英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

diarrhoea [diarrhoea 词源字典]: diarrhoea: [16] Diarrhoea means literally ‘through-flow’ (and hence semantically is a parallel formation to diabetes). It comes via late Latin diarrhoea from Greek diárrhoia, a term coined by the physician Hippocrates for ‘abnormally frequent defecation’. It was formed from the prefix dia- ‘through’ and rhein ‘flow’ (a relative of English rheumatism and stream).

Of other -rrhoea formations (or -rrhea, as it is generally spelled in American English), pyorrhoea ‘inflammation of the tooth sockets’ was coined in the early 19th century, and logorrhoea at around the turn of the 20th, originally as a clinical term in psychology (although subsequently hijacked as a facetious synonym for ‘talkativeness’).
=> rheumatism, stream[diarrhoea etymology, diarrhoea origin, 英语词源]
diary: diary: [16] Like its semantic cousin journal, a diary is literally a ‘daily’ record. It comes from Latin diarium, a derivative of diēs ‘day’. Originally in classical Latin the word meant ‘daily allowance of food or pay’, and only subsequently came to be applied to a ‘record of daily events’. From the 17th to the 19th century English also had an adjective diary, from Latin diarius, meaning ‘lasting for one day’.
diaspora: diaspora: see sporadic
diatribe: diatribe: [16] Diatribe’s connotations of acrimoniousness and abusiveness are a relatively recent (19th-century) development. Originally in English it meant simply ‘learned discourse or disquisition’. It comes via Latin diatriba from Greek diatribé ‘that which passes, or literally wears away, the time’, and hence, in scholarly circles, ‘study’ or ‘discourse’. This was a derivative of diatribein ‘pass, waste, while away’, a compound verb formed from the intensive prefix dia- and tríbein ‘rub’.
=> attrition, detriment, trite
dice: dice: [14] Dice originated, as every schoolboy knows, as the plural of die, which it has now virtually replaced in British English as the term for a ‘cube marked with numbers’. Die itself comes via Old French de from Latin datum, the past participle of the verb dare (and source also of English date). The main meaning of dare was ‘give’, but it also had the secondary sense ‘play’, as in ‘play a chess piece’.

The plural of the Old French word was dez (itself occasionally used as a singular), which gave rise to such Middle English forms as des, dees, and deys and, by around 1500, dyse. The singular die survives for ‘dice’ in American English, and also in the later subsidiary sense ‘block or other device for stamping or impressing’ (which originated around 1700).
=> date, donate
dictionary: dictionary: [16] The term dictionary was coined in medieval Latin, probably in the 13th century, on the basis of the Latin adjective dictionārius ‘of words’, a derivative of Latin dictiō ‘saying’, or, in medieval Latin, ‘word’. English picked it up comparatively late; the first known reference to it is in The pilgrimage of perfection 1526: ‘and so Peter Bercharius [Pierre Bercheur, a 15thcentury French lexicographer] in his dictionary describeth it’.

Latin dictiō (source also of English diction [15]) was a derivatives of the verb dicere ‘say’. Its original meaning was ‘point out’ rather than ‘utter’, as demonstrated by its derivative indicāre (source of English indicate) and words in other languages, such as Greek deiknúnai ‘show’, Sanskrit diç- ‘show’ (later ‘say’), and German zeihen ‘accuse’, which come from the same ultimate source.

Its past participle gave English dictum [16], and the derived verb dictāre ‘assert’ produced English dictate [17] and dictator [14]. It has been the basis of a wide range of other English words, from the more obvious derivatives like addict and predict to more heavily disguised offspring such as condition, index, and judge.
=> addict, condition, dictate, diction, ditto, index, indicate, judge, predict
didactic: didactic: see doctor
diddle: diddle: [19] The current meaning of diddle, ‘to cheat or swindle’, was probably inspired by Jeremy Diddler, a character who was constantly borrowing money and neglecting to repay it in James Kenney’s play Raising the Wind (1803) (the expression raise the wind means ‘to procure the necessary money’). Diddler immediately caught on as a colloquialism for a ‘swindler’, and by at the latest 1806 the verb diddle was being used in the corresponding sense. It may be that Kenney based the name Diddler on another colloquial verb diddle current at that time, meaning ‘to move shakily’ or ‘to quiver’.
die: die: English has two distinct words die. The noun, ‘cube marked with numbers’, is now more familiar in its plural form (see DICE). The verb, ‘stop living’ [12], was probably borrowed from Old Norse deyja ‘die’. This, like English dead and death, goes back ultimately to an Indo- European base *dheu-, which some have linked with Greek thánatos ‘dead’.

