英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

globe [globe 词源字典]: globe: [16] Globe comes from Latin globus, probably via Old French globe. Globus was related to glēba ‘lump of earth’ (source of English glebe [14]), and may denote etymologically ‘something rolled up into a ball’.
=> glebe[globe etymology, globe origin, 英语词源]
glory: glory: [13] Latin glōria had two separate descendants in Old French: glore, which produced modern French gloire, and glorie, which English took over via Anglo-Norman. The source of the Latin word, which is also the ancestor of Italian and Spanish gloria and Irish Gaelic glōir, is not known. The now obsolete English sense ‘pride’, inherited from Latin, is preserved in vainglorious [15].
gloss: gloss: English has two words gloss. The one meaning ‘shining surface’ [16] is of unknown origin, although no doubt it belongs ultimately to the general nexus of words beginning gl- which mean broadly ‘bright, shining’. Forms such as Icelandic glossi ‘spark’ and Swedish dialect glossa ‘glow’ suggest a Scandinavian origin. Gloss ‘explanation, definition’ [16] goes back to Greek glossa ‘tongue’, source also of English epiglottis [17].

This developed the secondary sense ‘language’ (as English tongue itself has done), and was borrowed by Latin as glōssa meaning ‘foreign word needing an explanation’, and eventually the ‘explanation’ itself. It passed into English via medieval Latin glōsa and Old French glose as gloze in the 14th century, and was reformulated as gloss on the basis of classical Latin glōssa in the 16th century. Glossary [14] comes from the Latin derivative glossārium.
=> epiglottis, glossary
glove: glove: [OE] Not surprisingly, most words for ‘glove’ in European languages are related in some way to words for ‘hand’; German handschuh and Dutch handschoen, for example, mean literally ‘handshoe’; Greek kheirís was derived from kheíris ‘hand’; and Romanian manusa was based on Latin manus ‘hand’. And glove appears to be no exception; it probably goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *galōfō, in which *ga- was a collective prefix and lōfō meant ‘hand’ (Swedish dialect loof ‘palm of the hand’ comes from it).
glow: glow: [OE] Glow comes ultimately from Indo- European *ghlō-, in which the ghl- seems originally to have had some sort of symbolic function, as if directly representing the notion of ‘brightness, shining’ in speech. Its Germanic descendant *glō- produced German glühen, Dutch gloeien, and Swedish glöda (all meaning ‘glow’) as well as English glow and probably also glower [16].
=> glower
glucose: glucose: see glycerine
glue: glue: [14] Glue is an ancient word, whose ancestry can be traced back all the way to Indo- European *gloi-, *glei-, *gli- ‘stick’. Its Latin descendant was glūten, from which English gets gluten [16], glutinous [16], and agglutinate [16]. In post-classical times this spawned a new form, glūs, which English acquired via Old French glu as glue.
=> agglutinate, gluten, glutinous
glutton: glutton: [13] Indo-European *gel- produced a wide range of descendants in the general semantic area ‘swallow’, among them Latin gula ‘throat’ and its offspring French gueule ‘mouth’ and English gullet; German kehle ‘throat’; and Latin gluttīre ‘swallow’, which was probably the ultimate source of English glut [14]. Another was Latin gluttō ‘overeater’, which English acquired via Old French gluton.
=> glut, gullet
glycerine: glycerine: [19] Greek glukús meant ‘sweet’ (its derivative gleukos ‘sweet thing’ is the ancestor of English glucose [19]). It had a variant glukerōs, which the French chemist Michel- Eugène Chevreul took as the basis of a name of a recently discovered syrupy liquid obtained from fats or oils – glycerin (adopted by English as glycerine or glycerin).
=> glucose
gnarled: gnarled: [17] Gnarled is essentially a 19thcentury word. It is recorded once before then, in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure 1603 (‘Thy sharp and sulphurous bolt splits the unwedgable and gnarled oak’), but its modern currency is due to its adoption by early 19th-century romantic writers. It is probably a variant of knurled [17], itself a derivative of knur or knor ‘rough misshapen lump, as on a tree trunk’ [14], which is related to German knorren ‘knot, gnarled branch or trunk’.
=> knurled
gnome: gnome: [18] Gnome comes via French from Latin gnomus, a word coined by the 16thcentury Swiss physician Paracelsus for a type of being that lives in the earth, in the same way that fish live in water. It seems to have been a pure invention on his part, and is not based on or related to Greek gnómē ‘opinion, judgment’ (source of English gnomic [19] and connected with agnostic, diagnosis, and know). The term gnomes of Zürich for ‘Swiss financiers’ is first recorded in the early 1960s.
go: go: [OE] Go is an ancient verb, traceable back to a prehistoric Indo-European base *ghēi- or *ghē-. This seems to have been relatively unproductive outside the Germanic languages (Sanskrit hā-, hī- ‘leave’ and Greek kikhánō ‘reach’ may be descendants of it), but it has provided the basic word for ‘move along, proceed’ in all the Germanic languages, including German gehen, Dutch gaan, Swedish gā, Danish gaa, and English go. In Old and Middle English its past tense was ēode, later yode, a word of uncertain origin, but from about 1500 this was replaced by went, originally the past tense of wend.
goad: goad: [OE] Goad comes via prehistoric Germanic *gaidō from an Indo-European base *ghai-. This also produced an Old English word for ‘spear’, gār, which survives today in garlic [OE], etymologically ‘spear leek’.
=> garlic
goal: goal: [16] The earliest examples of what can confidently be identified as the word goal come from the first half of the 16th century, when it was used for both the ‘finishing line of a race’ and the ‘posts through which the ball is sent in football’. Before that we are in the realm of speculation. A 14th-century text from Kent has the word gol ‘boundary’, which could quite plausibly be the ancestor of the 16th-century goal, and gol suggest an Old English *gāl.

