英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

get [get 词源字典]: get: [13] Get, now one of the most pervasive of English words, has only been in the language for the (comparatively) short period of 800 years. It was borrowed from Old Norse geta (although a related, hundred-per-cent English -get, which occurs in beget and forget, dates back to Old English times). Both come via a prehistoric Germanic *getan from Indo-European *ghed-, which signified ‘seize’ (guess is ultimately from the same source). Gotten is often quoted as an American survival of a primeval past participle since abandoned by British English, but in fact the original past participle of got was getten, which lasted into the 16th century; gotten was a Middle English innovation, based on such models as spoken and stolen. Got originated as an abbreviated form of gotten, which in due course came to be used, on both sides of the Atlantic, as the past tense of the verb (replacing the original gat).
=> beget, forget, guess[get etymology, get origin, 英语词源]
geyser: geyser: see gust
ghastly: ghastly: [14] Despite its similarity in form and sense, ghastly is not related to ghost. It was formed from the Middle English verb gasten ‘terrify’, which may have been a descendant of the Old English verb gǣstan ‘torment’ (source of aghast). The spelling with gh-, based on ghost, was first used by the 16th-century poet Edmund Spenser, and in due course caught on generally.
=> aghast
gherkin: gherkin: [17] Etymologically, a gherkin may be a ‘little unripe one’. The word was borrowed from an assumed early Dutch *gurkkijn, a diminutive form of gurk, which probably came from Lithuanian agurkas. This in turn goes back via Polish ogurek to medieval Greek angoúrion, which has been linked with classical Greek ágouros ‘youth’.
ghetto: ghetto: [17] English acquired ghetto from Italian, but its precise history is uncertain. Among the suggestions are that it represents Italian getto ‘foundry’, from a Jewish enclave in Venice established on the site of a medieval foundry in 1516; that it is short for Italian borghetto, a diminutive form of borgo ‘settlement outside city walls’ (to which English borough is related); and that it was an alteration of Latin Aegyptus ‘Egypt’, presumably an allusion to the captivity of the Jews in Egypt.
ghost: ghost: [OE] In Old English times, ghost was simply a synonym for ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ (a sense preserved in Holy Ghost); it did not acquire its modern connotations of the ‘disembodied spirit of a dead person appearing among the living’ until the 14th century. However, since it has been traced back to Indo-European *ghois- or *gheis-, which also produced Old Norse geisa ‘rage’, Sanskrit hédas ‘anger’, and Gothic usgaisjan ‘terrify’, it could well be that its distant ancestor denoted as frightening concept as the modern English word does.

