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gamble [gamble 词源字典]: gamble: [18] Although its ancestry has never been established beyond all doubt, it seems overwhelmingly likely that gamble is essentially the same word as game (in which the sense ‘gamble’ is preserved in such contexts as gaming tables and betting and gaming). The Middle English form of game was gamen, and it is thought that this may have produced a variant form gamel (recorded in the 16th century) which in due course became gamble.
=> game[gamble etymology, gamble origin, 英语词源]
game: game: There are two games in English. The noun game ‘pastime, sport’ [OE] used to be a fairly widespread word in the Germanic languages (Swedish and Danish still preserve it as gamman and gammen respectively) and may well go back to a prehistoric Germanic compound formed from the collective prefix *ga- and *mann- ‘person’ (source of English man), and denoting literally ‘people together, participating’.

Its Old English was gamen which, before it became reduced to game (a process which began in the 13th century but was not complete until the 16th century), bequeathed gammon (as in backgammon) and probably also gamble to modern English. Game ‘plucky’ [18] is probably an adjectival use of the same word. Game ‘lame’ [18], however, and its derivative gammy [19], are not related; they may come from archaic French gambi ‘crooked’.
=> gamble, man; gammy
gammon: gammon: Gammon ‘bacon’ [15] is not related to the gammon [18] of backgammon. It comes from Old Northern French gambon (source also of modern French jambon ‘ham’), which was a derivative of gambe ‘leg’ – hence etymologically ‘leg meat’. This seems to go back ultimately to Greek kampé ‘bend’, which was used particularly as an anatomical term for joints of the body.

Latin took it over as a veterinary expression, gamba, denoting a ‘horse’s hoof’, and it passed in due course into Italian as gamba (whence English gambit, gambol, jamb [14], and the gamba of viola da gamba [18], played between the legs) and into French as jambe, both meaning ‘leg’. The gammon of backgammon comes from Middle English gamen, the ancestor of modern English game (see also BACKGAMMON).
=> gambit, gambol, jamb
gamut: gamut: [15] Gamut began life as a medieval musical term. The 11th-century French-born musical theorist Guido d’Arezzo devised the ‘hexachord’, a six-note scale used for sightreading music (and forerunner of the modern tonic sol-fa). The notes were mnemonically named ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la (after, according to legend, syllables in a Latin hymn to St John: ‘Ut queant laxis resonāre fibris Mira gestorum famuli tuorum, Solve polluti labii reatum’ – ‘Absolve the crime of the polluted lip in order that the slaves may be able with relaxed chords to praise with sound your marvellous deeds’).

The note below the lowest note (ut) became known as gamma-ut (gamma, the name of the Greek equivalent of g, having been used in medieval notation for the note bottom G). And in due course gamma-ut, or by contraction in English gamut, came to be applied to the whole scale, and hence figuratively to any ‘complete range’ (an early 17th-century development).
gander: gander: see gannet
gang: gang: [12] Gang originally meant ‘going, journey’. It was borrowed from Old Norse gangr, which goes back ultimately to the same Germanic source (the verb *ganggan ‘go’) as produced the German past participle gegangen ‘gone’ and Old English gangan ‘go’ – still preserved in Scottish gang ‘go’ and in gangway [17]. Originally literally a ‘way for going’.

The word’s modern meaning seems to have developed via ‘quantity carried on a journey’ (a common usage in Scottish English well into the 19th century) and ‘set of articles carried together’ to (in the 17th century) ‘group of workmen’ and ‘group of people acting together for a (bad) purpose’.
gannet: gannet: [OE] The gannet used to be known dialectally as the solan goose (solan was a compound formed in the 15th century from Old Norse súla ‘gannet’ and önd ‘duck’), and in fact the name gannet too reveals a perceived similarity between the gannet and the goose. For it comes ultimately from a prehistoric Germanic *ganitaz or *ganoton, a word formed from the same base as produced English gander [10].
=> gander
gantry: gantry: see gallon
gaol: gaol: see jail
gape: gape: [13] Gape and the related gap [14] are of Scandinavian origin. English borrowed the verb from Old Norse gapa ‘open the mouth’, which survives in modern Scandinavian languages as Swedish gapa and Danish gabe. Old Norse gap ‘chasm’ (source of Swedish gap ‘mouth’ and Danish gab ‘opening, open mouth’) was originally taken over by English in the specific sense ‘hole in a wall or hedge’; the broader modern range of meanings began to emerge in the 16th century.
=> gap, yawn
garage: garage: [20] As the motor-car age got under way at the start of the 20th century, a gap opened up in the lexicon for a word for ‘car-storage place’. English filled it in 1902 by borrowing French garage. The first references to it show that the term (station was an early alternative) was originally applied to large commercially run shelters housing many vehicles – the equivalent more of modern multi-storey car parks than of garages (the Daily Mail, for example, on 11 January 1902, reports the ‘new “garage” founded by Mr Harrington Moore, hon. secretary of the Automobile Club … The “garage”, which is situated at the City end of Queen Victoria-street, has accommodation for 80 cars’, and Alfred Harmsworth, in Motors 1902, wrote of ‘stations or “garages” where a number of cars can be kept’).

