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fall [fall 词源字典]: fall: [OE] The verb fall comes from prehistoric Germanic *fallan, which also produced German fallen, Dutch vallen, and Swedish falla. The noun is partly a survival of Old English feall, partly a borrowing from the related Old Norse fall, but probably mostly a new formation based on the verb. The sense ‘autumn’, now restricted to American English, originated in the 16th century from an earlier phrase fall of the leaf. (Fell ‘cut down’ is related: etymologically it means ‘cause to fall’.)
=> fell[fall etymology, fall origin, 英语词源]
fallacy: fallacy: see fail
fallow: fallow: English has two words fallow, both of considerable antiquity. Fallow ‘uncultivated’ [OE] originally meant ‘ploughed land’. Its present-day adjectival meaning ‘ploughed but not sown’ or, more broadly, just ‘uncultivated’, developed in the 15th century. Fallow ‘pale yellowish-brown’ [OE] (now used only in fallow deer) comes via Germanic *falwaz from Indo- European *polwos, a derivative of the base *pol-, *pel-, which also produced English appal [14] (originally ‘grow pale’), pale, and pallid.

Its Germanic relatives include German fahl ‘pale, fawn’ and falb ‘pale yellow’. (Germanic *falwaz, incidentally, was the ancestor of French fauve ‘wild animal’, source of the term fauvism [20] applied to an early 20th-century European art movement that favoured simplified forms and bold colours.)
=> appal, pale, pallid
false: false: [OE] False appears originally to have been borrowed directly from Latin falsus at the end of the 10th century, but without making much of an impression. It was only in the 12th century that it began being used with any frequency, probably as the result of an extra impetus given by reborrowing it via Old French fals. The word’s ultimate source was the Latin verb fallere ‘deceive’, from which English also gets fail, fallacy, fallible, and fault.
=> fail, fallacy, fallible, fault
fame: fame: [13] Etymologically, fame is ‘being talked about’. The word comes via Old French fame from Latin fāma ‘talk, reputation’. This in turn goes back ultimately to the Indo-European base *bha- ‘speak’, which also produced English confess, fable, fate, ineffable, etc. The derivatives famous and infamous are both 14thcentury acquisitions.
=> confess, fable, fairy, fate, ineffable, profess
familiar: familiar: [14] Familiar originally meant simply ‘of the family’ (it came, partly via Old French familier, from Latin familiāris). Its usual use in this sense was in phrases such as familiar enemy and familiar foe, denoting a treacherous enemy from within one’s own family or household. It gradually broadened out semantically via ‘intimately associated’ (preserved in familiar spirit, and in the noun use ‘intimate friend’) to ‘well-known from constant association’.
=> family
family: family: [15] Latin famulus, a word of unknown origin, meant ‘servant’. From it was derived familia, a collective term for all the domestic servants of a household. Only rarely was it used for the entire household, including the servants’ employers too, and when it first entered English it was with the original Latin sense (which indeed survived until the late 18th century). Gradually, however, the English word broadened out to ‘whole household’, and then in the mid- 17th century narrowed down again to the current main sense ‘group of related people’.
=> familiar
famine: famine: [14] Both famine and famish [14] come ultimately from Latin famēs ‘hunger’. Its Vulgar Latin derivative *faminis produced Old French famine, source of English famine. Famish has come via a more circuitous route: another Vulgar Latin derivative of famēs was *affamāre, a compound verb formed with the prefix ad- ‘towards’; in Old French this became afamer, which was borrowed into Middle English, with loss of its first syllable, as fame ‘starve’; and before long this had the suffix -ish added to it, on the model of other verbs such as abolish and diminish.
=> famish
fan: fan: English has two words fan. By far the older [OE] came from Latin vannus; it originally meant ‘device for winnowing grain’, and its now familiar sense ‘handheld device for creating a cooling draught’ did not develop until the 16th century. Its characteristic semicircular shape gave rise to the term fanlight [19] (since applied to a rectangular window above a door). Fan ‘supporter’ is short for fanatic. There is a one-off example of its use in the 17th century, in New news from Bedlam 1682, but the origins of the modern word were in late 19th-century America, where it was used for sports supporters.
fancy: fancy: [15] Ultimately, fancy is the same word as fantasy [15], from which it emerged by a process of contraction and gradually became differentiated in meaning. Both go back originally to the Greek verb phaínein ‘show’ (source also of English diaphanous and phenomenon). From it was derived phantázein ‘make visible’, which produced the noun phantasíā ‘appearance, perception, imagination’ and its associated adjective phantastikós ‘able to make visible’ (and also incidentally phántasma, from which English gets phantasm and phantom).

The noun passed into English via Latin phantasia and Old French fantasie, bringing with it the original Greek senses and also some others which it had picked up on the way, including ‘caprice’. The semantic split between fantasy, which has basically taken the road of ‘imagination’, and fancy, which has tended more to ‘capricious preference’, was more or less complete by about 1600.

