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cruet [cruet 词源字典]: cruet: see crock
[cruet etymology, cruet origin, 英语词源]
cruise: cruise: see cross
cruller: cruller: see curl
crumb: crumb: [OE] Relatives of crumb are fairly widespread in the Germanic languages – German has krume, for example, and Dutch kruim – and it is represented in some non- Germanic Indo-European languages, such as Greek grūméā and even Albanian grime. As these forms indicate, the b is not original (the Old English word was cruma); it first appeared in the 16th century, but crum remained an accepted spelling well into the 19th century. The derivative crumble appeared in the 16th century.
=> crumble
crumhorn: crumhorn: see cram
crumpet: crumpet: [17] An isolated late 14th-century instance of the phrase crompid cake suggests that etymologically a crumpet may be literally a ‘curled-up’ cake, crompid perhaps being related to Old English crumb ‘crooked’. This was one of a wide range of closely related words descended from the Germanic base *kram- or *krem-, denoting ‘pressure’ (see CRAM). The colloquial application of the word to ‘women considered as sexually desirable’ seems to date from the 1930s.
=> cram
crupper: crupper: see crop
crusade: crusade: see cross
crush: crush: [14] The emergence of crush is something of a mystery. English borrowed it from Old French croissir, but it is not clear where Old French got it from. Some consider it to be of Romance origin, postulating a hypothetical Vulgar Latin *cruscīre to account for it, but others suggest that Old French may have borrowed it from Germanic, pointing to the similarity of Middle Low German krossen ‘crush’.
crust: crust: [14] Latin crusta meant ‘hard outer covering, shell’ (it is related to a number of words, including ultimately crystal, denoting a hard surface caused by freezing). Old French acquired it as crouste (the modern French form croûte formed the basis of croûton, borrowed into English in the early 19th century), and passed it on to Middle English as cruste. Crusta formed the basis of the modern Latin adjective crustāceus ‘having a shell’, applied in the early 19th century to the crustacea or crustaceans. And a custard was originally a kind of pie enclosed in a crust.
=> croûton, crystal, custard
cry: cry: [13] Cry comes via Old French crier from Latin quirītāre, which, according to the Roman etymologist Marcus Terentius Varo, meant originally ‘call for the help of the Quirites’. This was a term for those who held the rank of Roman citizen; it is of uncertain origin, variously explained as coming from an Italic word for ‘lance’ and as denoting those who lived in the Sabine town of Cures. The more banal truth, however, is that the Latin verb was probably of imitative origin.
crypt: crypt: [18] The Greek adjective kruptós meant ‘hidden’. From it was derived kruptikós, which passed into English via late Latin crypticus as cryptic [17]. The feminine form of the original Greek adjective, krúptē, was used as a noun meaning literally ‘hidden place’, thus ‘underground chamber, vault’; English acquired it via Latin crypta. From the same ultimate source comes apocrypha [14], literally ‘books of hidden – that is, unknown – authorship’.
=> apocrypha
crystal: crystal: [OE] The prehistoric Indo-European base *kru- produced several words denoting ‘hard outer surface’, including English crust, Old High German hrosa ‘crust’, and Old Norse hrúthr ‘crust’. In some cases they reflect a hardening caused by freezing: Old High German hrosa, for example, also meant ‘ice’, and Greek krúos meant ‘frost’.

From this was derived krustaímein ‘freeze’, which in turn formed the basis of krústallos ‘ice’. When Old English first acquired the word, via Latin crystallum and Old French cristal, it still meant ‘ice’, a sense which survived until the 16th century, although losing ground all the time to the metaphorical extension ‘clear mineral’.
=> crust
cubbyhole: cubbyhole: see cove
cube: cube: [16] Greek kúbos meant literally ‘six-sided solid figure’, a sense handed down to English via Latin cubus. Apart from more obvious metaphorical applications, such as ‘dice’, the Greek word was used for the internal cavity of the pelvis, a semantic feature which links it with its possible relative, English hip. The fine-art term cubism was introduced to English in 1911 from French, where it seems to have been coined in 1908 by an anonymous member of the Hanging Committee of the Salon des Independents. The story goes that when a painting by Georges Braque was being shown to the committee, he exclaimed ‘Encore des Cubes! Assez de cubisme!’.
cubicle: cubicle: see concubine
cuckold: cuckold: [13] Cuckold is a derivative of cuckoo, the cuckoo’s invasion of other birds’ nests perhaps being viewed as analogous to the stealing of a wife’s affections by another man. It is not an original English coinage, but was borrowed from an unrecorded Anglo-Norman *cucuald, a variant of Old French cucuault, which in turn was formed from cucu ‘cuckoo’ and the pejorative suffix -ault.
=> cuckoo
cuckoo: cuckoo: [13] So distinctive is the cuckoo’s call that it is not always clear whether the names for the bird in various languages, based on the call, owe their similarity to borrowing or coincidence – Dutch, for instance, has koekoek, Russian kukúshka, Latin cuculus, and Greek kókkūx. In the case of English cuckoo, it seems to have been borrowed from Old French cucu, which was of imitative origin. Its first appearance is in the famous Cuckoo song of the late 13th century (‘Sumer is icumen in, lhude sing, cuccu!’), where it replaced the native Middle English word yeke (from Old English gēac, also of imitative origin).
cucumber: cucumber: [14] English acquired this word as cucumer, by direct borrowing from Latin cucumer, which may originally have been a word of some pre-Italic Mediterranean language. The form spelled with a b did not appear until the 15th century. It seems to have been a blend of Middle English cucumer and Old French coucombre, which itself ultimately derived from Latin cucumer. Spellings based on the Old French form led to a pronunciation of the first syllable as ‘cow’, which persisted until the early 19th century.
cud: cud: [OE] The etymological meaning of cud appears to be ‘glutinous substance’. It is related to a wide range of Indo-European words in this general sense area, including Sanskrit játu ‘gum’, German kitt ‘putty’, and Swedish kâda ‘resin’, and the first syllable of Latin bitūmen (source of English bitumen [15]) is generally referred to the same source. Quid ‘piece of tobacco for chewing’ is a variant of cud.
=> bitumen, quid