英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

crescent [crescent 词源字典]: crescent: [14] Crescent is one of a wide range of words (including create, crescendo, concrete, crew, accretion, croissant, increase, and recruit) bequeathed to English by the Latin verb crēscere ‘grow’. In the case of crescent, it came in the form of the present participial stem crēscent-, which passed into English via Old French creissant and Anglo-Norman cressaunt.

Its use in the Latin phrase luna crescens ‘waxing moon’ led later to its application to the shape of the new moon, hence the modern meaning of crescent. The modern French form croissant has given English the term for a crescent-shaped puffpastry roll [19], so named allegedly from its original manufacture following the defeat of the Turkish besiegers of Budapest in 1686, whose Muslim symbol was the crescent.
=> accretion, create, creature, crew, croissant, increase, recruit[crescent etymology, crescent origin, 英语词源]
cresset: cresset: see grease
crest: crest: [14] The original etymological meaning of crest appears to have been ‘tuft of hair’. It comes via Old French creste from Latin crista ‘tuft, plume’, which may be related to Latin crīnis ‘hair’ (source of the English biological term crinite ‘hairy’ [16]). If so, crest belongs to the same word family as crinoline. The notion of crest as a ‘surmounting ridge’ is a secondary semantic development, which may have given rise to the word crease.
=> crease
cretin: cretin: [18] In the Swiss-French dialect of the high Alps the term creitin or crestin (their version of christian) was applied to people suffering from mental handicap and stunted growth – the notion being to emphasize that despite their abnormalities, such people were nevertheless as much human beings as any other ‘Christian’. The word was adopted (via French crétin) as a clinical term for someone suffering from dwarfism and mental retardation as a result of a congenital thyroid deficiency, and was subsequently broadened out, towards the end of the 19th century, as a general disparaging term for a ‘fool’.
=> christian
crevice: crevice: [14] Rather like crack, the word crevice began with the notion of the sharp noise of breaking and gradually developed to denote the fissure caused by such a break. It comes ultimately from the Latin verb crepāre ‘creak, rattle, crack’ (source of English crepitation [17] and decrepit, and probably also of craven), which passed into Old French as crever ‘burst, split’. From this was derived the noun crevace, borrowed into Middle English as crevace or crevisse. In modern French it developed into crevasse, which English reborrowed in the 19th century.
=> craven, crepitation, crevasse, decrepit
crew: crew: [15] The idea originally underlying crew is ‘augmentation’. It comes from Old French creue, which was derived from the verb creistre ‘grow, increase, augment’, a descendant of Latin crēscere ‘grow’. At first in English it denoted a squad of military reinforcements. Soon its meaning had spread to any band of soldiers, and by the end of the 16th century the word was being used for any group of people gathered together with or without a particular purpose. The most familiar modern application, to the people manning a ship, emerged in the latter part of the 17th century.
=> crescent, croissant, increase
crib: crib: [OE] Crib is a Germanic word, with relatives today in German (krippe) and Dutch (kribbe). In Old English it meant ‘manger’, and not until the 17th century did it develop its familiar presentday sense ‘child’s bed’. An intermediate stage, now lost, was ‘basket’, which appears to have given rise to its 18th-century use as a thieves’ slang term for ‘pilfer’; this in turn is probably the source of the modern colloquial sense ‘plagiarize’. Vulgar Latin borrowed Old High German kripja as *creppia, from which modern French gets crèche (acquired by English in the 19th century).
=> creche
cricket: cricket: English has two completely unrelated words cricket. The name of the small grasshopper-like insect [14] comes from Old French criquet, a derivative of the verb criquer ‘click, creak’, which no doubt originated as an imitation of the sound itself. The origins of the name of the game cricket [16] have never been satisfactorily explained. One explanation often advanced is that it comes from Old French criquet ‘stick’, or its possible source, Flemish krick, although it is not clear whether the original reference may have been to the stick at which the ball was aimed (the forerunner of the modern stumps) or to the stick, or bat, used to hit the ball.