The quasi- Greek spelling phantasy was introduced in the 16th century, and has persisted for the noun, although the contemporary phantastic for the adjective has now died out. The Italian form fantasia was borrowed in the 18th century for a fanciful musical composition. (Fancy and fantasy have no etymological connection with the superficially similar fanatic, incidentally, which comes ultimately from Latin fānum ‘temple’.)
=> diaphanous, fantasy, pant, phantom
fane: fane: see profane
fang: fang: [11] Fang originally meant ‘prey, spoils’ – a sense which survived well into the 18th century (‘Snap went the sheers, then in a wink, The fang was stow’d behind a bink [bench]’, Morrison, Poems 1790). It was related to a verb fang ‘take, capture’ which was very common in the Old and Middle English period, and which, like its surviving cousins German fangen, Dutch vangen, and Swedish fånga, goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *fangg- (English newfangled [15] is a memory of it).

The application of the word to an animal’s tooth does not emerge until as late as the 16th century, and although the broad semantic connection between ‘seizing’ and ‘sharp canine tooth’ is clear, the precise mechanism behind the development is not known.
=> newfangled
fantasy: fantasy: see fancy
far: far: [OE] Far is a word of ancient ancestry. It goes back to Indo-European *per-, which also produced Greek pérā ‘beyond, further’ and Sanskrit paras ‘beyond’. The Germanic descendant of the Indo-European form was *fer-, whose comparative form *ferrō ‘further’ passed into Old English as feorr, having lost its comparative connotations and come to mean simply ‘far’.

The Old English comparative was fierr, but in early Middle English this too lost its comparative force and a new form was created with the -er ending, ferrer, later farrer. This in turn was gradually replaced by further (a completely different – although probably distantly related – word, based on forth), of which farther is a 13th-century variant modelled on far.
farce: farce: [14] Farce originally meant ‘stuff’ (widening gastronomic knowledge in the late 20th century has made us more familiar with its French cousin farcir ‘stuff’, and the force- of forcemeat [17] is the same word). It came via Old French farsir from Latin farcīre ‘stuff’. The Latin verb was used in the Middle Ages for the notion of inserting additional passages into the text of the Mass, and hence to padding out any text. A particular application was the insertion of impromptu, usually comical interludes into religious plays, which had led by the 16th century to something approaching the modern meaning of farce.
=> forcemeat
fare: fare: [OE] Both the verb fare (now only an archaism) and the noun go back ultimately to the Indo-European base *por- ‘going, passage’, which has produced a wide range of other English words, including emporium, ferry, fiord, ford, importune, opportunity, pore, and port. Its Germanic descendant was *fer- ‘go’, which produced in Old English the nouns fær and faru ‘journey’ and the verb faran ‘go on a journey’ (its German cousin fahren is still a standard verb for ‘travel’).

Of the noun’s current senses, ‘food’ (which seems to have originated in the notion of ‘how well one was faring’, ‘how one was provided for’) dates back to the 13th century, and ‘money paid for travelling’ to the 15th century. The derivative welfare dates from the 14th century.
=> emporium, ferry, fiord, ford, importune, opportunity, pore, port
farinaceous: farinaceous: see farrago
farm: farm: [13] The specifically agricultural connotations of farm are surprisingly recent. The word comes ultimately from Latin firmāre ‘make firm, fix’, which produced a medieval Latin derived noun firma, denoting ‘fixed payment’. English acquired the word via Old French ferme, and originally used it in just this sense (‘I will each of them all have 4d to drink when they pay their farm’, Bury Wills 1463); something of this early sense is preserved in the verbal usage farm out, which to begin with signified ‘rent out’.

By the 16th century the noun was shifting semantically from ‘fixed (rental) payment’ to ‘land leased for such payment, for the purpose of cultivation’, but only very gradually did the notion of a farm being specifically a leased piece of land die out.
=> firm
farrago: farrago: [17] The notion of a farrago being a ‘heterogeneous mixture’ comes originally from the mixture of various grains for animal feed. Latin farrāgo was a derivative of far ‘corn’ (source of English farinaceous [17] and related to barley and barn), and was extended metaphorically to ‘medley, hotch-potch’ in classical times.
=> barley, barn, farinaceous
farrier: farrier: [16] Etymologically, a farrier is a ‘worker in iron’. The word comes via Old French ferrier from Latin ferrārius, a derivative of ferum. This meant literally ‘iron’ (it is the source of English ferrous [19], and may well have been borrowed from a Semitic source), and already in classical times was being applied metaphorically to implements made from iron, particularly ‘swords’. Its use for ‘horseshoe’, on which the meaning of farrier is based, is a medieval Latin development.
=> ferrous