英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

grin [grin 词源字典]: grin: [OE] Modern English grin and groan are scarcely semantic neighbours, but a possible common ancestor may provide the link: prehistoric Indo-European *ghrei-, which seems to have meant something like ‘be open’. It has been suggested as the source of a range of verbs which started off denoting simply ‘open the mouth’, but have since differentiated along the lines ‘make noise’ and ‘grimace’. Grin has taken the latter course, but close relatives, such as Old High German grennan ‘mutter’ and Old Norse grenja ‘howl’, show that the parting of the semantic ways was not so distant in time.

Old English grennian actually meant ‘draw back the lips and bare the teeth in pain or anger’. Traces of this survive in such distinctly unfunny expressions as ‘grinning skull’, but the modern sense ‘draw back the lips in amusement’ did not begin to emerge until the 15th century. Groan [OE], on the other hand, is firmly in the ‘make noise’ camp.
=> groan[grin etymology, grin origin, 英语词源]
grind: grind: [OE] Grind is part of the ancient Indo- European word-stock. Relatives such as Latin frendere ‘crush’ and Lithuanian grendu ‘rub’ point back to an Indo-European *ghrendh-. This perhaps denoted ‘crushing’ rather than what we would today call ‘grinding’; for in earliest times grain was crushed rather than ground to produce meal. The connotations of the word seem to have changed in step with advances in grainpulverizing technology. (The same is true, incidentally, in the case of Indo-European *mel-, which produced the majority of modern European words for ‘grind’, from German mahlen and Spanish moler to Russian molot’, and also gave English meal, mill, molar, etc.) Grist [OE] was formed from the same base as produced grind, and until the 15th century meant simply ‘grinding’.
=> grist
grip: grip: [OE] Grip comes from a prehistoric Germanic verb *gripjan, derived from a base *grip-. Variants of this base produced gripe [OE] (which originally meant simply ‘grasp’), grope [OE], and possibly also grab. French borrowed it as gripper ‘seize’, from which English gets the now obsolete grippe ‘flu’ [18].
=> grab, gripe, grope
grisly: grisly: [OE] Middle English had a verb grise ‘be terrified’, which points back via an unrecorded Old English *grīsan to a West Germanic *grīdenoting ‘fear, terror’, from which grisly would have been formed. Dutch has the parallel formation grijzelijk. In 1900, the Oxford English Dictionary described grisly as ‘now only arch and lit’, but since then its fortunes have recovered strongly, and it is now firmly part of the general language.
grist: grist: see grind
grit: grit: [OE] Etymologically, grit is ‘something produced by pounding’. Prehistoric Indo- European *ghrēu- denoted ‘rub, pound, crush’, and from it came Germanic *greutam ‘tiny particles of crushed or pounded rock’, hence ‘sand, gravel’. Its modern descendants include English grit and German griess ‘gravel, grit, coarse sand’, and it was also used in the formation of the Old English word for ‘pearl’, meregrot, literally ‘sea-pebble’, an alteration of Latin margarīta ‘pearl’. Groats ‘husked grain’ [OE] comes from the same source.

The sense ‘determination, resolve’ originated in the USA in the early 19th century, presumably as a metaphorical extension of grit meaning ‘hard sandstone’ (as in millstone grit).
=> groats
grizzle: grizzle: [18] Grizzle ‘whine, complain’ is a bit of a puzzle. It has no obvious ancestor, and it is tempting to conclude that it originated as an ironic allusion to ‘patient Griselda’ (popularly Grizel from the 14th to the 19th centuries), the proverbial meek, uncomplaining wife. Against this it has to be said that in the earliest recorded examples of the verb it means ‘grin’, and that the sense ‘whine, complain’ did not emerge until the 19th century; however, grizzle ‘grin’ may be a different word.

The adjective grizzle ‘grey’ [15] is now obsolete, but it lives on in its derivatives grizzled ‘grey-haired’ [15] and grizzly [16] (as in grizzly bear). It was borrowed from Old French grisel, a derivative of gris ‘grey’, which goes back ultimately to prehistoric Germanic *grīsiaz.
groan: groan: see grin
groats: groats: see grit
grocer: grocer: [15] Etymologically, a grocer is simply somebody who sells ‘in gross’ – that is, wholesale. The word’s ancestor is medieval Latin grossārius ‘wholesale dealer’, a derivative of late Latin grossus ‘large, bulky’ (from which English gets gross). It passed into English via Old French grossier and Anglo-Norman grosser. In practice, the term seems largely restricted in Britain from earliest times to merchants who dealt in spices and similar imported edible goods, and as early as the mid 15th century it was being used for retailers who sold such goods in small quantities to the public. Greengrocer is an 18th-century formation.
=> gross
grog: grog: [18] Grog comes from the nickname of Edward Vernon (1684–1757), the British admiral who in 1740 introduced the practice of serving rum and water (grog) to sailors in the Royal Navy rather than the hitherto customary neat rum (it was discontinued in 1970). His nickname was ‘Old Grogram’, said to be an allusion to the grogram cloak he always wore (grogram ‘coarse fabric’ [16] comes from French gros grain, literally ‘coarse grain’). Groggy [18], originally ‘drunk’, is a derivative.
groin: groin: [15] Unravelling the history of groin required a good deal of detective work, and the answer that the 19th-century etymologist Walter Skeat came up with was the rather surprising one that it is related to ground. The root on which this was formed was prehistoric Germanic *grundu-, which also produced the derivative *grundja-. This passed into Old English as grynde, which seems originally to have meant ‘depression in the ground’ (although the more extreme ‘abyss’ is its only recorded sense).