The Old English form of the word was gāst, which in Middle English became gost; the gh- spelling, probably inspired by Flemish gheest, first appeared at the end of the 15th century, and gradually established itself over the next hundred years.
=> poltergeist
GI: GI: [20] GI originated, around the beginning of the 20th century, as a US abbreviation of galvanized iron. It was soon in common use in the military, in contexts such as GI can, and the idea seems to have got about that it stood for not galvanized iron but government issue. This misconception propelled it into such combinations as GI shoe, GI soap and (facetiously) GI soldier. By the 1930s this had been shortened to simply GI, designating an enlisted man in the US Army.
giblets: giblets: [14] French gibier means ‘game’ – in the sense ‘hunted animals’ (it comes from Frankish *gabaiti ‘hunting with falcons’). In the Old French period this seems to have produced a diminutive form *giberet, literally ‘small game’, which, though never recorded, is assumed to have been the basis of Old French gibelet (l and r are very close phonetically, and each is easily substituted for the other). Gibelet is only known in the sense ‘game stew’, but it seems quite plausible that it could have originally meant ‘entrails of hunted animals’ (Walloon, the French dialect of southern Belgium, has giblè d’awe ‘goose giblets’).
giddy: giddy: [OE] Like enthusiastic, the etymological meaning of giddy is ‘possessed by a god’. Its distant ancestor was a prehistoric Germanic adjective *guthigaz, which was derived from *gutham ‘god’. This produced Old English gidig, which meant ‘insane’ or ‘stupid’. It was not until the 16th century that it acquired its main present-day meaning, ‘dizzy’.
=> god
gift: gift: [13] Prehistoric Germanic *geb-, the source from which English gets the verb give, produced the derivative *geftiz. This passed into Old English as gift, which, as far as is known, meant only ‘bride price’, and seems to have died out by the Middle English period. Modern English gift represents a borrowing of the related Old Norse gipt or gift. (Modern German, Swedish, and Danish gift and Dutch gif are used euphemistically for ‘poison’.)
=> give
gild: gild: see gold
gill: gill: English has three separate words gill. The oldest, gill ‘ravine’ [11], was borrowed from Old Norse gil, a word of unknown ancestry. Gill ‘fishes’ breathing organ’ [14] probably also comes from an Old Norse *gil, never actually recorded, but deduced from modern Swedish gäl and Danish gjælle ‘gill’. It may well go back to a prehistoric Indo-European source which also produced Greek kheilos ‘lip’. Gill ‘quarter of a pint’ [14] comes via Old French gille from medieval Latin gillo ‘water-pot’.
gillyflower: gillyflower: see clove
gilt: gilt: see gold
gimmick: gimmick: [20] Gimmick originally meant ‘dishonest contrivance’ – indeed, in the first known printed reference to it, in George Maine’s and Bruce Grant’s Wise-crack dictionary 1926 (an American publication), it is defined specifically as a ‘device for making a fair game crooked’. The modern sense ‘stratagem for gaining attention’ seems to have come to the fore in the 1940s. The origins of the word are a mystery, although it has been suggested that it began as gimac, an anagram of magic used by conjurers.
gin: gin: Gin ‘alcoholic drink’ [18] and gin ‘trap’ [13] are different words, but both originated as abbreviations. The latter comes from Old French engin (source of English engine), while the former is short for geneva. This now obsolete term for the spirit was borrowed via Dutch genever from Old French genevre, a derivative of Latin jūniperus ‘juniper’ (juniper being the chief flavouring agent of gin). English geneva was remodelled on the basis of the name of the Swiss city.
=> engine; juniper
ginger: ginger: [OE] Few foodstuffs can have been as exhaustively etymologized as ginger – Professor Alan Ross, for instance, begetter of the U/non-U distinction, wrote an entire 74-page monograph on the history of the word in 1952. And deservedly so, for its ancestry is extraordinarily complex. Its ultimate source was Sanskrit śrngavēram, a compound formed from śrngam ‘horn’ and vẽra- ‘body’; the term was applied to ‘ginger’ because of the shape of its edible root.

This passed via Prakrit singabēra and Greek ziggíberis into Latin as zinziberi. In postclassical times the Latin form developed to gingiber or gingiver, which Old English borrowed as gingifer. English reborrowed the word in the 13th century from Old French gingivre, which combined with the descendant of the Old English form to produce Middle English gingivere – whence modern English ginger.

Its verbal use, as in ‘ginger up’, appears to come from the practice of putting a piece of ginger into a lazy horse’s anus to make it buck its ideas up.
gingerbread: gingerbread: [13] The idea that gingerbread does not much resemble bread is entirely justified by the word’s history. For originally it was gingebras (a borrowing from Old French), and it meant ‘preserved ginger’. By the mid-14th century, by the process known as folk etymology (the substitution of a more for a less familiar form), -bread had begun to replace -bras, and it was only a matter of time (the early 15th century, apparently) before sense followed form. The expression ‘take the gilt off the gingerbread’ (not recorded before the late 19th century) comes from the fact that formerly gingerbread was often decorated with gold leaf.
gingerly: gingerly: see general
gipsy: gipsy: [16] In the 16th century, it was widely thought that the Romany people originated in Egypt. They were therefore called gipcyans or gipsens, which was simply an alteration of Egyptian. The modern form of the word developed in the 17th century (perhaps influenced by Latin Aegyptius). In American English the spelling gypsy is generally preferred. (Spanish gitano ‘gipsy’, incidentally, has a similar origin.)
=> egyptian