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cenotaph [cenotaph 词源字典]: cenotaph: [17] A cenotaph is literally an ‘empty tomb’: the word comes, via French and Latin, from Greek kenotaphion, from kenos ‘empty’ and taphos ‘tomb’. The idea behind the name is that someone who had been killed far away from his or her home (for instance, in battle), and whose body could not be brought back, should be commemorated by a symbolic tomb.
[cenotaph etymology, cenotaph origin, 英语词源]
censer: censer: see incense
census: census: see excise
cent: cent: [16] Centum is the Latin word for ‘hundred’ – indeed both come ultimately from the same Indo-European source, *kmtóm. It first appeared in English in the form cent in the phrase per cent (originally used apparently by the financier Sir Thomas Gresham in a letter of 1568: ‘the interest of xij per cent by the year’); this was probably borrowed from Italian per cento (it is not a genuine Latin phrase). The use of cent for a unit of currency dates from the 1780s, when it was adopted by the newly founded USA; its status as one hundredth of a dollar was officially ordained by the Continental Congress on 8 August 1786.
=> century
centre: centre: [14] The word centre came originally from the spike of a pair of compasses which is stuck into a surface while the other arm describes a circle round it. Greek kéntron meant ‘sharp point’, or more specifically ‘goad for oxen’ (it was a derivative of the verb kentein ‘prick’), and hence was applied to a compass spike; and it was not long before this spread metaphorically to ‘mid-point of a circle’. The word reached English either via Old French centre or directly from Latin centrum. The derived adjective central is 16th-century.
=> eccentric
century: century: [16] Latin centuria meant ‘group of one hundred’ (it was a derivative of centum ‘hundred’). Among the specialized applications of this general sense, the most familiar to us today is that of a division of the Roman army consisting originally of a hundred soldiers (the title of its commander, centurion [14] – Latin centuriō – derives from centuria). When English took the word over, however, it put it to other uses: it was first applied to ‘period of 100 years’ in the early 17th century, while ‘score of 100 or more in cricket’ comes from the mid 19th century.
=> cent, centurion
cereal: cereal: [19] Cereal is a comparatively modern introduction of the Latin adjective cereālis ‘of grain’, which was derived from the name of Cerēs, the Roman goddess of agriculture (identified with Greek Demeter). It has, needless to say, no connection with serial (see SERIES).
cerebellum: cerebellum: see saveloy
cerebral: cerebral: see saveloy
ceremony: ceremony: [14] The antecedents of ceremony are obscure. We can trace it back to Latin caerimōnia ‘religious rites’, but there the trail stops. It probably arrived in English via Old French ceremonie.
certain: certain: [13] Certain comes ultimately from Latin certus ‘sure, fixed’, which derived from the past participle of the verb cernere ‘decide’. The Latin adjective was extended in Vulgar Latin to *certānus, which passed into English via Old French certain. Other English words based on certus include certify [14] (from late Latin certificāre) and its derivative certificate, and certitude [15] (from late Latin certitūdō).
=> crime, crisis, decree, discern, discrete, discriminate, excrement, riddle, secret
cessation: cessation: see cease
cesspool: cesspool: [17] Cesspool has no direct etymological connection with pool. It comes from Old French suspirail ‘ventilator, breathing hole’, a derivative of souspirer ‘breathe’ (this goes back to Latin suspīrāre, source of the archaic English suspire ‘sigh’). This was borrowed into English in the early 15th century as suspiral ‘drainpipe’, which in the subsequent two hundred years appeared in a variety of spellings, including cesperalle.

By the early 16th century we find evidence of its being used not just for a pipe to drain matter away, but also for a well or tank to receive matter thus drained (originally any effluent, not just sewage). The way was thus open for a ‘reinterpretation’ of the word’s final element as pool (by the process known as folk etymology), and in the late 17th century the form cesspool emerged.

By analogy, as if there were really a word cess ‘sewage’, the term cesspit was coined in the mid-19th century.
=> suspire
cha: cha: see tea
chaffinch: chaffinch: [OE] Etymologically, a chaffinch is a finch which gets its food by pecking amongst the chaff and other grain debris in the barnyard. The word chaff itself (Old English ceaf) probably goes back to a prehistoric Germanic base *kaf-, *kef- ‘chew’, which was also the source of chafer ‘beetle’ [OE] (literally the ‘chewing creature’) and jowl. (The verb chaff ‘make fun of’ [19], on the other hand, is probably an alteration of chafe, which came via Old French chaufer and Vulgar Latin *califāre from Latin calefacere ‘make warm’, a relative of English cauldron and calorie.)
=> chafer, jowl
chagrin: chagrin: [17] The word chagrin first appeared in French in the 14th century as an adjective, meaning ‘sad, vexed’, a usage at first adopted into English: ‘My wife in a chagrin humour, she not being pleased with my kindness to either of them’, Samuel Pepys’s Diary 6 August 1666. It died out in English in the early 18th century, but the subsequently developed noun and verb have persisted. Etymologists now discount any connection with French chagrin ‘untanned leather’ (source of English shagreen [17]), which came from Turkish sagri.
chain: chain: [13] Chain is a direct descendant of Latin catēna ‘chain’, source also of English concatenate [16], literally ‘link together in a chain’. This passed into Old French as chaeine, a later from of which, chaine, was adopted by English. The Latin word’s antecedents are not known.
=> concatenate
chair: chair: [13] Chair comes ultimately from Greek kathédrā ‘seat’ (source also of cathedral, of course), which was a compound originally meaning literally ‘something for sitting down on’ – it was formed from katá- ‘down’ and *hed- ‘sit’. It produced Latin cathedra, which in Old French became chaiere, the source of the English word.

The use of chair specifically for the seat occupied by someone presiding at a meeting dates from the mid 17th century, and its metaphorical extension to the person sitting in it, as symbolizing his or her office – as in ‘address one’s remarks to the chair’ – is virtually contemporary (‘The Chair behaves himself like a Busby amongst so many schoolboys’, Thomas Burton’s Diary, 23 March 1658); but its use as a synonym for chairperson, to avoid a distinction on grounds of sex, is a late 20th-century development.
=> cathedral
chalice: chalice: [13] Latin calix ‘cup’ and its relative, Greek kálux ‘pod’, perhaps hold the record for the words most often borrowed into English. Calix first made its appearance as part of the original West Germanic stratum of English, into which it had been borrowed from Latin; this was as Old English cælc. Then came cælic, which Old English independently acquired from Latin after the conversion of the English to Christianity.

Next was calice, whose source was an Old French dialectal form descended from Latin calix. And finally, at the end of the 13th century, the main Old French form chalice was adopted. The final twist in the story is that in the 17th century Latin calyx (a descendant of the related Greek kálux) was borrowed into English as a botanical term, ‘outer covering of a flower’.
chalk: chalk: [OE] Latin calx meant broadly ‘lime, limestone’ (it probably came from Greek khálix ‘pebble’). This was borrowed in early times into the Germanic languages, and in most of them it retains this meaning (German kalk, for instance, means ‘limestone’). In English, however, it fairly soon came to be applied to a particular soft white form of limestone, namely chalk (the Old English word was cealc). The Latin word is also the source of English calculate, calcium, and causeway.
=> calcium, calculate, causeway