Another possible candidate is Flemish krickstoel, a long low stool with a shape reminiscent of the early types of wicket.
crime: crime: [14] Crime is one of a wide range of English words (including certain, crisis, critic, decree, discern, discrete, discriminate, excrement, riddle ‘sieve’, secret, and secretary) which come ultimately from or are related to the Greek verb krínein ‘decide’. This was a relative of Latin cernere ‘decide’, from whose root evolved the noun crīmen ‘judgment, accusation, illegal act’. This passed via Old French crimne (later crime) into English, where traces of the original meaning ‘accusation’ survived until the 17th century.
=> certain, critic, decree, discriminate, excrement, secret
crimp: crimp: see cram
crimson: crimson: [14] The colour term crimson comes ultimately from the name of a small scale insect, the kermes, from whose dried bodies a red dyestuff is obtained. Kermes comes from Arabic qirmaz, which in turn was derived from Sanskrit krmi-ja ‘(dye) produced by a worm’, a compound formed from krmi- ‘worm’ and ja- ‘produced, born’. From qirmaz was derived Arabic qirmazī ‘red colour’, which passed into English via metathesized Old Spanish cremesin. The medieval Latin version carmesīnum is thought to have been the source of English carmine [18], through blending with minium ‘red lead’ (whence English miniature).
=> carmine
cringe: cringe: [13] Like crank, cringe appears to come ultimately from a prehistoric Germanic base *krank- whose original meaning was ‘bend’ or ‘curl up’. This produced an Old English verb crincan ‘fall in battle, yield’ (the association of ‘curling up’ and ‘dying’ is obvious), probable ancestor of modern English crinkle [14]. Crincan does not itself seem to be the source of cringe, which until the 16th century was usually spelled crenge or crench; to explain these eforms it is necessary to postulate *crencean, an unrecorded Old English causative derivative of crincan, meaning ‘cause to curl up’.
=> crank, crinkle
crinite: crinite: see crest
crinoline: crinoline: [19] The reason crinolines are called crinolines is that they were originally made from a stiff fabric woven from horsehair and linen thread. Italian crino ‘horsehair’ (from Latin crīnus ‘hair’, a possible relative of English crest) and lino ‘flax’ (from Latin līnum, source of English linen) were combined to produce crinolino, which passed into English via French crinoline.
=> crest, linen
cripple: cripple: [OE] The etymological sense of cripple appears to be ‘someone who creeps along’, for it probably goes back ultimately to the same Indo- European base, *greub-, as creep. The word is widespread in the Germanic languages: German has kruppel, Dutch kreupel, and Norwegian krypel.
=> creep
crisp: crisp: [OE] Historically, crisp means ‘curly’. It was borrowed into Old English from Latin crispus ‘curled’ (which was also the source of French crêpe, acquired by English as crape in the 17th century and then reborrowed in the original French form in the 19th century). The reason for the emergence of the word’s modern sense ‘brittle’, which happened in the early 16th century, is not clear, it may simply be that the sound of the word suggested brittleness.
=> crape, crêpe
crisscross: crisscross: [16] Crisscross is an alteration of Christscrosse, a term used from the 16th to 18th centuries for the figure of a cross (not specifically, as the name would seem to suggest, the crucifix). Gradually the original signification of the first syllable came to be lost, and the term fell into the pattern of reduplicated words (such as flipflop, singsong) in which a syllable is repeated with variation of the vowel. This may have contributed to the broadening of the word’s meaning to ‘pattern of repeated crossings’, which happened in the 19th century.
critic: critic: [16] Critic and crisis both come ultimately from the Greek verb krínein ‘decide’ (a relative of Latin cernere ‘decide’, which produced English certain, crime, decree, discern, discrete, discriminate, excrement, riddle ‘sieve’, secret, and secretary). The Greek derived noun krísis ‘judgment’ was used by the physicians Hippocrates and Galen for the ‘turning point of a disease’.

It passed as a medical term via Latin crisis into English in the 15th century, where it was not used in the more general modern sense until the 17th century. The Greek derived noun krités ‘judge’ produced in turn kritikós ‘able to make judgments’; this came to be used as a noun, ‘one who makes judgments’, which passed via Latin criticus into English.

Another descendant of krités was Greek kritérion ‘standard for making a judgment’, borrowed directly into English in the 17th century as criterion.
=> certain, crime, crisis, criterion, discern, discriminate, excrement, secret
crock: crock: English has two words crock. The one meaning ‘earthenware pot’ [OE] is now almost never heard on its own, except perhaps in the phrase ‘crock of gold’, but it is familiar from its derivative crockery [18]. Its immediate antecedents appear to be Germanic (Dutch, for instance, has the related kruik), but cognate forms appear in other Indo-European languages, including Welsh crochan and Greek krōssós. Cruet [13] comes from Anglo-Norman *cruet, a diminutive frorm of Old French crue ‘pot’, which was borrowed from Old Saxon krūka, a relative of English crock. Crock ‘decrepit person, car, etc’ [15] is earliest encountered (in Scottish English) in the sense ‘old ewe’.

The connotation of being ‘broken-down’, and the existence of near synonyms such as Dutch krak, Flemish krake, and Swedish krake, all meaning ‘wornout old horse’, suggest some kind of link with the word crack.
=> crockery, cruet
crocodile: crocodile: [13] The crocodile gets its name from its habit of basking in the sun on sandbanks or on the shores of rivers. The word means literally ‘pebble-worm’, and it was coined in Greek from the nouns krókē ‘pebbles’ and drilos ‘worm’. The resulting Greek compound *krokódrīlos has never actually been found, for it lost its second r, giving krokódīlos, and this r reappeared and disappeared capriciously during the word’s journey through Latin and Old French to English. Middle English had it – the 13th century form was cokodrille – but in the 16th century the modern r-less form took over, based on Latin crocodīlus.