No such word has come down to us, but the Old English verb gǣlan ‘hinder’, which looks as though it could have been related to a noun *gāl, indicates that if it existed it might have meant ‘obstacle, barrier’ (which would lead on quite logically through ‘boundary’ and ‘finishing line’ to ‘something to be aimed at’).
goat: goat: [OE] Old English had no all-purpose word for ‘goat’; the male goat was a bucca (‘buck’) and the female goat was a gāt. In early Middle English, goat began to encroach on the semantic territory of buck, and by the 14th century it had come to be the dominant form for both sexes, as is shown by the emergence around that time of the distinguishing terms she-goat and he-goat (nanny-goat and billy-goat are much later – 18th-century and 19th-century respectively). Goat itself comes via prehistoric Germanic *gaitaz (source of German geiss, Dutch geit, Swedish get, and Danish ged) from Indo- European *ghaidos.

This may be related to Lithuanian zaidziu ‘play’, and if so, the goat could be etymologically the ‘animal that jumps about’ (semantic development in the opposite direction has given English caper from Latin caper ‘goat’).
gobbledegook: gobbledegook: [20] This word for pretentious or obfuscatory verbiage was the invention, in the 1940s, of Maury Maverick, Texan lawyer, chairman of the US Smaller War Plants Corporation and a descendant of the Samuel A. Maverick who gave English the word maverick. His explanation of its genesis, that it was probably suggested by ‘the old bearded turkey gobbler back in Texas, who was always gobbledy-gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity’, stikes a disingenuous note in the light of the previously existing US slang phrase gobble the goo, meaning ‘perform fellatio’.
goblin: goblin: [14] Goblin probably came via Anglo- Norman from medieval Latin gobelīnus, which was reported by the 12th-century English chronicler Ordericus Vitalis as haunting the area around Évreux in northwestern France. It is thought that this could have been based on German kobold ‘goblin’, source of English cobalt.
=> cobalt
god: god: [OE] Similar in form though it may be, and appropriate as the semantic connection would be, god is not etymologically related to good. It probably comes from an Indo-European *ghut-. This may be related to Sanskrit havate and Old Church Slavonic zovetu, both meaning ‘call’, and if so the underlying etymological meaning of god would be ‘that which is invoked’. The English word’s immediate ancestor was prehistoric Germanic *guth-, which also produced German gott, Dutch god, and Swedish and Danish gud.
goffer: goffer: see wafer
gold: gold: [OE] Gold gets its name from its colour. The perception of what this is has varied. In the ancient Germanic languages, red was often used as a poetic epithet for ‘gold’, and in English this survives into the present day as an archaism. And Latin aurum ‘gold’, source of French or and Italian and Spanish oro, is probably related to words for ‘dawn’ (such as Latin aurora), the inspiration in both cases being ‘redness’.

The word gold, however, depends on the metal’s yellowness. It goes back to Indo-European *ghel-, source of English yellow. From this was formed *ghltom ‘gold’, which was the ancestor of Russian zoloto ‘gold’, Polish złoto (whence złoty ‘golden’, used as the name of a Polish coin), Sanskrit hiranya- ‘gold’, and the various Germanic words for ‘gold’: English and German gold, Dutch goud, and Swedish and Danish guld. Golden [13] is a Middle English derivative of gold, replacing the earlier gilden, which came from Old English gylden.

Of related forms in other Germanic languages, Dutch gulden is the source of the former coin-name guilder [15]. The verb gild, from Old English gyldan, retains its original vowel; gilt [14] began life as its past participle.
=> gall, gild, gilt, guilder, yellow