英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

cab [cab 词源字典]: cab: [19] Cab is short for cabriolet, a term, borrowed from French, for a light horse-drawn carriage. It comes, via the French verb cabrioler, from Italian capriolare ‘jump in the air’, a derivative of capriolo ‘roebuck’, from Latin capreolus, a diminutive form of caper ‘goat’ (source of English caper ‘leap’ and Capricorn). The reason for its application to the carriage was that the vehicle’s suspension was so springy that it appeared to jump up and down as it went along. From the same source comes the cabriole leg ‘curved furniture leg’ [18], from its resemblance to the front leg of a capering animal.
=> cabriole, cabriolet, caper, capricorn[cab etymology, cab origin, 英语词源]
cabbage: cabbage: [14] The shape of a cabbage, reminiscent of someone’s head, led to its being named in Old French caboce, which meant literally ‘head’. English acquired the word via the Old Northern French variant caboche (whose modern French descendant caboche, in the sense ‘head’, is said to provide the basis for Boche, the contemptuous term for ‘Germans’).

It is not known where it comes from ultimately; etymologists used to link it with Latin caput ‘head’, but that theory is no longer generally accepted. The Old English word for ‘cabbage’ was cāwel, which remains with us in the form of various Germanic relatives such as kohl-rabi, cauliflower, and Scottish kale.
cabin: cabin: [14] English acquired cabin from Old French cabane, which had it via Provençal cabana from late Latin capanna or cavanna ‘hut, cabin’. Surprisingly, despite their formal and semantic similarity, which has grown closer together over the centuries, cabin has no ultimate connection with cabinet [16], whose immediate source is French cabinet [16], whose immediate source is French cabinet ‘small room’.

The etymology of the French word is disputed; some consider it to be a diminutive form of Old Northern French cabine ‘gambling house’, while others take it as a borrowing from Italian gabbinetto, which perhaps ultimately comes from Latin cavea ‘stall, coop, cage’ (from which English gets cage). Its modern political sense derives from a 17th-century usage ‘private room in which the sovereign’s advisors or council meet’; the body that met there was thus called the Cabinet Council, which quickly became simply Cabinet.
cable: cable: [13] The ultimate source of cable is late Latin capulum ‘lasso’, a derivative of the verb capere ‘take, seize’, either directly or perhaps via Arabic habl. In Provençal, capulum became cable, which produced the Old French form chable: so English must either have borrowed the word straight from Provençal, or from *cable, an unrecorded Anglo-Norman variant of the Old French word.
=> capture, heave
cabriole: cabriole: see cab
cachet: cachet: [17] Cachet was a Scottish borrowing of a French word which originally meant ‘seal affixed to a letter or document’. In the 19th century this developed into the figurative ‘personal stamp, distinguishing characteristic’, which, through its use in the context of distinguished or fashionable people or things, has come to mean ‘prestige’. The original notion contained in the word is of ‘pressing’.

It comes via the medieval French verb cacher ‘press’ from Latin coactāre ‘constrain’. This was a derivative of coact-, the past participial stem of cōgere ‘drive together’ (source of English cogent), a compound verb formed from con- ‘together’ and agere ‘drive’ (source of English act and a host of other derivatives from agent to prodigal).

Modern French cacher means ‘hide’, which is the source of cache ‘hoard’, borrowed by English in the 19th century.
=> cache, cogent
cack-handed: cack-handed: [19] Cack comes from a 15thcentury dialect verb meaning ‘defecate’, which probably came from Middle Dutch cacken. It goes back via Latin cacāre to an ultimate Indo- European base *kak-, from which a lot of other Indo-European languages get words connected with ‘excrement’. The connection with cackhanded is usually explained as being that clumsy people make a mess; on this view ‘left-handed’, which cack-handed also means, is a secondary sense derived from ‘clumsy’. It may be nearer the mark to place ‘left-handed’ first, however, bearing in mind the traditional role of the left hand in many cultures for wiping the anus.
cackle: cackle: see cheek
cactus: cactus: [17] Cactus comes via Latin from Greek káktos, which was the name of the cardoon, a plant of the thistle family with edible leafstalks. Cactus originally had that meaning in English too, and it was not until the 18th century that the Swedish botanist Linnaeus applied the term to a family of similarly prickly plants.
cad: cad: see cadet
cadaver: cadaver: [16] Cadaver literally means ‘something that has fallen over’. It is a derivative of the Latin verb cadere ‘fall’ (from which English gets a wide range of other words, from case to accident). Its application to ‘dead body’ arises from the metaphorical use of the Latin verb for ‘die’.
=> accident, cadence, case
caddy: caddy: [18] Caddy comes ultimately from Malay katī, which was a measure of weight equal to about 0.6 kilos or 1½ pounds: it was thus originally ‘container which holds one caddy of tea’. English acquired the word in the 16th century as catty, and it is not altogether clear where the -dd- spelling came from. It has no connection with the golfer’s caddie (see CADET).
cadet: cadet: [17] Etymologically, a cadet is a ‘little head’. Its original meaning in English was ‘younger son or brother’, and it came from French cadet, an alteration of a Gascon dialect term capdet ‘chief’. This in turn derived from Vulgar Latin *capitellus ‘little head’, a diminutive form of Latin caput ‘head’ (from which English also gets captain and chief).

The reason for its apparently rather strange change in meaning from ‘chief’ to ‘younger son’ seems to be that the younger sons of Gascon families were in former times sent to the French court to fulfil the role of officers. When English borrowed French cadet, it did so not only in a form that retained the original spelling, but also as caddie or cadee, which originally meant ‘young officer’.

The Scottish version, caddie, gradually developed in meaning over the centuries through ‘person who runs errands’ to, in the 19th century, ‘golfer’s assistant’. Cad, originally ‘unskilled assistant’ [18], is an abbreviation of caddie or cadee.
=> captain, chief
cadre: cadre: see quarter
caesarian: caesarian: [17] The application of the adjective caesarian to the delivery of a baby by surgical incision through the abdomen and womb arises from the legend that Julius Caesar (c. 100–44 BC) himself or an earlier ancestor of his was born in this way. The name Caesar comes from the Latin phrase a caeso mātrisūtere, literally ‘from the mother’s cut womb’ (caesus was the past participle of the Latin verb caedere ‘cut’, from which English gets concise, incise, precise, etc). The abbreviation caesar for ‘caesarian section’ is mid 20th-century.
=> concise, incise, precise
café: café: see coffee
cafeteria: cafeteria: see coffee
caffeine: caffeine: see coffee
cage: cage: [13] English acquired cage via Old French cage from Latin cavea, which meant ‘enclosure for animals, such as a coop, hive, or stall’, and also ‘dungeon’. This is usually referred to Latin cavus ‘hollow’, from which English gets cave and cavern, although not all etymologists agree with this derivation. A Vulgar Latin derivative of cavea, *caveola, was the ancestor of English gaol, and cavea has also been postulated as the ultimate source of cabinet.
=> cabinet, cave, decoy, gaol, jail
cainozoic: cainozoic: see recent