It appears to correspond to Middle English grynde ‘groin’ (‘If the pricking be in the foot, anoint the grynde with hot common oil’, Lanfranc’s Science of Surgery 1400 – evidently an example of reflexology), and the theory is that the original sense ‘depression in the ground’ became transferred figuratively to the ‘depression between the abdomen and the thighs’.

By the late 15th century grynde had become gryne, and (by the not uncommon phonetic change of /ee/ to /oi/) this metamorphosed to groin in the late 16th century. (Groyne ‘wall projecting into the sea’ [16] is a different word. It is a transferred use of the now obsolete groin ‘pig’s snout’ [14], which came via Old French groin from Latin grunnīre ‘grunt’.)
groom: groom: [13] No one has ever been able satisfactorily to explain where the word groom came from. It suddenly appears in early Middle English, meaning ‘boy, male servant’ (the sense ‘one who takes care of horses’ is a 17th-century development), and none of the words with a superficial similarity to it, such as Old French grommet ‘servant’ and Old Norse grómr ‘man’, can be shown to be related. Bridegroom is a 14th-century alteration of Old English brydguma (the element guma ‘man’ is related to Latin homō ‘man’) under the influence of groom.
groove: groove: see grub
grope: grope: see grip
gross: gross: [14] Gross comes via Old French gros from late Latin grossus ‘large, bulky’, a word of unknown origin (not related to German gross ‘large’). Its association with literal physical size has now largely died out in English, in the face of a growing figurative role in such senses as ‘coarse, vulgar’ and (of amounts) ‘total, entire’. Its use as a noun meaning ‘144’, which dates from the 15th century, comes from the French phrase grosse douzaine ‘large dozen’. Grocer is a derivative, as is engross [14]; this originally meant ‘buy up wholesale’, hence ‘gain exclusive possession of’ and, by metaphorical extension, ‘occupy all the attention of’.
=> engross, grocer
grotesque: grotesque: [16] Etymologically, grotesque means ‘grotto-like’. Its Italian source, grottesco, was used in the phrase pittura grottesca, literally ‘grotto-like pictures’, denoting wall paintings of the sort discovered in the excavated basements of old buildings. Many of them were evidently bizarre or highly imaginative, and so grottesca came to mean ‘fanciful, fantastic’.

English acquired the word via Old French crotesque (crotescque was the earliest English spelling, later re-formed as grotesque on the basis of French grotesque and Italian grottesca), and in general use from the mid-18th century onward it slid towards the pejorativeness of ‘ludicrous, absurd’. The colloquial abbreviation grotty is first recorded in print in 1964.
=> grotto
grotto: grotto: [17] Grotto and crypt are ultimately the same word. The source of both was Greek krúptē, originally ‘hidden place’, hence ‘vault’. English acquired crypt directly from krúptē’s Latin descendant, crypta, but grotto came via a more circuitous route. Crypta became *crupta or *grupta in Vulgar Latin, and this produced Italian grotta, later grotto. French borrowed it as grotte, and the earliest English form, the now obsolete grot [16], came from French, but in the 17th century the Italian version of the word established itself.
=> crypt, grotesque
ground: ground: [OE] Ground is part of a widespread family of Germanic words, which include also German, Swedish, and Danish grund and Dutch grond. A common meaning element of all these is ‘bottom’, particularly of the sea (preserved in English ‘run aground’), and it seems that their prehistoric Germanic ancestor *grunduz may originally have denoted something like ‘deep place’.
groundsel: groundsel: [OE] The -sel of groundsel represents Old English swelgan ‘swallow’ (ancestor of modern English swallow), and if ground- genuinely represents ground, then groundsel would mean etymologically ‘groundswallower’ – presumably a reference to its rapid and invasive growth. However, in early texts the form gundæswelgiæ appears, the first element of which suggests Old English gund ‘pus’. If this is the word’s true origin, it would mean literally ‘pus-swallower’, an allusion to its use in poultices to absorb pus, and groundsel would be a variant introduced through association with ground.
=> swallow