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circus [circus 词源字典]: circus: [16] Latin circus meant literally ‘ring, circle’, but it was applied metaphorically by the Romans to the circular arena in which performances and contests were held. That was the original signification of the word in English, applied in a strictly antiquarian sense to the ancient world, and it was not until the late 18th century that it began to be used for any circular arena and the entertainment staged therein.

The Latin word is related to, and may have come from, Greek kírkos; and it is also connected with Latin curvus, source of English curve. It has additionally been linked with Latin corōna ‘circlet’, from which English gets crown. And it is of course, via its accusative form circum, the starting point of a wide range of English words with the prefix circum-, from circumference to circumvent (in this category is circuit [14], which goes back to an original Latin compound verb circumīre, literally ‘go round’).
=> circle, circuit, circulate, crown, curve, search[circus etymology, circus origin, 英语词源]
cistern: cistern: see chest
citadel: citadel: see city
cite: cite: [15] Latin ciēre or cīre meant ‘move’ (it was related to Greek kīnein ‘move’, source of English kinetic and cinema). From its past participle, citus, was formed the verb citāre, meaning ‘cause to move’, and hence ‘call, summon’. This passed into English (via Old French citer), as cite ‘summon officially’.

In the 16th century this came to be applied metaphorically to the ‘calling forth’ of a particular passage of writing, author, etc as an example or proof of what one is saying – hence the modern sense ‘quote’. The same Latin verb lies behind a range of other English verbs, including excite, incite, recite, and solicit.
=> cinema, excite, incite, kinetic, recite, solicit
citizen: citizen: [14] The Latin word for ‘citizen’ was cīvis. From it was formed the derivative cīvitās ‘citizenship, city state’, from which English gets city. From this in turn a new derivative was formed in Vulgar Latin, *cīvitātānus ‘citizen’, replacing the original cīvis. This found its way, much changed, into Old French as citeain (whence modern French citoyen). Anglo- Norman altered the Old French form to citezein, possibly on analogy with Anglo-Norman deinzein ‘denizen’.
citrus: citrus: [19] Latin citrus signified the ‘citron’, a tree (Citrus medica) of Asian origin with a lemon-like fruit which was the earliest of the citrus fruits to become known in the West. Like the fruit itself, the name is presumably of Eastern origin – perhaps from a non-Indo- European language from around the eastern end of the Himalayas. Citron is a French derivative of citrus, coined on the model of French limon ‘lemon’; it was borrowed into English in the 16th century.
cittern: cittern: see guitar
city: city: [13] The Latin word for ‘city’ was urbs (whence English urban), but a ‘citizen’ was cīvis. From this was derived the noun cīvitās, which originally had the abstract sense ‘citizenship’. Gradually it acquired more concrete connotations, eventually coming to be used as a synonym of urbs. It passed into English via Old French cite, and at first was used for any settlement, regardless of size (although it was evidently felt to be a grander term than the native borough); the modern distinction between towns and cities developed during the 14th century.

The Italian descendant of Latin cīvitās is città. A now obsolete variant of this was cittade, whose diminutive form is the source of English citadel [16].
=> citadel, citizen, civil
civil: civil: [14] Latin cīvis ‘citizen’ had two adjectival derivatives which have passed into English: cīvicus, source of civic [16], and cīvīlis, from which, via Old French, we get civil. Of its derivatives, civility [14] comes from Latin cīvīlitās, but civilize [17] and civilian [14] are French creations.
=> civilize, city
claim: claim: [13] The etymological notion behind claim is of ‘calling out’. It comes from claim-, the present stem of Old French clamer, which goes back to Latin clāmāre ‘cry out, shout’ (whose derived noun clāmor is the source of English clamour [14]). Relatives of clāmāre include clārus (source of English clear) and possibly callāre ‘call out’ (whence English council); and it formed the basis of the English verbs acclaim, exclaim, and proclaim (their spelling was altered through association with claim).

These words’ ultimate source was the onomatopoeic Indo- European base *klā-, which also produced low ‘make the noise characteristic of cattle’.
=> acclaim, clamour, clear, council, exclaim, low, proclaim
clam: clam: [OE] Old English clam meant ‘something for tying up or fastening, fetter’; it can be traced back to a prehistoric Germanic base *klam-, which also produced clamp [14] and is related to climb. There is a gap in the word’s history in early Middle English times, but it reappears at the end of the 14th century in the sense ‘clamp’, and in the 16th century it was applied, originally in Scotland, to the mollusc which now bears the name, apparently on the grounds that its two shells close like the jaws of a clamp or vice.
=> clamp, climb
clammy: clammy: [14] Etymologically, clammy means ‘sticky as if smeared with clay’. It comes from the now obsolete verb clam ‘smear, stick’. This goes back to Old English clǣman, a word of ancient ancestry: its prehistoric Germanic source was *klaimjan, a verb derived from *klaimaz ‘clay’; this was formed from the base *klai-, which is also the ultimate source of English clay and can be traced back to the Indo-European base *gloi-, *glei-, *gli-, from which English gets glue and gluten.
=> clay, glue
clamour: clamour: see claim
clamp: clamp: see climb
clan: clan: [14] The immediate source of clan is naturally enough Gaelic, but ultimately it comes, somewhat unexpectedly, from Latin, for etymologically it is the same word as plant. Scots Gaelic clann originally meant ‘offspring’ (hence the modern meaning ‘family group’), and it came from Old Irish cland, a direct borrowing from Latin planta (the Celtic languages of the British Isles tended to change Latin /p/ to /k/).

This was the source of English plant, but it did not then have nearly such a broad application; it meant specifically ‘shoot suitable for planting out’, and the connotations of ‘new growth’ and ‘offspring’ show up in the Gaelic borrowing.
=> plant
clandestine: clandestine: see conceal
clangor: clangor: see laugh
claret: claret: [14] Claret was originally a ‘lightcoloured wine’ – pale red (virtually what we would now call rosé), but also apparently yellowish. The word comes ultimately from Latin clārus ‘clear’; from this was derived the verb clārāre, whose past participle was used in the phrase vīnum clārātum ‘clarified wine’. This passed into Old French as vin claret.

Modern French clairet preserves the word’s early sense ‘pale wine, rosé’, but in English by the later 17th century seems to have been transferred to red wine, and since in those days the vast majority of red wine imported into Britain came from Southwest France, and Bordeaux in particular, it was not long before claret came to mean specifically ‘red Bordeaux’.
=> clear
clarion: clarion: see clear
class: class: [16] Latin classis originally denoted ‘the people of Rome under arms, the ancient Roman army’; it appears to come from an earlier unrecorded *qladtis, a derivative of the base *qel- ‘call’, which points to an underlying sense ‘call to arms’. Under the terms of the constitution attributed to Servius Tullius, a 6thcentury BC king of Rome, the army, and hence the people, was divided into six such classes, membership of each based originally on the amount of land held, and latterly on wealth in money terms.

English first adopted the word in this antiquarian sense (which provided the basis for the modern application to social class), but its widespread use in the language probably began in the sense ‘group of pupils’. The derivatives classic [17] and classical [16] come from Latin classicus, probably via French classique; in Latin, the adjective signified ‘of the highest class of Roman citizen’, whence the word’s presentday approbatory connotations.