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eleemosynary [eleemosynary 词源字典]: eleemosynary: see alms
[eleemosynary etymology, eleemosynary origin, 英语词源]
elegant: elegant: [15] Someone who made careful, fastidious choices was termed in Latin ēlegāns. This was the present participle of a hypothetical verb *ēlegāre, a derivative of ēligere ‘pick out, select’ (source of English elect). Originally it seems to have been a derogatory term – ‘fussy, foppish’ – but by classical times it signified more approvingly ‘making refined choices’, and was also transferred to the things chosen – ‘choice, tasteful’. English probably acquired the word via French.
=> elect
elegy: elegy: [16] Greek élegos originally signified simply ‘song’ (Aristophanes, for example, used it for the song of a nightingale in his play Birds). It is not clear where it came from, although it has been speculated that the Greeks may have borrowed it from the Phrygians, an Indo- European people of western and central Asia Minor, and that originally it denoted ‘flute song’ (the long-held derivation from Greek e e légein ‘cry woe! woe!’ is not tenable). Later on it came to mean specifically ‘song of mourning’, and its adjective derivative elegeíā passed as a noun via Latin and French into English.
elephant: elephant: [13] Elephants were named from their tusks. Greek eléphās (probably a borrowing from a non-Indo-European language) meant originally ‘ivory’ (hence chryselephantine ‘of gold and ivory’ [19]). Only later did it come to denote the animal itself, and it passed in this sense into Latin as elephantus. By post-classical times this had become *olifantus, and it is a measure of the unfamiliarity of the beast in northern Europe in the first millenium AD that when Old English acquired the word, as olfend, it was used for the ‘camel’.

Old French also had olifant (referring to the ‘elephant’ this time) and passed it on to English as olifaunt. It was not until the 14th century that, under the influence of the classical Latin form, this began to change to elephant. In the 16th and 17th centuries there was a learned revival of the sense ‘ivory’: Alexander Pope, for instance, in his translation of the Odyssey 1725, refers to ‘the handle … with steel and polish’d elephant adorn’d’.

The notion of the white elephant as ‘something unwanted’ arose apparently from the practice of the kings of Siam presenting courtiers who had incurred their displeasure with real white elephants, the cost of whose proper upkeep was ruinously high.
eleven: eleven: [OE] Originally, eleven and twelve seem to have meant literally ‘one over’ and ‘two over’. Eleven comes ultimately from a prehistoric Germanic *ainlif- (source also of German elf and Swedish elva) in which the first element *ainaz is ‘one’ and the second is probably related to English leave. The compound would thus have signified ‘one left (over ten)’, hence ‘ten plus one’.
=> leave, one
elf: elf: [OE] In Germanic legend, elves were potent supernatural beings, capable of exercising considerable magic powers to the benefit or harm of human beings. Their decline to their modern status as small mischievous sprites seems to have begun in the 16th century. The word comes from a prehistoric Germanic *albiz, a variant of which produced Old Norse álfr (source of English oaf [17]) and German alp ‘nightmare’.
=> oaf
eligible: eligible: see elect
eliminate: eliminate: [16] To eliminate somebody is literally to ‘kick them out of doors’. The word comes from the past participle of Latin ēlīnāre, a compound verb formed from the prefix ex- ‘out’ and līmen ‘threshhold’ (source also of English subliminal and probably sublime). At first it was used in English with its original Latin sense (‘the secounde sorte thearfore, that eliminate Poets out of their citie gates’, Giles Fletcher, Christ’s Victorie 1610), and it was not until the early 18th century that the more general modern notion of ‘exclusion’ began to develop.
=> sublime, subliminal
élite: élite: see elect
elixir: elixir: [14] Although nowadays we think of an elixir as liquid, it probably originated in the Greek word for ‘dry’, xērós (whence English xerox). From this was derived a term for a ‘dry’ powder for treating wounds, xérion, and it has been speculated that this was borrowed by Arabic as (with the definite article al) aliksīr. Medieval alchemists used this as a word for a substance which could change base metals into gold, and also for a substance (according to some the same substance) which could confer immortality (known more fully as the elixir of life).
=> xerox
elk: elk: [OE] The Indo-European base *ol-, *elproduced a number of names for deerlike animals – Greek élaphos ‘stag’, for example, and Welsh elain ‘hind’, not to mention English eland. In its Germanic descendants, two main lines of development are evident: its extensions *olk- and *elk- produced respectively Germanic *algiz (whence Old Norse elgr) and Germanic *elkho(n)- (whence Old English colh).

