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drape [drape 词源字典]: drape: [15] The verb drape originally meant ‘weave wool into cloth’. It was borrowed from Old French draper, which was a derivative of drap ‘cloth’ (source of English drab). This in turn came from late Latin drappus, which was ultimately of Celtic origin. Other offspring of drap which found their way into English are draper [14], drapery [14], and trappings. The use of drapery for ‘loose voluminous cloth covering’ eventually fed back into the verb drape, producing in the 19th century its current sense ‘cover loosely with cloth’.
=> drab, draper, trappings[drape etymology, drape origin, 英语词源]
drastic: drastic: see drama
draught: draught: [12] Draught and draft are essentially the same word, but draft (more accurately representing its modern English pronunciation) has become established since the 18th century as the spelling for ‘preliminary drawing or plan’, ‘money order’, and (in American English) ‘conscription’. The word itself probably comes from an unrecorded Old Norse *drahtr, an abstract noun meaning ‘pulling’ derived from a prehistoric Germanic verb *dragan (source of English drag and draw).

Most of its modern English meanings are fairly transparently descended from the idea of ‘pulling’: ‘draught beer’, for example, is ‘drawn’ from a barrel. Of the less obvious ones, ‘current of air’ is air that is ‘drawn’ through an opening; the game draughts comes from an earlier, Middle English sense of draught, ‘act of drawing a piece across the board in chess and similar games’; while draft ‘provisional plan’ was originally ‘something drawn or sketched’.
=> draft, drag, draw
draw: draw: [OE] The Old English ancestor of modern English draw was dragan, which came from a prehistoric Germanic verb *dragan (source also of English drag). This seems to have meant originally ‘carry’ (which is what its German and Dutch descendants tragen and dragen still mean). In English and the Scandinavian languages, however (Swedish draga, for instance), it has evolved to ‘pull’. ‘Sketch’, perhaps the word’s most common modern English sense, developed in Middle English from the notion of ‘drawing’ or ‘pulling’ a pencil, brush, etc across a surface. Dray ‘wagon’ [14] is related to, and perhaps originally came from, Old English dragan.
=> drag, draught, dray
drawer: drawer: [16] A drawer is literally something that is ‘drawn’ or ‘pulled’ out. The coinage was perhaps based on French tiroir ‘drawer’, which was similarly derived from the verb tirer ‘pull’. The same basic notion underlies the formation of drawers [16], a superannuated term for ‘knickers’, which were originally ‘garment pulled on’.
dray: dray: see draw
dread: dread: [12] Old English had the verb ondrǣdan ‘fear’. Its first syllable is generally taken to be the prefix *and- ‘against’, which is related to German ent- ‘away, un-’ and Greek anti- (source of English anti-) and appears also in English answer. The second part, however, remains a mystery. There are one or two related forms in other West Germanic languages, such as Old High German intrātan, but where they come from has never been established satisfactorily. By the end of the Old English period this obsolete prefix had shrunk to a- (adread survived until around 1400), and in the 12th century it started to disappear altogether.
dream: dream: [13] Old English had a word drēam, which meant ‘joy, merrymaking, music’, but it is not at all clear that this is the same word as modern English dream (the recorded Old English words for ‘dream’ were swefn and mǣting). Semantically, the two are quite a long way apart, and on balance it seems more likely that Old English had a homonym *drēam ‘dream’, which has not survived in the written records, and which was perhaps subsequently reinforced by Old Norse draumr.

Both these and the related German traum and Dutch droom have been traced back to an Indo-European base denoting ‘deception’, represented also in Sanskrit druh- ‘seek to harm’ and Avestan (a dialect of Old Iranian) druz- ‘lie, deceive’.
dreary: dreary: [OE] In Old English, dreary (or drēorig, as it then was) meant ‘dripping with blood, gory’, but its etymological connections are with ‘dripping, falling’ rather than with ‘blood’. It goes back to a West Germanic base *dreuz-, *drauz- which also produced Old English drēosna ‘drop, fall’, probably the ultimate source of drizzle [16] and drowsy.

The literal sense ‘bloody’ disappeared before the end of the Old English period in the face of successive metaphorical extensions: ‘dire, horrid’; ‘sad’ (echoed in the related German traurig ‘sad’); and, in the 17th century, the main modern sense ‘gloomy, dull’. Drear is a conscious archaism, created from dreary in the 17th century.
=> drizzle, drowsy
dredge: dredge: English has two distinct words dredge, neither with a particularly well-documented past. Dredge ‘clear mud, silt, etc from waterway’ [16] may be related in some way to the 15thcentury Scottish term dreg-boat, and similarities have been pointed out with Middle Dutch dregghe ‘drag-net’, although if the two are connected, it is not clear who borrowed from whom.