It was not long, however, before individual houses got more personalized garages, and the application to an establishment where vehicle repairs are carried out and fuel sold soon followed. The French word garage itself is a derivative of the verb garer, which originally meant ‘dock ships’. It comes from Old French garer ‘protect, defend’, a loanword from Old High German warōn (to which English ward, warn, and the -ware of beware are related).
=> beware, ward, warn
garb: garb: see gear
garble: garble: [15] Garble used not to have its presentday negative connotations. It originally meant simply ‘cleanse, sift, cull’: ‘[At Alexandria] all sorts of spices be garbled after the bargain is made’, Richard Hakluyt, Voyages 1599. Gradually, though, ‘taking out the worst’ and ‘selecting the best’ passed into ‘making an unfair selection’, ‘distorting by leaving things out’ and eventually simply ‘distorting meaning’.

The word itself has a convoluted pre-English history: English got it from Italian garbellare, which in turn came from Arabic gharbala ‘sift, select’, a term probably widespread in the commercial linguae francae of the Mediterranean seaboard in medieval and Renaissance times. This verb was a derivative of the Arabic noun ghirbāl ‘sieve’, which seems to have been based on the Latin verb crībellāre ‘seive’ – itself derived from crībellum, a diminutive form of crībum ‘seive’, which was related to Latin cernere ‘sift’ (source of English discern and discrete).
=> certain, discern, discrete
garden: garden: [14] Ultimately, garden and yard are the same word. Both come from prehistoric Germanic *gardon, but whereas yard reached English via a direct Germanic route, garden diverted via the Romance languages. Vulgar Latin borrowed *gardon as *gardo ‘enclosure’, and formed from it the adjective *gardīnus ‘enclosed’. The phrase hortus gardīnus ‘enclosed garden’ came to be abbreviated to gardīnus, which gave Old Northern French gardin, the source of the English word (more southerly dialects of Old French had jardin, borrowed by Italian as giardino).
=> yard
gargoyle: gargoyle: [15] The ancient root *garg-, *gurgoriginated as an imitation of throat sounds. From it were derived such guttural words as Greek gargaraaizein ‘gargle’ (whence Latin gargarizāre ‘gargle’) and Latin gurguliō ‘gullet’ (Latin gurges, source of English gorge and regurgitate, had moved further figuratively to ‘whirlpool’).

Among the offspring of gurguliō are Vulgar Latin *gurguliāre, source of English gurgle [16], and Old French gargouille ‘throat’. Roof spouts carved in the shape of grotesque creatures had the term gargouille applied to them from the notion that the rain-water was coming out of their throats – hence English gargoyle. Gargouille also formed the basis of the verb gargouiller ‘gargle, gurgle’, from which English gets gargle [16].
=> gargle, gurgle
garlic: garlic: see goad
garner: garner: see grain
garnet: garnet: [13] Garnet, as a term for a semiprecious stone, was borrowed from Middle Dutch garnate. This in turn came from Old French grenat ‘dark red’, the colour of the garnet, whose original inspiration was probably the pomegranate (in Old French pome grenate), with its vivid scarlet pulp.
=> grain, pomegranate
garnish: garnish: [14] Garnish was originally a fairly utilitarian verb, meaning simply ‘fit out, equip, supply’ or ‘adorn’. Its modern culinary application did not develop until the late 17th century. It came from garniss-, the lengthened stem of the Old French verb garnir ‘equip, adorn’. This was borrowed from prehistoric Germanic *warnjan, which presumably came from the same base as produced *warnōjan ‘be cautious, guard, provide for’ (source of English warn).

The notion of ‘warning’ is preserved in the legal term garnishee [17], applied to someone who is served with a judicial warning not to pay their debt to anyone other than the person who is seeking repayment.
=> warn
garotte: garotte: [17] Garotte is widely used simply for ‘strangle’, but its strict application is to a former Spanish method of capital punishment by strangulation or breaking the neck, in which a metal collar was screwed increasingly tight. It got its name from Spanish garrote, which originally meant ‘cudgel’: in earlier, less sophisticated or more impromptu versions of the execution, a cudgel or stick was inserted into a band around the neck and twisted round and round so as to tighten the band. The immediate source of garrote was no doubt Old French garrot, from an earlier guaroc ‘club, stick, rod for turning’, whose form suggests a Celtic origin.