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fax [fax 词源字典]: fax: [20] Fax is a sleeper of a word. The technology of facsimile telegraphy, by which a document is scanned and its image transmitted via a telegraphic link, had been around since the 1870s, but the word fax was not invented for it (in the USA, by the simple expedient of removing the end of facsimile) until the 1940s. Even then, faxes were not widely known about outside the world of commerce, and it was only in the 1970s that the technology, and with it the word (by now a verb as well as a noun), became an everyday phenomenon. Facsimile [17], incidentally, is simply a lexicalization of Latin fac simile ‘make similar’.
[fax etymology, fax origin, 英语词源]
fay: fay: see fairy
faze: faze: [19] Faze ‘disconcert’ is now mainly restricted to American English, but in fact it has an extensive prehistory stretching back to Anglo-Saxon times. It is a variant of feeze, a verb meaning ‘drive away’ or ‘alarm’ as well as ‘disconcert’ which survives in American English and in some British dialects, and which comes from Old English fēsian ‘drive away’.
fealty: fealty: see faith
fear: fear: [OE] ‘Being frightened’ seems to be a comparatively recent development in the semantic history of the word fear. In Old English times the verb meant ‘be afraid’, but the noun meant ‘sudden terrible event, danger’, and it did not develop its modern sense – possibly under the influence of the verb – until the 13th century (the Old English nouns for ‘fear’ were ege and fyrhto, source of modern English fright).

Related words, such as German gefahr and Dutch gevaar, both meaning ‘danger’, confirm that this is the earlier sense (as would Latin perīculum ‘danger’ – source of English peril – if, as has been suggested, it too is connected). Taking the search wider, possible links with Latin perītus ‘experienced’, Greek peráō ‘go through’, and English fare ‘go’ point to an underlying meaning ‘what one undergoes, experience’.
=> peril
feasible: feasible: [15] Something that is feasible is literally something ‘that can be done’. The word was borrowed from French faisable, a derivative of the stem of the verb faire ‘do, make’. This is the French descendant of Latin facere, which has contributed so voluminously to English vocabulary, from fact to difficult.
=> difficult, fact, factory, fashion, feat, feature
feast: feast: [13] The notion of ‘eating’ is a secondary semantic development for feast, whose underlying meaning (as may be guessed from the related festival [14] and festivity [14]) has more to do with joyousness than with the appeasement of hunger. Its ultimate source is the Latin adjective festus, which meant ‘joyful, merry’. This was used as a plural noun, festa, meaning ‘celebratory ceremonies, particularly of a religious nature’, which came down to Old French as feste.

This was the source of English feast, and its modern French descendant gave English fête [18]. Incidentally, the sense ‘sumptuous meal’, present in feast but not in fête, goes back to the Latin singular noun festum. Also related is festoon [17], acquired via French from Italian festone, which originally meant ‘ornament for a festive occasion’; and fair (as in fairground) comes ultimately from Latin fēria, first cousin to festus.
=> fair, festival, festoon, fête
feat: feat: [14] Etymologically, a feat is ‘something that is done’. The word comes via Old French fet from Latin factum ‘deed’, a noun based on the past participle of facere ‘make, do’, and is hence a doublet of English fact – that is to say, both words go back to an identical source, but have become differentiated (in this case because fact came directly from Latin, whereas feat was filtered through Old French).
=> fact, factory, fashion, feasible, feature
feather: feather: [OE] The concept of ‘feathers’ is closely bound up with those of ‘wings’ and ‘flying’, and not surprisingly feather belongs to a word family in which all three of these meanings are represented. Its ultimate source is the prehistoric Indo-European base *pet-, which also produced Greek ptéron ‘wing’ (as in English pterodactyl), Latin penna ‘feather, wing’ (source of English pen), and Sanskrit pátati ‘fly’. Its Germanic descendant was *fethrō, from which came German feder, Dutch veer, Swedish fjäder and English feather (itself used in the plural for ‘wings’ in Anglo-Saxon times).
=> pen, pterodactyl
feature: feature: [14] Feature comes ultimately from Latin factūra, a derivative of the verb facere ‘do, make’ which meant literally ‘making, formation’. Elements of this original sense remained when the word reached English via Old French faiture – when John Dymmok wrote in 1600 of ‘horses of a fine feature’, for example, he was referring to their shape or general conformation – but already a semantic narrowing down to the ‘way in which the face is shaped’ had taken place.

