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currant [currant 词源字典]: currant: [14] Etymologically, currants are grapes from ‘Corinth’. In the Middle Ages Corinth, in Greece, exported small dried grapes of particularly high quality, which became known in Old French as raisins de Corinthe ‘grapes of Corinth’. This phrase passed via Anglo-Norman raisins de corauntz into Middle English as raisins of coraunce. By the 16th century, coraunce had come to be regarded as a plural form, and a new singular was coined from it – at first coren, and then in the 17th century currant.

In the late 16th century, too, the name was transferred to fruit such as the blackcurrant and redcurrant, under the mistaken impression that the ‘dried-grape’ currant was made from them.
[currant etymology, currant origin, 英语词源]
current: current: [13] Current literally means ‘running’. It comes from Old French corant, the present participle of courre ‘run’, which in turn was descended from Latin currere ‘run’. This has been traced back to a prehistoric root denoting ‘swift movement’, which probably also produced car, career, carry, and charge. The Latin verb itself has a wide range of descendants in English, from the obvious courier [16] to the more heavily disguised corridor [16] (originally literally ‘a run’), occur and succour.

For the English offspring of its past participle cursus see COURSE. The sense ‘of the present time’ (first recorded in the 17th century) comes from the notion of ‘running in time’ or ‘being in progress’.
=> car, carry, charge, corridor, courier, course, occur, succour
curry: curry: Of the two English words curry, the older, ‘groom a horse’ [13], is now almost forgotten except in the compound currycomb and the phrase curry favour. It comes, via Old French correier, from Vulgar Latin *conrēdāre ‘arrange, prepare, get ready’, which seems to have been an adaptation and partial translation of a prehistoric Germanic verb *garǣthjan, a derivative of the base which produced English ready.

The expression curry favour is a partial translation of Old French estriller favel or torcher favel, literally ‘groom a chestnut horse’, which, for reasons that are not known, was used as a metaphor for hypocritical behaviour; the word favel, unfamiliar to English speakers, was replaced with the semantically appropriate favour. Curry ‘spiced dish’ [16] was borrowed from Tamil kari ‘sauce’.
=> ready
cursary: cursary: see course
curse: curse: [OE] Curse first appeared in late Old English (in the early 11th century) as curs. It has no known linguistic relatives, and it is not clear where it comes from. Perhaps the most plausible suggestion is that it was borrowed from Old French curuz ‘anger’ (which probably came from the verb *corruptiāre, a Vulgar Latin derivative of Latin corrumpere ‘destroy’ – source of English corrupt), and that curse itself therefore originally meant ‘anger, wrath’. The colloquial alteration cuss dates from the 18th century.
=> corrupt, rupture
curtail: curtail: [16] The now defunct English noun curtal meant ‘horse with a docked tail’. It was borrowed in the 16th century from French courtault, a derivative of the adjective court ‘short’. Like English curt [17] this came from Latin curtus ‘cut off, shortened’, which in common with English short and shear, can be traced back to an Indo-European base *ker- or *sker- ‘cut’. In the late 16th century the noun was converted into a verb, originally meaning literally ‘dock a horse’, and the close semantic link with ‘tails’ led to its alteration to curtail.
=> cuirass, curt, shear, shirt, short, skirt
curtain: curtain: [13] Latin cortīna meant ‘round vessel, cauldron’, but in the 4th-century Vulgate we find it being used to translate Greek aulaía ‘curtain’. The reason for this considerable semantic leap seems to have been a link perceived to exist between Greek aulaía, a derivative of aulē ‘court’, and Latin cohort- ‘court’ (source of English court), although in fact there is no etymological connection between cohort- and cortīna. The word passed into Old French as cortine, and from there was acquired by English.
curtsey: curtsey: see court
curve: curve: [15] Curve has a wide circle of relations in English. It comes from Latin curvus ‘curved’, which had connections with Greek kurtós ‘curved’, Greek korōnos ‘curved’ (source of English crown), and Greek kírkos ‘ring, circle’ (source of English circle). When English acquired it, it was still an adjective, and English did not convert it into a noun until the 17th century.
=> circle, crown, curb
cushion: cushion: [14] Ultimately, cushion and quilt are the same word. Both come from Latin culcita ‘mattress, cushion’, which is related to Sanskrit kūrcás ‘bundle’, and both reached English via rather circuitous routes. In Gallo-Roman (the descendant of Latin spoken in France from the 5th to the 9th centuries) culcita underwent a transformation which produced Old French coissin and cussin, which Middle English borrowed as quisshon and cushin.