It is not actually entirely clear which of these two is represented by modern English elk, which is first unequivocally recorded in the late 15th century. It is formally possible that it could be a survival of the Old English word, with its final /kh/ sound changed to /k/, but the long gap in the written record between Old English eolh and Middle English elk suggests that it could be an Old Norse borrowing.
=> eland
ell: ell: see elbow
ellipse: ellipse: [18] Greek élleipsis meant literally ‘defect, failure’. It was a derivative of elleípein, literally ‘leave in’, hence ‘leave behind, leave out, fall short, fail’, a compound verb formed from the prefix en- ‘in’ and leípein ‘leave’ (which is related to English loan and relinquish). It was borrowed into English in the 17th century as ellipsis in the grammatical sense ‘omission of a word or words’, but its mathematical use for an ‘oval’ (enshrined in the form ellipse, borrowed via French ellipse and Latin ellīpsis) comes from the notion that a square drawn on lines passing vertically and laterally through the centre of an ellipse ‘falls short’ of the entire length of the lateral line.
=> loan, relinquish
elm: elm: [OE] The tree-name elm is widely distributed throughout the Indo-European languages of Europe. Latin had ulmus, for instance (source of German ulme and Dutch olm) and Irish has leamh. Of the Germanic languages (those whose native forms have not been supplanted by Latin ulmus) Swedish and Norwegian have alm beside English elm.
elope: elope: [17] Etymologically, elope signifies ‘leap away’. It was originally an Anglo-Norman legal term applied to a married woman running off with a lover, and only in the past couple of hundred years has it come to be applied to a couple leaving home to get married when parental permission is denied. It is thought that the Anglo-Norman term was an adaptation of Middle English *alopen, past participle of an unrecorded verb *alepen ‘run away’, which would have been formed from the prefix a- ‘away’ and lepen ‘run, leap’ (source of modern English leap and related to lope and German laufen ‘run’).
=> leap, lope
eloquent: eloquent: see ventriloquist
else: else: [OE] Else shares its sense of ‘otherness’ with related words in other parts of the Indo- European language family. It comes ultimately from the base *al-, which also produced Latin alter ‘other’ (source of English alter) and alius ‘other’ (source of English alibi and alien) and Greek állos ‘other’ (source of the prefix allo- in such English words as allopathy, allophone, and allotropy). Its Germanic descendant was *aljo- ‘other’, whose genitive neuter case *aljaz, used adverbially, eventually became English else.
=> alibi, alien, alter
elude: elude: see illusion
emaciate: emaciate: see meagre
emancipate: emancipate: [17] Despite modern associations with women’s liberation, emancipate has no etymological connection with man. It comes from Latin ēmancipāre, which meant originally ‘free from parental power’. This was a compound verb formed from the prefix ex- ‘out of’ and mancipium ‘ownership’, and referred in Roman law to the freeing of a son from the legal authority of the male head of the family, thus making him responsible for himself in law. Mancipium (source of the archaic English noun manciple ‘steward, purveyor’ [13]) was ultimately a compound noun formed from manus ‘hand’ (as in English manual) and capere ‘take’ (as in English captive and capture).

The association of the verb with the ‘freeing of slaves’, the basis of the present English meanings, is a modern development.
=> captive, capture, manciple, manual