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cobalt [cobalt 词源字典]: cobalt: [17] German kobold means ‘goblin’: and in former times it was believed by German silver miners that impurities in the ore they were extracting, which lessened the value of the silver and even made them ill, were put there by these mischievous creatures. In fact these impurities were a silver-white metallic element, which was named kobalt after a Middle High German variant of kobold (the miners’ sickness was probably caused by the arsenic with which it occurred).
[cobalt etymology, cobalt origin, 英语词源]
cobble: cobble: Cobble as in cobblestone [15] and cobble ‘mend’ [15] are two distinct words. The former was derived from cob ‘rounded lump’, with the diminutive suffix -le. The earliest evidence of it is in the compound cobblestone, and it is not recorded on its own until about 1600. The verb cobble is a back-formation from cobbler ‘shoemaker’ [14], of unknown origin. The derivative cobblers ‘nonsense’ [20] is short for cobbler’s awls, rhyming slang for ‘balls’.
=> cob
cobra: cobra: [19] Cobra is a shortening of Portuguese cobra de capella, which came into English in India in the 17th century. This meant literally ‘snake with a hood’: cobra from Latin colubra ‘snake’ and capella (referring of course to the ‘hood’ it makes when agitated, by spreading out the skin at the side of its head) from Vulgar Latin *cappellus ‘little cape’, from late Latin cappa ‘hood’.
=> cap, cape, chapel, chaperon
cobweb: cobweb: [14] A cobweb was originally literally a web woven by a cop, a Middle English word for ‘spider’. It was short for attercop ‘spider’, a compound of Old English origin which had largely died out by the 17th century. This seems to have meant literally ‘poison head’, from Old English ātōr ‘poison’ and coppe ‘head, top’ (a possible relative of English cob). It was revived by J R R Tolkien in The Hobbit 1937.
cocaine: cocaine: [19] Cocaine is made from the dried leaves of the coca bush, a plant native to the Andes, and its name was formed (perhaps originally in French, as cocaïne) from the plant’s name. That was a local name, Quechua koka, probably from the Aymara language of Bolivia and Peru, and it reached Europe in the 16th century by way of Spanish coca.
coccyx: coccyx: [17] The Greek physician Galen considered that the small tapering bone at the base of the human spine resembled a cuckoo’s beak. He therefore named it kókkux, which was Greek for ‘cuckoo’. It reached English via the Latin form coccyx.
cochineal: cochineal: [16] Cochineal ‘red dye’ comes via French cochenille from Old Spanish cochinilla, a term applied both to the dye and to the small insect related to the mealybugs, from whose dried body it is made. It is generally thought to be a derivative of Latin coccinus ‘scarlet’, which in turn came from Greek kokkinos, a derivative of kókos, the Greek term for the cochineal insect (the word originally meant ‘berry, seed’ – it was applied to various bacteria, such as streptococcus and staphylococcus, because of their spherical seedlike shape – and it was thought in ancient times that the dried body of the insect was a berry).
=> staphylococcus, streptococcus
cock: cock: [OE] The word cock is probably ultimately of onomatopoeic origin, imitative of the male fowl’s call (like the lengthier English cock-adoodle- doo [16], French coquerico, and German kikeriki). Beyond that it is difficult to go with any certainty; it reflects similar words in other languages, such as medieval Latin coccus and Old Norse kokkr, but which if any the English word was borrowed from is not clear.

It has been suggested that it goes back to a Germanic base *kuk-, of which a variant was the source of chicken, but typical Old English spellings, such as kok and kokke, suggest that it may have been a foreign borrowing rather than a native Germanic word – perhaps pointing to Germanic coccus. The origin of the interconnected set of senses ‘spout, tap’, ‘hammer of a firearm’, and ‘penis’ is not known; it is possible that it represents an entirely different word, but the fact that German hahn ‘hen’ has the same meanings suggests otherwise.

Of derived words, cocker [19], as in ‘cocker spaniel’, comes from cocking, the sport of shooting woodcock, and cocky [18] is probably based on the notion of the cock as a spirited or swaggering bird, lording it over his hens (there may well be some connection with cock ‘penis’, too, for there is an isolated record of cocky meaning ‘lecherous’ in the 16th century). Cockerel [15] was originally a diminutive form.
=> chicken, cocky
cock-a-hoop: cock-a-hoop: [16] Cock-a-hoop comes from a 16th- and 17th-century expression set the cock on the hoop ‘make merry’ – but exactly how the expression arose is not clear. One obvious interpretation is that it meant ‘put the tap on the barrel’ – that is, let the wine or beer flow freely – but it has also been suggested that hoop here means ‘measure of grain’ (a sense which originated in the 16th century), the notion being that to put a cockerel on a heap of grain implied prodigality.
cockatoo: cockatoo: [17] Cockatoo was originally a Malay word, although it has changed somewhat under the influence of English cock. It comes via Dutch kaketoe from Malay kakatua, a compound formed from kakak ‘elder brother or sister’ and tua ‘old’. A related word is cockatiel ‘small Australian parrot’ [19]; it comes ultimately from Portuguese cacatilha, formed from Malay kakatua with the Portuguese diminutive suffix -ilha, and it reached English via Dutch kaketielje.
cockatrice: cockatrice: [14] The name of the cockatrice, a mythical serpent whose glance could kill, has a bizarre history. It started life as medieval Latin calcātrix, which meant literally ‘tracker, hunter’ (it was formed from the verb calcāre ‘tread, track’, a derivative of calx ‘heel’). This was a direct translation of Greek ikhneúmōn (a derivative of ikhneúein ‘track’), a name given to a mysterious Egyptian creature in ancient times which was said to prey on crocodiles.