The complexity of forms spawned by these was quite staggering – the OED records nearly seventy spellings of the word – but by the 17th century things had settled down, with cushion emerging the winner. Cushy [20], incidentally, is quite unrelated, being a borrowing from Hindi khūsh ‘pleasant’.
=> quilt
cuspidor: cuspidor: see spit
custard: custard: [15] A custard was originally a pie, which took its name from its ‘crust’ (Anglo- Norman *crustade, the source of the word, was a derivative of Old French crouste, from which English got crust). The earliest English form was crustade, and intermediate spellings crustarde and custade occur. The reference in the name is to the pie’s pastry shell, not to its lid, for it had none: it was an open pie, of meat or fruit, filled up with stock or milk. This liquid was often thickened with eggs, and by around 1600 the term had moved across to name a dish in its own right made of eggs beaten into milk and cooked.
=> crust
custom: custom: [12] Custom comes ultimately from Latin consuēscere, a compound verb formed from the intensive prefix com- and suēscere ‘become accustomed’. This in turn was derived from suī, the genitive singular of the reflexive pronoun suus ‘oneself’; the notion underlying its formation was therefore ‘that which is one’s own’, a semantic element echoed in Greek ethos ‘custom, usage, trait’, which was based ultimately on Indo-European *swe- ‘oneself’.

From consuēscere was formed the Latin noun consuētūdō ‘being accustomed’ (source of the English legal noun consuetude ‘custom’ [14]). This passed into early Old French as *costudne, which developed via *costumne to custome, the form borrowed into Middle English (English costume came from the same ultimate source, but via Italian costume).

The word’s original sense, ‘habitual practice’, developed various secondary associations, including ‘customary tax’ (whence customs duties) and ‘customary business patronage’ (whence customer). The derivative accustom [15] was borrowed from Anglo-Norman acustumer.
=> accustom, costume
cut: cut: [13] There is no direct evidence that Old English had the word cut – the Old English terms were sceran ‘shear’, ceorfan ‘carve’, and hēawan ‘hew’ – but many etymologists have speculated that a pre-Conquest *cyttan did exist. Forms such as Norwegian kutte ‘cut’, Swedish kåta ‘whittle’, and Icelandic kuta ‘cut with a knife’ suggest an origin in a North Germanīc base *kut-.
cutaneous: cutaneous: see hide
cuticle: cuticle: see hide
cutlass: cutlass: [16] Appropriate as the name sounds, cutlass has no etymological connection with cut. It comes from Old French cutelas, a derivative (denoting large size) of coutel ‘knife’. This in turn goes back to Latin cultellus, a diminutive of culter ‘knife, ploughshare’ (source of English coulter [OE] and cutler [14], whence cutlery [14]).
=> coulter, cutlery
cutlet: cutlet: see coast
cuttlefish: cuttlefish: [11] The cuttlefish probably gets its name from its resemblance to a bag when its internal shell is removed. Its earliest recorded designation is cudele (the compound cuttlefish does not appear until the 16th century), which is generally taken to be a derivative of the same base as produced cod ‘pouch’ (as in codpiece and peascod). In the 16th century the variant scuttlefish arose, perhaps partly with reference to the creature’s swift movements.
=> cod
cybernetics: cybernetics: [20] Cybernetics was first coined in French, as cybernétique, in the 1830s. But then it was used literally for the ‘art of governing’ (it is a derivative of Greek kubernétēs ‘steersman, governor’, from kubernan ‘steer’, source of English govern). The English term, ‘theory of control and communication processes’, is a new formation, introduced in the late 1940s by the founder of cybernetics, the US mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964).
=> govern