It may seem strange at first sight that English should have borrowed a verb for such a basic concept as ‘dying’ (although some have speculated that a native Old English verb *dīegan or *dēgan did exist), but in fact it is a not uncommon phenomenon for ‘die’ verbs to change their meaning euphemistically, and therefore to need replacing by new verbs. In the case of the Old English verbs for ‘die’, steorfan survives as starve and sweltan in its derivative swelter, while cwelan is represented by the related cwellan ‘kill’, which has come down to us as quell.
=> dead, death
diesel: diesel: [19] The name of this type of internalcombustion engine (which runs on oil rather than petrol) commemorates its inventor, the Parisborn Bavarian engineer Rudolf Diesel (1858– 1913). He conceived his idea for the engine in the early 1890s. In its development stage he was almost killed when one exploded, but by 1897 he had succeeded in producing an operable engine. Within a year he was a millionaire. The term diesel is first recorded in English in 1894.
diet: diet: [13] Diet comes, via Old French diete and Latin diaeta, from Greek díaita ‘mode of life’. This was used by medical writers, such as Hippocrates, in the specific sense ‘prescribed mode of life’, and hence ‘prescribed regimen of food’. It has been speculated that Latin diaeta, presumably in the yet further restricted sense ‘day’s allowance of food’, came to be associated with Latin diēs ‘day’.

This gave rise to medieval Latin diēta ‘day’s journey’, ‘day’s work’, etc, hence ‘day appointed for a meeting’, and thus ‘meeting (of legislators)’. English acquired this word (coming orthographically full circle as diet) in the 15th century, but it is now mainly used for referring to various foreign legislatures.
different: different: [14] English acquired different via Old French different from different-, the present participial stem of Latin differre, a compound verb formed from the prefix dis- ‘apart’ and ferre ‘carry’ (related to English bear). Latin differre had two distinct strands of meaning that sprang from the original literal ‘carry apart, scatter, disperse, separate’: one was ‘put off, delay’, from which English gets defer; the other ‘become or be unlike’, whence English differ [14] and different. The derived indifferent [14] originally meant ‘not differentiating or discriminating’.
=> bear, dilatory
difficult: difficult: [14] Difficult means literally ‘not easy’. It is a back-formation from difficulty [14], which was borrowed from Latin difficultās. This was a derivative of the adjective difficilis (source of French difficile), which was a compound formed from the prefix dis- ‘not’ and facilis ‘easy’ (whence English facile [15]).
=> facile
diffidence: diffidence: see defy
dig: dig: [13] The origins of dig are not altogether clear. It does not appear to have existed in Old English, although it has been speculated that there was an Old English verb *dīcigian, never recorded, derived from dīc ‘ditch’ (the standard Old English verbs for ‘dig’ were delfan and grafan, whence modern English delve and grave). Another theory is that it was borrowed from Old French diguer ‘make a dyke, hollow out the earth’. This was a derivative of the noun digue ‘dyke’, which itself was borrowed from a Germanic source that also produced Old English dīc (and indeed modern English dyke).
=> ditch, dyke
digest: digest: [15] English took the verb digest from dīgest-, the past participle of Latin dīgerere. This was a compound verb formed from the prefix dī- ‘apart’ and gerere ‘carry’, and originally meant ‘divide, distribute’ – a sense which developed via ‘dissolve’ into the specifically physiological ‘dissolve and obtain nutrients from food in the body’.

A further semantic offshoot of ‘distribute’ was ‘orderly arrangement’, and in fact the earliest use of the word in English was as the noun digest ‘summary of information’ [14], from Latin dīgesta, the neuter plural of the past participle, literally ‘things arranged’.
=> congest, gesture, ingest
digit: digit: [15] Digit was borrowed from Latin digitus. This meant ‘finger or toe’, but its underlying etymological sense is probably ‘pointer’; it appears to come from an Indo-European base *deik-, which also produced Latin dicere ‘say’ (originally ‘point out’), Greek deiknúnai ‘show’, Sanskrit diç- ‘show’, and possibly English toe.

The word was used in classical times for a measure of length, a ‘finger’s breadth’, but the mathematical sense ‘any of the numbers from 0 to 9’ (originally as counted on the fingers) is a later development. Digitalis [17], the scientific name of the ‘foxglove’, is a modern Latin use of the Latin adjective digitālis ‘of the finger’, perhaps in allusion to the foxglove’s German name fingerhut ‘thimble’, literally ‘finger-hat’.
=> toe
dignity: dignity: [13] Dignity comes via Old French dignete from Latin dignitās, a derivative of dignus ‘worthy’. Also from the same source was Latin dignāre (source of English deign and its derivative disdain) and late Latin dignificāre (source of English dignify [15]). Dignus itself probably came from an earlier unrecorded *decnus ‘suitable, fitting’, a derivative of the verb decere, which produced English decent. Other related words in English include condign [15] and indignant [16], while dignitās also produced, via a different line of descent, English dainty.
=> condign, dainty, deign, disdain, indignant
digress: digress: see gradual
dilapidate: dilapidate: [16] It is a common misconception that dilapidate means literally ‘fall apart stone by stone’, since the word comes ultimately from Latin lapis ‘stone’ (as in lapis lazuli [14], literally ‘azure stone’). But in fact Latin dīlapidāre meant ‘squander’ (a sense once current in English, but now superseded). It was a compound verb formed from the prefix dis- ‘apart’ and lapidāre ‘throw stones’, and thus originally must have meant literally ‘scatter like stones’, but its only recorded sense is the metaphorical extension ‘throw away or destroy wantonly, squander’.

The application of the word to the destruction of buildings is a piece of later etymologizing.
=> lapis lazuli