adventura ‘about to arrive’, which produced adventure.

In the Romance languages in which it subsequently developed (Italian avventura, Spanish aventura, and French aventure, the source of Middle English aventure) the d disappeared, but it was revived in 15th – 16thcentury French in imitation of Latin. The reduced form venture first appears in the 15th century.
=> adventitious, avent, venture
adverb: adverb: [15] Adverb comes ultimately from a Latin word modelled on Greek epírrhēma, literally ‘added word’. The elements of this compound (the prefix epi- and rhēma ‘word’) were translated literally into Latin (ad- and verbum), giving adverbum. English took the word either directly from Latin, or via French adverbe.
=> verb
advertise: advertise: [15] When it was originally borrowed into English, from French, advertise meant ‘notice’. It comes ultimately from the Latin verb advertere ‘turn towards’ (whose past participle adversus ‘hostile’ is the source of English adverse [14] and adversity [13]). A later variant form, advertīre, passed into Old French as avertir ‘warn’ (not to be confused with the avertir from which English gets avert [15] and averse [16], which came from Latin abvertere ‘turn away’).

This was later reformed into advertir, on the model of its Latin original, and its stem form advertiss- was taken into English, with its note of ‘warning’ already softening into ‘giving notice of’, or simply ‘noticing’. The modern sense of ‘describing publicly in order to increase sales’ had its beginnings in the mid 18th century. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the verb was pronounced with the main stress on its second syllable, like the advertise- in advertisement.
=> adverse, adversity, verse
advice: advice: [13] Like modern French avis, advice originally meant ‘opinion’, literally ‘what seems to one to be the case’. In Latin, ‘seem’ was usually expressed by the passive of the verb vidēre ‘see’; thus, vīsum est, ‘it seems’ (literally ‘it is seen’). With the addition of the dative first person pronoun, one could express the notion of opinion: mihi vīsum est, ‘it seems to me’.

It appears either that this was partially translated into Old French as ce m’est a vis, or that the past participle vīsum was nominalized in Latin, making possible such phrases as ad (meum) vīsum ‘in (my) view’; but either way it is certain that a(d)- became prefixed to vīs(um), producing a new word, a(d)vis, for ‘opinion’.

It was originally borrowed into English without the d, but learned influence had restored the Latin spelling by the end of the 15th century. As to its meaning, ‘opinion’ was obsolete by the mid 17th century, but already by the late 14th century the present sense of ‘counsel’ was developing. The verb advise [14] probably comes from Old French aviser, based on avis.
=> vision, visit
advocate: advocate: [14] Etymologically, advocate contains the notion of ‘calling’, specifically of calling someone in for advice or as a witness. This was the meaning of the Latin verb advocāre (formed from vocāre ‘call’, from which English also gets vocation). Its past participle, advocātus, came to be used as a noun, originally meaning ‘legal witness or adviser’, and later ‘attorney’.

In Old French this became avocat, the form in which English borrowed it; it was later relatinized to advocate. The verb advocate does not appear until the 17th century. The word was also borrowed into Dutch, as advocaat, and the compound advocaatenborrel, literally ‘lawyer’s drink’, has, by shortening, given English the name for a sweetish yellow concoction of eggs and brandy.
=> invoke, revoke, vocation
aegis: aegis: [18] The notion of ‘protection’ contained in this word goes back to classical mythology, in which one of the functions or attributes of the Greek god Zeus (and later of Roman Jupiter or Minerva) was the giving of protection. This was usually represented visually as a shield, traditionally held to be made of goatskin – hence Greek aigís, the name of the shield, came to be associated in the popular imagination with aix (aig- in its stem form), the Greek word for ‘goat’. English borrowed the word directly from Latin.
aeolian harp: aeolian harp: [18] Aeolus was the Greek god of the winds (the form of the name is Latin; the original Greek was Aiolos, deriving from the adjective aiolos ‘quick-moving’). Hence the application of the epithet to a musical instrument whose strings are sounded by the breeze blowing over them. The term is first recorded in the writings of Erasmus Darwin, at the end of the 18th century.
aeon: aeon: see age
aeroplane: aeroplane: [19] The prefix aero- comes ultimately from Greek āér ‘air’, but many of the terms containing it (such as aeronaut and aerostat) reached English via French. This was the case, too, with aeroplane, in the sense of ‘heavier-than-air flying machine’. The word was first used in English in 1873 (30 years before the Wright brothers’ first flight), by D S Brown in the Annual Report of the Aeronautical Society – he refers vaguely to an aeroplane invented by ‘a Frenchman’.

