英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

fletcher [fletcher 词源字典]: fletcher: see fledge
[fletcher etymology, fletcher origin, 英语词源]
fleur-de-lys: fleur-de-lys: see lily
flight: flight: [OE] English has two distinct, etymologically unrelated words flight. One, ‘flying’, comes from a prehistoric West Germanic *flukhtiz, a derivative of the same base as produced fly (the sense ‘series of stairs’, which developed in the 18th century, was perhaps modelled on French volée d’escalier, literally ‘flight of stairs’). The other, ‘escape’, comes from a hypothetical Old English *flyht, never actually recorded, which goes back ultimately to the same Germanic base as produced flee.
=> flee, fly
flinch: flinch: see link
flit: flit: see float
flitch: flitch: see flesh
float: float: [OE] Germanic *fleut-, which produced English fleet, had the so-called ‘weak grades’ (that is, variant forms which because they were weakly stressed had different vowels) *flot- and *flut-. The former was the source of Germanic *flotōjan, which passed into late Old English as flotian and eventually ousted flēotan (modern English fleet) from its original meaning ‘float’.

It also seems to have been borrowed into the Romance languages, producing French flotter, Italian fiottare, and Spanish flotar (a diminutive of the Spanish noun derivative flota gave English flotilla [18]). The latter formed the basis of Old Norse flytja, acquired by English as flit [12], and of Old English floterian, which became modern English flutter.
=> fleet, flit, flotilla, flutter
floe: floe: see flake
flood: flood: [OE] Flood goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *flōthuz, which also produced German flut, Dutch vloed, and Swedish flod ‘flood’. It was derived ultimately from Indo- European *plō-, a variant of *pleu- ‘flow, float’ which also produced English fleet, float, fly, fledge, and fowl.
=> fleet, float, fly, fowl
floor: floor: [OE] Floor and its first cousins, German flur ‘paved floor’ and Dutch vloer ‘floor’, go back to a prehistoric Germanic *flōruz. They are related to various Celtic words for ‘floor’, including Old Irish lār, Welsh llawr, and Breton leur, and it has been speculated that both the Germanic and the Celtic words come ultimately from the same source as Latin plānus ‘flat’ and English flat, and denote etymologically ‘flat surface’.
=> flat
flora: flora: [16] Latin flōs meant ‘flower’ (it was the source of English flower). From it was derived Flora, the name given to the Roman goddess of flowers. English took over the term in this mythological sense, and in the 17th century it began to be used in the titles of botanical works (for example John Ray’s Flora, seu de florum cultura ‘Flora, or concerning the cultivation of flowers’).

In particular, it was used for books describing all the plants in a particular area or country, and in the 18th century it came, like its animal counterpart fauna, to be applied as a collective term to such plants. The adjective floral [17] comes from Latin flōs.
=> flower
florid: florid: see flower
florin: florin: [14] Florin came via Old French florin from Italian fiorino, a diminutive of fiore ‘flower’. This was used as the name of a gold coin first issued in Florence, Italy in 1252, which had the figure of a lily on its obverse side. In the 15th century it was adopted as the term for an English gold coin worth variously 6 shillings and 6 shillings and 8 pence, issued in the reign of Edward III, and it was revived in 1849 when a new 2 shilling silver coin was issued.
=> flower
florist: florist: see flower
flotilla: flotilla: see float
flour: flour: [13] Etymologically, flour is the same word as flower. It originally meant the ‘flower’, or ‘finest part’, of ground grain, and hence eventually just ‘ground (and more or less sifted) grain’. The distinction in spelling between flour and flower did not emerge until the late 18th century, and the spelling flower for ‘flour’ persisted into the early 19th century.
=> flower
flourish: flourish: [13] To flourish is etymologically to ‘flower’ – and indeed ‘come into flower, bloom’ is originally what the verb literally meant in English: ‘to smell the sweet savour of the vine when it flourisheth’, Geoffrey Chaucer, Parson’s Tale 1386. The metaphorical ‘thrive’ developed in the 14th century. The word comes from Old French floriss-, the stem of florir ‘bloom’, which goes back via Vulgar Latin *florīre to classical Latin florēre, a derivative of flōs ‘flower’.
=> flower
flow: flow: [OE] The prehistoric Indo-European *pleu-, ancestor of a heterogeneous range of English vocabulary, from fleet to plover, denoted ‘flow, float’. It had a variant form *plō-, which passed into Germanic as *flō-. This formed the basis of the Old English verb flōwan (whence modern English flow) and also of the noun flood.
=> fleet, flood, fowl, plover, pluvial
flower: flower: [13] The Old English word for ‘flower’ was blōstm, which is ultimately related to flower. Both come from Indo-European *bhlō-, which probably originally meant ‘swell’, and also gave English bloom, blade, and the now archaic blow ‘come into flower’. Its Latin descendant was flōs, whose stem form flōr- passed via Old French flour and Anglo-Norman flur into English, where it gradually replaced blossom as the main word for ‘flower’. Close English relatives include floral, florid [17] (from Latin flōridus), florin, florist [17] (an English coinage), flour, and flourish.
=> blade, bloom, blow, floral, florid, flour, flourish
flu: flu: [19] Flu is short for influenza [18]. The first record of its use is in a letter of 1839 by the poet Robert Southey (who spelled it, as was commonly the practice in the 19th century, flue): ‘I have had a pretty fair share of the Flue’. Influenza means literally ‘influence’ in Italian, and was used metaphorically for the ‘outbreak of a particular disease’ (hence an influenza di febbre scarlattina was an ‘outbreak of scarlet fever’, a ‘scarlet fever epidemic’).

The severe epidemic of the disease we now know as flu, which struck Italy in 1743 and spread from there throughout Europe, was called an influenza di catarro ‘catarrh epidemic’, or simply an influenza – and hence influenza became the English word for the disease.
=> influence, influenza