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couvade [couvade 词源字典]: couvade: see incubate
[couvade etymology, couvade origin, 英语词源]
cove: cove: [OE] Old English cofa meant ‘small room’, as used for sleeping in or as a storeroom. It was descended from Germanic *kubon, which was probably also the ultimate ancestor of cubbyhole [19] (the superficially similar cubicle is not related). In the late Old English period this seems to have developed in northern and Scottish dialects to ‘small hollow place in coastal rocks, cave’, and hence (although not, apparently, until as late as the 16th century) to ‘small bay’. (The other cove [16], a dated slang term for ‘chap’, may come from Romany kova ‘thing, person’.)
=> cubbyhole
coven: coven: see convent
covenant: covenant: [13] The notion of ‘agreement’ in covenant comes originally from a literal ‘coming together’. It was borrowed from Old French covenant, a noun use of the present participle of the verb covenir ‘agree’, which was descended from Latin convenire ‘come together’ (source also of English convene, convenient, convention, convent, and coven). (Modern French has restored the n, giving convenir.)
=> convenient, convent, convention, coven, venue
cover: cover: [13] Cover comes ultimately from Latin cooperīre, a compound verb formed from the intensive prefix com- ‘completely’ and operīre ‘cover’ (a relative of aperīre ‘open’, from which English gets aperient). It passed into English via Old French cuvrir or covrir. Derivatives include coverlet [13] (in which the final element represents not the diminutive suffix but French lit ‘bed’, the word being a borrowing from Anglo-Norman covrelit, literally ‘bed-cover’) and kerchief (literally ‘head-cover’), as in handkerchief.
=> aperient, discover
covet: covet: [13] Covetousness and cupidity are very closely related, etymologically as well as semantically. Covet comes via Old French coveitier from Vulgar Latin *cupiditāre, a verb derived from the Latin noun cupiditās (from which English gets cupidity). Its ultimate source is the Latin verb cupere ‘desire’.
=> cupidity
covey: covey: see incubate
cow: cow: English has two completely distinct words cow. The commoner, ‘female of cattle’ [OE], is a word of very ancient ancestry. It goes back via West and North Germanic *kōuz to a hypothetical Indo-European *gwōus, which was also the source of Latin bōs (from which English gets bovine, beef, and bugle, not to mention Bovril). In modern English its plural is cows, but Old English cū had an anomalous plural, cy, which in the remodelled form kine survived dialectally into the 20th century. The other cow, ‘intimidate, daunt’ [17], probably comes from Old Norse kúga ‘oppress’.
=> beef, bovine, bugle
coward: coward: [13] Etymologically, a coward seems to be ‘someone who runs away with his tail between his legs’. It comes from Old French cuard, which was based on *cōda, the Vulgar Latin descendant of Latin cauda ‘tail’. (The apparently similar cower [13] is no relation, coming from Middle Low German *kūren ‘lie in wait’.)
cowslip: cowslip: [OE] Old English cūslyppe literally meant ‘cow dung’ (a variant cūsloppe, which survived dialectally into the 20th century as cowslop, suggests that its second element is related to slop and sloppy). The name presumably came from the plant’s growing in pastures where cows commonly graze, and perhaps even from some perceived symbiosis with cow-pats.
coxswain: coxswain: [15] A coxswain was originally a servant, or swain, whose job was to steer a ship’s boat, or cock (cock comes from Old French coque, which was probably a descendant via late Latin caudica ‘canoe’ of Latin caudex ‘tree trunk’, and swain is a borrowing from Old Norse sveinn ‘boy, servant’). The abbreviation cox seems to have developed in the 19th century.
coy: coy: [14] Essentially, coy is the same word as quiet, and ‘quiet’ is what it meant when it first came into English (it soon developed to ‘shyly reserved’, and the sense ‘quiet’ died out in the 17th century). Its ultimate source was Latin quiētus, but whereas in the case of quiet this passed directly through Old French, coy came via the more circuitous route of Vulgar Latin *quētus, which produced early Old French quei, and later coi, the source of the English word.
=> quiet
crab: crab: Crab the crustacean [OE] and crab the apple [14] may be two distinct words. The word for the sea creature has several continental relatives (such as German krebs and Dutch krabbe) which show it to have been of Germanic origin, and some of them, such as Old Norse krafla ‘scratch’ and Old High German krapho ‘hook’, suggest that the crab may have received its name on account of its claws.