The abbreviated form plane followed around 1908. (An earlier, and exclusively English, use of the word aeroplane was in the sense ‘aerofoil, wing’; this was coined in the 1860s, but did not long survive the introduction of the ‘aircraft’ sense.) Aeroplane is restricted in use mainly to British English (and even there now has a distinctly old-fashioned air). The preferred term in American English is airplane, a refashioning of aeroplane along more ‘English’ lines which is first recorded from 1907.
=> air
aesthetic: aesthetic: [18] In strict etymological terms, aesthetic relates to perception via the senses. It comes ultimately from the Greek verb aísthesthai ‘perceive’ (which is related to Latin audīre ‘hear’), and this meaning is preserved in anaesthetic, literally ‘without feeling’. The derived adjective aisthētikós reached Western Europe via modern Latin aesthēticus, and was first used (in its Germanized form ästhetisch) in the writings of the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).

Here, it retained its original sense, ‘perceptual’, but its use by A T Baumgarten as the title (Æsthetica) of a work on the theory of beauty in art (1750) soon led to its adoption in its now generally accepted meaning.
=> audible, audition
aestivate: aestivate: see ether
affable: affable: [16] The Latin original of affable, affābilis, meant ‘easy to speak to’. It was formed from the verb āffārī ‘speak to’, which in turn was derived from the prefix ad- ‘to’ and fārī ‘speak’ (the source of fable, fame, and fate). It reached English via Old French affable.
=> fable, fame, fate
affair: affair: [13] Like ado, and of course to-do, affair originally meant literally ‘to do’. It was coined in Old French from the phrase à faire ‘to do’, and entered English via Anglo-Norman afere. The spelling affair was established by Caxton, who based it on the French model. The specific sense of a ‘love affair’ dates from the early 18th century.
=> fact
affect: affect: There are two distinct verbs affect in English: ‘simulate insincerely’ [15] and ‘have an effect on’ [17]; but both come ultimately from the same source, Latin afficere. Of compound origin, from the prefix ad- ‘to’ and facere ‘do’, this had a wide range of meanings. One set, in reflexive use, was ‘apply oneself to something’, and a new verb, affectāre, was formed from its past participle affectus, meaning ‘aspire or pretend to have’.

Either directly or via French affecter, this was borrowed into English, and is now most commonly encountered in the past participle adjective affected and the derived noun affectation. Another meaning of afficere was ‘influence’, and this first entered English in the 13th century by way of its derived noun affectiō, meaning ‘a particular, usually unfavourable disposition’ – hence affection.

The verb itself was a much later borrowing, again either through French or directly from the Latin past participle affectus.
=> fact
affinity: affinity: [14] The abstract notion of ‘relationship’ in affinity was originally a more concrete conception of a border. The word comes, via Old French afinite, from the Latin adjective affinis, which meant literally ‘bordering on something’. It was formed from the prefix ad- ‘to’ and the noun finis ‘border’ (from which English also gets finish, confine, and define).
=> confine, define, finish, paraffin, refine
affix: affix: see fix
afflict: afflict: [14] When it originally entered English, afflict meant ‘overthrow’, reflecting its origins in Latin afflīgere ‘throw down’, a compound verb formed from the prefix ad- ‘to’ and flīgere ‘strike’. English afflict comes either from the Latin past participle afflictus, from a new Latin verb formed from this, afflictāre, or perhaps from the now obsolete English adjective afflict, which was borrowed from Old French aflit and refashioned on the Latin model. The meaning ‘torment, distress’ developed in the early 16th century.
affluent: affluent: [15] The meaning ‘rich’ is a fairly recent development for affluent; it is first recorded in the mid 18th century. Originally the adjective meant simply ‘flowing’. It came, via Old French, from Latin affluent-, the present participle of affluere, a compound verb formed from the prefix ad- ‘towards’ and fluere ‘flow’ (the source of English fluid, fluent, flux, fluctuate, and many other derivatives).
=> fluctuate, fluent, fluid, flux
afford: afford: [OE] This verb originally meant ‘accomplish, fulfil’. In Old English times it was geforthian, formed from the prefix ge-, denoting completion of an action, and forthian ‘advance towards completion’ or literally ‘further’ (from the adverb forth). The notion of accomplishing something or managing something gradually led, by the 15th century, to the idea of being able to do something because one has enough money.

Meanwhile, the original ge- prefix, which by Middle English times had become i- (iforthien), had been transformed into af- under the influence of the many Latin-based words beginning in aff-, and in the 16th century spellings with final d in place of th start to appear.
=> forth