At one point Latin calcātrix, later caucātrix, came to be used for the crocodile itself, but this application never gained much currency in English (which adopted the word via Old French cocatris). Instead, it was adopted as another name for the basilisk, a mythical serpent. The accidental similarity of the first syllable to cock led both to the embroidering of the basilisk/cockatrice legend, so that it was said to have been born from a cock’s egg, and to the word’s 16th-century rerouting as a heraldic term for a beast with the head, wings, and body of a cock and the tail of a serpent.
cockchafer: cockchafer: [18] Etymologically, cockchafer (a medium-sized beetle) is probably a ‘large gnawer’. The second part of the word, which goes back to Old English times (ceafor), can be traced to a prehistoric base *kab- ‘gnaw’, source also of English jowl. The first element, cock, may be an allusion to the species’ greater size in relation to other chafers.
=> jowl
cockle: cockle: [14] The cockle is related etymologically to another mollusc, the conch: they both began life in Greek kónkhē – which meant ‘mussel’ as well as ‘conch’. From this was formed the diminutive konkhúlion ‘small variety of conch’ – hence ‘cockle’. The Greek word subsequently became reduced to kokhúlion, whose plural passed into medieval Latin as *cochilia.

Next in the chain was Old French coquille, source of the English word. The origin of the phrase cockles of one’s heart (first recorded in the mid 17th century) are not clear: some have claimed that the heart resembles a cockle shell, or more specifically that the fibres of the heart muscle spiral like the lines on a cockle shell, while others note a supposed resemblance of cockle to corculum, a Latin diminutive of cor ‘heart’, and others again point out that the scientific name for the cockle is Cardium, from Greek kardíā ‘heart’, but none of these explanations really carries conviction.
=> conch
cockney: cockney: [14] Etymologically, a cockney is a ‘cock’s egg’ (it comes from cokene, the old genitive plural of cock, and ey, the Middle English word for ‘egg’). This was a medieval term for a small or misshapen egg, the ‘runt’ of the clutch, supposedly laid by a cock, and it came to be applied (probably egged on by Middle English cocker ‘pamper’) to a ‘pampered child’ or ‘mother’s boy’.

In the 16th century we find that it has passed on to ‘town dweller’ (the notion being that people who lived in towns were soft and effete compared with countrymen), and by around 1600 it had started to mean more specifically ‘someone born in the city of London’. The popular definition ‘someone born within the sound of Bow bells’ is first reported by the lexicographer John Minsheu in 1617.
=> cock, egg
cockroach: cockroach: [17] Cockroach is a product of folk etymology, the process by which a ‘foreign’ – sounding is adapted by speakers of a language so as to seem more familiar. In this case the foreign word was Spanish cucaracha. This was evidently too much for 17th-century English tongues, so the first element was transformed into cock and the second to roach (presumably after the freshwater fish of that name). Modern English roach ‘butt of a marijuana cigarette’ [20] is probably an abbreviation of cockroach, but this is not certain.
cocktail: cocktail: [19] The origins of the word cocktail are mysterious. It first appeared (in America) in the first decade of the 19th century, roughly contemporary with cocktail meaning ‘horse with a cocked tail’ – that is, one cut short and so made to stick up like a cock’s tail – but whether the two words are connected, and if so, how the drink came to be named after such a horse, are not at all clear.
cocoa: cocoa: [18] Like chocolate, cocoa came to English from the Nahuatl language of the Aztec people. Their cacahuatl meant ‘beans of the cocoa tree’. Its first element was borrowed into Spanish as cacao. This was adopted by English in the 16th century, and remained the standard form until the 18th century, when it was modified to cocoa. Originally it was pronounced with three syllables (/ko-ko-a/), but confusion with the coco of coconut (which was also sometimes spelled cocoa) led to the current twosyllable pronunciation.
coconut: coconut: [17] Despite its tropical origins, the coconut has a European name. The base of the coconut’s shell, with its three small holes, apparently reminded early Spanish and Portuguese explorers of a human face, so they called it coco; this was the Portuguese word for a grinning or grimacing face, as of a scarecrow. English adopted it in the 16th century, and it formed the basis of the compound coconut, first recorded in 1613. (Before then the fruit of the coconut palm had been known as the Indian nut.)
cod: cod: [13] Like most fish-names, the origins of cod are obscure. It has been suggested, not all that convincingly, that it comes from another word cod [OE], now obsolete, which meant broadly ‘pouch’ – the idea being that the fish supposedly has a ‘baglike’ appearance. Among the specific applications of this other cod, which was of Germanic origin, were ‘seedcase’ (which survived into the twentieth century in the archaic compound peascod ‘pea pod’) and ‘scrotum’.

By transference the latter came to mean ‘testicles’, whence codpiece, a 15th- to 17thcentury garment somewhat analogous to the jockstrap. The cuttle of cuttlefish comes from the same source.
=> cuttlefish
coda: coda: see queue