The origins of crab the fruit are not so clear. Some would claim that it is simply a metaphorical extension of the animal crab, from a perceived connection between the proverbial perversity or cantankerousness of the crustacean (compare crabbed) and the sourness of the apple, but others have proposed a connection with Swedish dialect skrabba ‘wild apple’, noting that a form scrab was current in Scottish English from at least the 16th century.
=> crayfish
crabbed: crabbed: [13] Because of their tendency to deploy their pincers at the slightest provocation, and also perhaps because of their sidelong method of locomotion, crabs seem always to have had a reputation for being short-tempered and perverse. Hence the creation of the adjective crabbed, which literally means ‘like a crab’. Its meaning has subsequently been influenced by crab the apple, famous for its sourness. (The semantically similar crabby is a 16th-century formation.)
crack: crack: [OE] Old English had the verb cracian ‘make a sudden sharp noise’, but English did not acquire the noun crack until the 14th century. Both are of Germanic origin (modern German has the related krachen, for instance, and Dutch has kraken), and the verb’s hypothetical ancestor can be reconstructed as *krakojan. The notion of ‘sudden sharp noise’ is semantically primary (presumably it was originally onomatopoeic), and the prevalent modern sense ‘fissure’ arises from the connection between the noise of something breaking and the resultant line of fracture.
=> crock
craft: craft: [OE] The original notion contained in the word craft is that of ‘strength’ (that is the meaning of its relatives in other Germanic languages, such as German and Swedish kraft). Old English croeft had that sense too (it had largely died out by the 16th century), but it had also developed some other meanings, which are not shared by its Germanic cognates: ‘skill’, for example (in a bad as well as a good sense, whence crafty) and ‘trade’ or ‘profession’.

Much later in origin, however (17th-century in fact), is the sense ‘ship’. It is not clear how this developed, but it may have been a shortening of some such expression as ‘vessel of the sailor’s craft’ (that is, ‘trade’). The word’s Germanic stem was *krab- or *kraf-, which some have seen also as the source of crave [OE].
=> crave
cram: cram: [OE] Prehistoric Germanic had a base *kram-, *krem- which denoted ‘compression’ or ‘bending’. Among its descendants were Old Norse kremja ‘squeeze, pinch’, German krumm ‘crooked’ (source of English crumhorn [17], a curved Renaissance musical instrument), and Old English crammian (ancestor of cram), which meant ‘press something into something else, stuff’.

An extension of the base with p (*kramp-, *kremp-) produced Middle Low German and Middle Dutch krampe ‘bent’, one or other of which was borrowed by Old French as crampe and passed on to English as cramp [14] (crampon [15] comes from a related source). Other products of the Germanic base were Old English crumb ‘crooked’, a possible ancestor of crumpet, and perhaps crimp [17].

A nonnasalized version of the base produced Germanic *krappon ‘hook’, source of grape and grapnel.
=> crampon, crimp, crumhorn, crumpet, grape, grapnel
crane: crane: [OE] Crane is a widespread Indo- European bird-name: related forms such as Latin grūs, Greek géranos (source of English geranium, also known as crane’s-bill, from the long pointed ‘beak’ of its fruit), and Welsh garan point to a prehistoric Indo-European base *ger-, possibly imitative of the bird’s raucous call. The resemblance of a crane lowering its long neck to feed or drink to the operation of a lifting apparatus with a long jib led to the application of crane to the latter in the 14th century (French grue and German kran show a similar semantic development). Cranberry [17] is a borrowing (originally American) of German cranbeere, literally ‘craneberry’, so named from the stamens, which supposedly resemble a beak.
=> cranberry, geranium, pedigree
crank: crank: [OE] There appears to be a link between the words crank, cringe, and crinkle. They share the meaning element ‘bending’ or ‘curling up’ (which later developed metaphorically into ‘becoming weak or sick’, as in the related German krank ‘ill’), and probably all came from a prehistoric Germanic base *krank-. In Old English the word crank appeared only in the compound crancstoef, the name for a type of implement used by weavers; it is not recorded in isolation until the mid-15th century, when it appears in a Latin-English dictionary as a translation of Latin haustrum ‘winch’.

The adjective cranky [18] is no doubt related, but quite how closely is not clear. It may derive from an obsolete thieves’ slang term crank meaning ‘person feigning sickness to gain money’, which may have connections with German krank. Modern English crank ‘cranky person’ is a backformation from the adjective, coined in American English in the 19th century.
=> cringe, crinkle
cranny: cranny: see crenellate