It has also been suggested that it is related ultimately to drag. Dredge ‘sprinkle with sugar, flour, etc’ [16] is a verbal use based on a now obsolete noun dredge, earlier dradge, which meant ‘sweet’. This was borrowed from Old French dragie (its modern French descendant gave English dragée [19]), which may be connected in some way to Latin tragēmata and Greek tragémata ‘spices, condiments’ (these Latin and Greek terms, incidentally, may play some part in the obscure history of English tracklements ‘condiments to accompany meat’ [20], which the English food writer Dorothy Hartley claimed to have ‘invented’ on the basis of an earlier – but unrecorded – dialect word meaning more generally ‘appurtenances’).
=> dragée
drench: drench: [OE] Originally, drench meant simply ‘cause to drink’. It comes ultimately from the prehistoric Germanic verb *drangkjan, which was a causative variant of *drengkan (source of English drink) – that is to say, it denoted ‘causing someone to do the action of the verb drink’. That particular sense now survives only as a technical usage in veterinary medicine, but already by the Middle English period it had moved on metaphorically to ‘drown’ (now obsolete, and succeeded by the related drown) and ‘soak thoroughly’.
=> drink, drown
dress: dress: [14] Dress originally meant literally ‘put right, put straight’. It comes via Old French dresser from Vulgar Latin *dīrectiāre, a derivative of Latin dīrectus ‘straight’ (from which English gets direct). Traces of this underlying sense survive in the word’s application to the correct aligning of columns of troops, but its main modern signification, ‘clothe’, comes via a more generalized line of semantic development ‘prepare’ (as in ‘dress a turkey for the oven’), and hence ‘array, equip’. (English address developed in parallel with dress, and comes from the same ultimate source.) Dresser ‘sideboard’ [15] was borrowed from Old French dresseur, a derivative of dresser in the sense ‘prepare’.
=> address, direct
drift: drift: [13] Drift comes ultimately from the same Germanic base as produced drive, and etymologically means ‘driving or being driven’, but as far as we can tell it did not exist in Old English, and the word as we now have it is a borrowing from other Germanic languages. Its first recorded use is in the sense ‘snowdrift’, which points to Old Norse drift as the source, but later more general applications were probably reinforced by Dutch drift.
=> drive
drill: drill: English has no fewer than four separate words drill, all of them comparatively recent acquisitions. Drill ‘make a hole’ [16] was borrowed from Middle Dutch drillen, but beyond that is history is obscure. The word’s military application, to ‘repetitive training’, dates from earliest times, and also existed in the Dutch verb in the 16th century; it seems to have originated as a metaphorical extension of the notion of ‘turning round’ – that is, of troops marching around in circles. Drill ‘small furrow for sowing seeds’ [18] may come from the now obsolete noun drill ‘rivulet’, but the origins of this are purely conjectural: some have linked it with the obsolete verb drill ‘trickle’. Drill ‘strong fabric’ [18] gets its name from originally being woven from three threads.

An earlier form of the word was drilling, an adaptation of German drillich; this in turn was descended from Latin trilix, a compound formed from tri- ‘three’ and līcium ‘thread’ (trellis is a doublet, coming ultimately from the same Latin source). (Cloth woven from two threads, incidentally, is twill [14], or alternatively – from Greek dímitos – dimity [15].) Drill ‘African baboon’ [17] comes from a West African word.

It occurs also in the compound mondrill [18], the name of a related baboon, which appears to have been formed with English man.
=> trellis; mandrill
drink: drink: [OE] Drink comes ultimately from a prehistoric Germanic verb *drengkan, which is widely represented in other modern Germanic languages: German trinken, for instance, Dutch drinken, Swedish dricka, and Danish drikke. Variants of it also produced English drench and drown. Its pre-Germanic history is not clear, however: some have suggested that the original underlying notion contained in it is of ‘sucking liquid in or up’, and that it is thus related to English draw (a parallel semantic connection has been perceived between Latin dūcere ‘lead, draw’ and the related tsuk- ‘drink’ in Tocharian A, an extinct Indo-European language of central Asia).
=> drench, drown
drip: drip: see drop
drive: drive: [OE] As far as is known, drive is an exclusively Germanic word. It and its relatives German treiben, Dutch drijven, Swedish driva, Danish drive, and Gothic dreiban point to a prehistoric Germanic ancestor *drīban. Its base also produced English drift and drove [OE]. The central modern sense of drive, ‘drive a car’, comes from the earlier notion of driving a horse, ox, etc by pushing it, whipping it, etc from behind, forcing it onwards, but in most other modern European languages the verb for ‘driving a vehicle’ denotes basically ‘leading’ or ‘guiding’ (French conduire, for example, or German lenken).
=> drift, drove
drizzle: drizzle: see dreary
dromedary: dromedary: [14] The dromedary, or onehumped camel, got its name from its swiftness of foot. The word comes via Old French dromedaire from late Latin dromedārius, an adjective formed from dromas, the Latin term for ‘camel’. This in turn was derived from the Greek dromás ‘runner’, a close relative of drómos ‘running, course’, which is the source of the -drome in such English words as hippodrome, aerodrome, and palindrome.
=> aerodrome, hippodrome, palindrome
drop: drop: [OE] Drop, droop, and drip are closely related. Droop [13] was borrowed from Old Norse drūpa, which came from a Germanic base *drūp-. A variant of this, *drup-, produced Middle Danish drippe, the probable source of English drip [15], and a further variant, *drop-, lies behind Old English dropa, ancestor of modern English drop.

All three go back ultimately to a prehistoric Indo-European *dhreub-, source of Irish drucht ‘dew’. The English noun originally meant ‘globule of liquid’, and its related verb ‘fall in drops’. The main modern transitive sense, ‘allow to fall’, developed in the 14th century, giving English a single word for the concept of ‘letting fall’ not shared by, for example, French and German, which have to use phrases to express it: respectively, laisser tomber and fallen lassen.
=> drip, droop