This meaning was then distributed, as it were, to the individual components of the face, and hence (in the 17th century) to any distinctive or characteristic part.
=> difficult, fact, factory, fashion, feasible, feat
February: February: [13] Etymologically, February is the ‘month of purification’. The word comes via Old French feverier and late Latin febrārius from Latin februārius (English reintroduced the Latin -ruar- spelling in the 14th century). This was a derivative of februa, a word borrowed into Latin from the language of the ancient Sabine people of Italy which was used to designate a festival of purification held on 15 February.
feckless: feckless: [16] From an etymological point of view, feckless is simply another way of saying ineffective. It originated in Scotland, where from the 15th century the local population economized on the pronunciation of effect, reducing it to feck (this survived into modern times in the sense ‘efficacy’). From it was formed feckless, literally ‘having no effect’, and also feckful ‘efficient, vigorous’, which never made it further south than northern England.
=> effect
fecund: fecund: see foetus
federal: federal: [17] The modern political use of federal and its various derivatives is a comparatively recent development, ushered in by the formation of the USA in the late 18th century. Its original meaning was ‘of a league or treaty’ (it was formed from Latin foedus ‘league, treaty’, which came from the same ultimate Indo-European base – *bhidh-, *bhoidh- – as faith), and its application to a ‘joining together of states into a single unit’ seems to have arisen from such phrases as federal union, which would originally have meant ‘union by treaty’.
=> confide, defy, faith, perfidy
fee: fee: [14] Fee is a word bequeathed to modern English by the feudal system (and indeed it is closely related etymologically to feudal). It came via Anglo-Norman fee from medieval Latin feodum or feudum (source also of feudal [17]). This denoted ‘land or other property whose use was granted as a reward for service’, a meaning which persists in its essentials in modern English ‘payment for work done’.

The secondary signification of fee, ‘feudal estate’, is no longer a live sense, but it is represented in the related fief [17], a descendant of feodum, which English acquired through French rather than Anglo-Norman. The ultimate derivation of the medieval Latin term itself is not altogether clear, although it is usually assigned to an unrecorded Frankish *fehuōd, literally ‘cattle-property’ (*fehu has related forms in Old English féoh ‘cattle, property’ and Old Norse fé ‘cattle, money’ – joint sources of the first syllable of English fellow – and in modern German viehe ‘cattle’; they all go back ultimately to Indo- European *peku-, ancestor of a wide range of words meaning ‘cattle’ which, since in former times cattle were symbolic of wealth, in many cases came to signify ‘property’ too).
=> fellow, feudal, fief
feeble: feeble: [12] Semantically, feeble was originally a close relative of deplorable and lamentable, but over the centuries it has diverged markedly from them. Its ultimate source was Latin flēbilis, a derivative of the verb flēre ‘weep’. In classical times this meant literally ‘worthy of being cried over, lamentable’, but later it came to signify ‘weak’. It passed in this sense into Old French as fleible, which subsequently became feible or feble (source of English feeble), and later still foible (whence English foible [17]) and faible (the modern French form).
=> foible
feed: feed: [OE] Feed was formed from the noun food in prehistoric Germanic times. It comes via Old English fēdan from Germanic *fōthjan, a derivative of *fōthon, the noun from which modern English food is descended. Its use as a noun, for ‘food, fodder’, dates from the 16th century.
=> food
feel: feel: [OE] Like its West Germanic cousins, German fühlen and Dutch voelen, feel is part of a wider Indo-European word-family covering notions like ‘touching’ and ‘handling’, including Greek palámē and Latin palma ‘palm of the hand’ and Latin palpāre, originally ‘stroke, touch lightly’, later ‘feel’ (source of English palpable and palpitation). Its ultimate ancestor was the Indo-European base *pōl-, *pal-.
=> palm, palpable, palpitation
feign: feign: [13] Feign is first cousin to faint. It comes from the present stem of Old French faindre or feindre ‘pretend, shirk’, whose past participle gave English faint. This in turn came from Latin fingere ‘make, shape’, which also gave English effigy, fiction, figure, and figment and is related to English dairy and dough. The semantic progression from ‘make, shape’ to ‘reform or change fraudulently’, and hence ‘pretend’, had already begun in classical Latin times.
=> dairy, dough, effigy, faint, fiction, figure
feint: feint: The noun feint [17] and the adjective feint [19] are essentially different words, but they have a common ultimate origin. Feint ‘misleading mock attack’ was borrowed from French feinte, a noun use of the feminine form of the past participle of feindre ‘pretend’ (from which English got feign). Feint ‘printed with pale lines’ is an artificial variant of faint introduced in the printing trade in the mid 19th century (and faint itself originally came from the past participle of feindre).
=> faint, feign