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cajun [cajun 词源字典]: cajun: [19] Cajun, denoting a French-speaking culture of Louisiana, USA, is an alteration of Acadian. Acadia was the name of a French colony in Canada (now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island) whose inhabitants were driven out by the British in the 18th century and migrated to the southern states of the USA (the source of the original French Acadie is not known). The word became much more widely known in the 1980s following a sudden fashion for Cajun food and dance music.
[cajun etymology, cajun origin, 英语词源]
cake: cake: [13] Originally, cake was a term for a flat round loaf of bread (it is this ‘shape’ element in its meaning that lies behind more modern usages such as ‘cake of soap’). It is not until the 15th century that we find it being applied to foodstuffs we would now recognize as cakes, made with butter, eggs, and some sort of sweetening agent. English borrowed the word from Old Norse kaka; it is related to cookie (from Dutch koekje), but not, despite the similarity, to cook. The expression piece of cake ‘something easy’ seems to have originated in the 1930s.
=> cookie
calcium: calcium: [19] Calcium was coined by the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy in 1808 on the basis of Latin calx ‘limestone’ (which is also the ancestor of English calcareous, calculate, calculus, causeway, and chalk). The Latin word probably came from Greek khálix, which meant ‘pebble’ as well as ‘limestone’.
=> calcarious, calculate, causeway, chalk
calculate: calculate: [16] Calculate comes from the past participial stem of the Latin verb calculāre, a derivative of the noun calculus, which meant ‘pebble’. This was almost certainly a diminutive form of Latin calx, from which English gets calcium and chalk. The notion of ‘counting’ was present in the word from ancient times, for a specialized sense of Latin calculus was ‘stone used in counting, counter’ (its modern mathematical application to differential and integral calculus dates from the 18th century).

Another sense of Latin calculus was ‘stone in the bladder or kidney’, which was its meaning when originally borrowed into English in the 17th century.
=> calcarious, calcium, calculus, causeway, chalk
calendar: calendar: [13] English acquired calendar via Anglo-Norman calender and Old French calendier from Latin calendārium, which was a ‘moneylender’s account book’. It got its name from the calends (Latin calendae), the first day of the Roman month, when debts fell due. Latin calendae in turn came from a base *kal- ‘call, proclaim’, the underlying notion being that in ancient Rome the order of days was publicly announced at the beginning of the month.

The calendula [19], a plant of the daisy family, gets its name from Latin calendae, perhaps owing to its once having been used for curing menstrual disorders. Calender ‘press cloth or paper between rollers’ [15], however, has no connection with calendar; it probably comes from Greek kúlindros ‘roller’, source of English cylinder.
calf: calf: English has two distinct words calf, both of Germanic origin. Calf ‘young cow’ goes back to Old English cealf, descendant of a prehistoric West Germanic *kalbam, which also produced German kalb and Dutch kalf. Calf of the leg [14] was borrowed from Old Norse kálfi, of unknown origin.
calibre: calibre: [16] Calibre, and the related calliper, are of Arabic origin. They come ultimately from Arabic qālib ‘shoemaker’s last, mould’ (there is some dispute over the source of this: some etymologists simply derive it from the Arabic verb qalaba ‘turn, convert’, while others trace it back to Greek kalapoús, literally ‘wooden foot’, a compound formed from kalon ‘wood’, originally ‘firewood’, a derivative of kaiein ‘burn’, and poús ‘foot’).

English acquired the Arabic word via Italian calibro and French calibre. The original Western meaning, ‘diameter of a bullet, cannon-ball, etc’, derives from the Arabic sense ‘mould for casting metal’. Calliper [16], which originally meant ‘instrument for measuring diameters’, is generally taken to be an alteration of calibre.
=> calliper
calico: calico: [16] Calico, a plain cotton cloth, was originally Calicut-cloth. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was the main export of Calicut, now known as Kozhikode, a city and port on the southwest coast of India whose first European visitor was the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama (c. 1469–1524). In the 19th century Calicut was South India’s major port. (It has no connection with Calcutta.)
call: call: [OE] Essentially, call is a Scandinavian word, although it does occur once in an Old English text, the late 10th-century Battle of Maldon. It was borrowed from Old Norse kalla, which can be traced back via West and North Germanic *kal- to an Indo-European base *gol- (among other derivatives of this is Serbo-Croat glagól ‘word’, source of Glagolitic, a term for an early Slavic alphabet).
calligraphy: calligraphy: see kaleidoscope
calliper: calliper: see calibre
callisthenics: callisthenics: see kaleidoscope
callow: callow: [OE] Old English calu meant ‘bald’. Eventually, the word came to be applied to young birds which as yet had no feathers, and by the late 16th century it had been extended metaphorically to any young inexperienced person or creature. It probably came, via West Germanic *kalwaz, from Latin calvus ‘bald’.
=> calvary
calm: calm: [14] The underlying meaning of calm seems to be not far removed from ‘siesta’. It comes ultimately from Greek kauma ‘heat’, which was borrowed into late Latin as cauma. This appears to have been applied progressively to the ‘great heat of the midday sun’, to ‘rest taken during this period’, and finally to simply ‘quietness, absence of activity’. Cauma passed into Old Italian as calma, and English seems to have got the word from Italian.
calorie: calorie: see cauldron
calumny: calumny: see challenge
calvary: calvary: [18] Latin calvāria meant literally ‘skull’ (it was a derivative of calva ‘scalp’, which in turn came from calvus ‘bald’, source of English callow). It was therefore used to translate Aramaic gulgūtha, also ‘skull’, which was the name of the hill outside Jerusalem on which Christ was crucified (applied to it because of its shape).
=> callow
cambium: cambium: see change
camel: camel: [OE] Naturally enough, camel is of Semitic origin: Hebrew has gāmāl, for example, and Arabic jamal. It was a relative of these that was the source of Greek kámēlos, which passed via Latin camēlus into English as early as the mid 10th century. (It replaced a previous Old English olfend, a word – shared by other early Germanic languages – apparently based on the misconception that a camel was an elephant.)
camellia: camellia: [18] The camellia, a shrub of oriental origin, was named in the mid-18th century by the Swedish taxonomist Linnaeus after the Moravian Jesuit missionary and botanist Joseph Kamel (in modern Latin, Camellus) (1661– 1706), who described the flora on the Philippine island of Luzon. The spelling of its name, with a double l, encourages a short ‘e’ pronunciation, but in practice most people say ‘cameelia’.