quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- fraud[fraud 词源字典]
- fraud: see frustrate
[fraud etymology, fraud origin, 英语词源] - fraught
- fraught: [14] Fraught and freight [15] are related, and share the underlying meaning ‘load’. But whereas freight has stayed close to its semantic roots, fraught, which started out as ‘laden’, has moved on via ‘supplied or filled with something’ to specifically ‘filled with anxiety or tension’. It was originally the past participle of a now obsolete verb fraught ‘load a ship’, which was borrowed from Middle Dutch vrachten.
This in turn was a derivative of the noun vracht ‘load, cargo’, a variant of vrecht (from which English gets freight). Both vracht and vrecht probably go back to a prehistoric Germanic noun *fraaikhtiz, whose second element *-aikhtiz is related to English owe and own.
=> freight - free
- free: [OE] The prehistoric ancestor of free was a term of affection uniting the members of a family in a common bond, and implicitly excluding their servants or slaves – those who were not ‘free’. It comes ultimately from Indo- European *prijos, whose signification ‘dear, beloved’ is revealed in such collateral descendants as Sanskrit priyás ‘dear’, Russian prijatel’ ‘friend’, and indeed English friend.
Its Germanic offspring, *frijaz, displays the shift from ‘affection’ to ‘liberty’, as shown in German frei, Dutch vrij, Swedish and Danish fri, and English free. Welsh rhydd ‘free’ comes from the same Indo-European source.
=> friday, friend - freebooter
- freebooter: see filibuster
- freeze
- freeze: [OE] Freeze is an ancient word, which traces its history back to Indo-European *preus- (source also of Latin pruīna ‘hoarfrost’). Its Germanic descendant was *freusan, from which come German frieren, Dutch vriezen, Swedish frysa, and English freeze. The noun frost [OE] was formed in the prehistoric Germanic period from a weakly stressed variant of the base of *freusan plus the suffix -t.
=> frost - freight
- freight: see fraught
- frenzy
- frenzy: see frantic
- frequent
- frequent: [16] Frequent comes from Latin frequēns, which meant ‘crowded’ as well as ‘regularly repeated’ (it is not known what the origins of frequēns were, although it may be related to Latin farcīre ‘stuff’, source of English farce). The sense ‘crowded’ was carried over into English along with ‘regularly repeated’, but it had virtually died out by the end of the 18th century. The verb frequent [15] goes back to Latin frequentāre ‘visit frequently or regularly’.
- fresh
- fresh: [12] Fresh is of Germanic origin, but in its present form reached English via French. Its ultimate source was the prehistoric Germanic adjective *friskaz, which also produced German frisch, Dutch vers, Swedish färsk, and possibly English frisk [16]. It was borrowed into the common source of the Romance languages as *friscus, from which came French frais and Italian and Spanish fresco (the Italian form gave English fresco [16], painting done on ‘fresh’ – that is, still wet – plaster, and alfresco [18], literally ‘in the fresh air’).
English acquired fresh from the Old French predecessor of frais, freis. The colloquial sense ‘making presumptuous sexual advances’, first recorded in the USA in the mid 19th century, probably owes much to German frech ‘cheeky’.
=> alfresco, fresco, frisk - fret
- fret: English has three separate words fret. Fret ‘irritate, distress’ [OE] goes back to a prehistoric Germanic compound verb formed from the intensive prefix *fra- and the verb *etan (ancestor of English eat), which meant ‘eat up, devour’. Its modern Germanic descendants include German fressen ‘eat’ (used of animals). In Old English, it gave fretan, which also meant ‘devour’, but this literal meaning had died out by the early 15th century, leaving the figurative ‘gnaw at, worry, distress’. Fret ‘decorate with interlaced or pierced design’ [14] (now usually encountered only in fretted, fretwork, and fretsaw) comes from Old French freter, a derivative of frete ‘trellis, embossed or interlaced work’, whose origins are obscure.
Also lost in the mists of time are the antecedents of fret ‘ridge across the fingerboard of a guitar’ [16].
=> eat - friar
- friar: see fraternal
- Friday
- Friday: [OE] Friday was named for Frigg, in Scandinavian mythology the wife of Odin and goddess of married love and of the hearth (Frigg, or in Old English Frīg, is thought to have come from prehistoric Germanic *frijaz ‘noble’, source of English free). ‘Frigg’s day’ was a direct adaptation of Latin Veneris dies ‘Venus’s day’ (whence French vendredi ‘Friday’), which in turn was based on Greek Aphrodítēs hēméra ‘Aphrodite’s day’.
=> free - friend
- friend: [OE] Etymologically, friend means ‘loving’. It and its Germanic relatives (German freund, Dutch vriend, Swedish frände, etc) go back to the present participle of the prehistoric Germanic verb *frijōjan ‘love’ (historically, the German present participle ends in -nd, as in modern German -end; English -ng is an alteration of this). *Frijōjan itself was a derivative of the adjective *frijaz, from which modern English gets free, but which originally meant ‘dear, beloved’.
=> free - frieze
- frieze: [16] Phrygia, in western and central Asia Minor, was noted in ancient times for its embroidery. Hence classical Latin Phrygium ‘of Phrygia’ was pressed into service in medieval Latin (as frigium, or later frisium) for ‘embroidered cloth’. English acquired the word via Old French frise, by which time it had progressed semantically via ‘fringe’ to ‘decorative band along the top of a wall’.
- fright
- fright: [OE] Prehistoric Germanic *furkhtaz, an adjective of unknown origin (not related to English fear), meant ‘afraid’. From it was derived a noun *furkhtīn, which was the basis of one of the main words for ‘fear’ among the ancient Germanic languages (not superseded as the chief English term by fear until the 13th century). Its modern descendants include German furcht and English fright (in which the original sequence ‘vowel plus r’ was reversed by the process known as metathesis – something which also happened to Middle Low German vruchte, from which Swedish fruktan and Danish frygt ‘fear’ were borrowed).
- fringe
- fringe: [14] Late Latin fimbria meant ‘fibre, thread’ (it is used in modern English as an anatomical term for a threadlike structure, such as the filaments at the opening of the Fallopian tube). In the plural it was applied to a ‘fringe’, and eventually this meaning fed back into the singular. In Vulgar Latin fimbria, by the soundreversal process known as metathesis, became *frimbia, which passed into Old French as fringe or frenge – source of the English word.
- Frisbee
- Frisbee: [20] The name of this spinning plastic disc had its origin in a catching game played in Bridgeport, Connecticut in the 1950s. The participants were no doubt not the first to notice that an aerodynamically volatile flat disc produces more interesting and challenging results than a spherical object, but it was their particular choice of missiles that had farreaching terminological results: they used pie tins from the local Frisbie bakery. The idea for turning the dish into a marketable plastic product belonged to Fred Morrison, and he registered Frisbee (doubtless more commercially grabby than Frisbie) as a trademark in 1959.
- fritter
- fritter: see fry
- frizz
- frizz: see fry
- fro
- fro: see from