英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

golliwog [golliwog 词源字典]: golliwog: [19] It was Florence Upton (1873– 1922), an American-born illustrator and writer of children’s books, who dreamed up the blackfaced male doll we now know as the golliwog. It first appeared in the story The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls – and a ‘Golliwog’ 1895, with verses by Florence’s mother Bertha. The inspiration for the word may have been golly [19], a euphemism for God, and polliwog, an American term for a ‘tadpole’ (which came from Middle English polwygle, a compound of pol ‘head’ and the verb wiglen ‘wiggle’). The offensive wog [20] for ‘black person’ is probably short for golliwog.
[golliwog etymology, golliwog origin, 英语词源]
gondola: gondola: [16] The gondola, the narrow boat used on Venetian canals, gets its name from the way it rocks gently in the water. Italian gondola is an adaptation of gondolà, a word meaning ‘roll, rock’ in the Rhaeto-Romanic dialect of Friuli, in northeastern Italy (Rhaeto-Romanic is a cover term for a group of Romance-language dialects spoken in southern Switzerland, northern Italy, and the Tyrol). Gondola was first applied to the cabin suspended from an airship or balloon in the 1890s (probably as a translation of German gondel).
gonorrhoea: gonorrhoea: see general
good: good: [OE] Good is such a general, all-embracing word for anything regarded in a positive light that it perhaps comes as something of a surprise that it is not an ancient primary term distributed throughout the Indo-European languages. It is a strictly Germanic word (German has gut, Dutch goed, and Swedish and Danish god), and it goes back to prehistoric Germanic *gath- ‘bring together’ (source of English gather and together); the progression of senses appears to be ‘brought together, united’, ‘fitting, suitable’, ‘pleasing’, and ‘good’. See also BEST.
=> gather, together
good-bye: good-bye: [16] The good of good-bye was originally God. The expression is a contraction of God be with you, a form of farewell first recorded in the late 16th century. Its gradual reduction can be traced through a series of metamorphoses (Shakespeare, for instance, had God be wy you and God buy’ ye), and it did not reach modern good-bye until the 18th century. The substitution of good for God seems to have been mainly due to the influence of such phrases as good day and good night.
=> god
googol: googol: [20] There are comparatively few ‘new’ words in the English language – that is, words which have not been made up from combinations of old words, or borrowed from other languages, but have sprung up as entirely new growths – but this is one of them. When in the 1930s the American mathematician Dr Edward Kasner was trying to think of a name for an unimaginably large number, ten to the power of a hundred, he asked his nine-year-old nephew Milton Serotta for a suggestion, and googol was what he got. It has never really caught on in technical use, although it has spawned a compound of its own – the googolplex, ten to the power of a googol.
goon: goon: [20] The antecedents of goon are murky. It may have been inspired by goony ‘simpleton’, which is first recorded in the 1890s and which may well be the same word as the much earlier gony with the same meaning, which in turn goes right back to the 16th century and could be related to Scottish gonyel ‘fool’. An ultimate connection with the obsolete verb gane ‘yawn’ has been suggested, but all we know for certain about goon itself is that it was introduced to the English language at large in America in 1921 by Frederick Lewis Allen, writing in Harper’s Magazine.

He claimed that it had been in use in his family for some years, with the meaning ‘stolid person’, but he had no suggestions to offer as to its origins. It then disappears from the record until the 1930s, when its resurrection seems to have been set in train by ‘Alice the Goon’, a slow-witted, muscular character in the comic strip ‘Thimble Theater, featuring Popeye’ by E.C. Segar, which first came out in 1933 (it is not clear whether Segar knew about the earlier, 1920s usage).

Taken up enthusiastically in student slang, by the end of the decade goon was firmly established in the senses ‘fool’ and ‘thug, strong-arm man’. During World War II it was applied by Allied prisoners of war to their German guards, and it has often been suggested that that was the inspiration for the goon of The Goon Show (originally Crazy People), the popular BBC radio comedy programme of the 1950s.

Its creator, Spike Milligan, denied this, and said that he got the idea from the ‘Goon’ of the Popeye cartoons. Either way, it is the show’s particular brand of comical surreality that colours today’s meaning of the word.
goose: goose: [OE] Goose has relatives throughout the Indo-European languages: Latin ānser, Greek khén, Sanskrit hansás, Russian gus’, Czech husa, German and Dutch gans, and Swedish gåas (not to mention Irish Gaelic gēis ‘swan’) all go back to a prehistoric Indo-European *ghans-, which probably originated as an imitation of the honking of geese. (The only major exceptions to this cosy family are French ole and Italian and Spanish oca, which come from Latin avicula ‘little bird’.) A Germanic extension of the base was *ganit- or *ganot-, which produced not only English gander ‘male goose’ but also gannet. Gosling [15] was borrowed from the Old Norse diminutive gáeslingr, literally ‘little goose’; and goshawk [OE] is a compound of goose and hawk.

The verb goose ‘jab between the buttocks’, first recorded in the 1870s, may come from a supposed resemblance between the upturned thumb with which such jabbing may be done and the neck of a goose.
=> gooseberry, goshawk
gooseberry: gooseberry: [16] Probably, when all is said and done, gooseberry is simply a compound of goose and berry. But no one has ever been able to explain satisfactorily why the gooseberry should have been named after the goose, and there has been no lack of alternative etymological suggestions for the word – notably that goose is an alteration of an old dialect word for the ‘gooseberry’, such as groser or gozell, borrowed ultimately from French groseille ‘gooseberry’.

The quaint alteration goosegog dates from at least the early 19th century. Play gooseberry ‘be an uncomfortably superfluous third person with two lovers’ also goes back to the early 19th century, and may have originated in the notion of a chaperone (ostensibly) occupying herself with picking gooseberries while the couple being chaperoned did what they were doing (gooseberry-picker was an early 19th-century term for a ‘chaperone’).
gore: gore: English has three separate words gore, two of them perhaps ultimately related. Gore ‘blood’ [OE] originally meant ‘dung, shit’, or more generally ‘filth, dirt, slime’, and related words in other languages, such as Dutch goor ‘mud, filth’, Old Norse gor ‘slime’, and Welsh gôr ‘pus’, round out a semantic picture of ‘unpleasant semi-liquid material’, with frequent specific application to ‘bodily excretions’.

It was from this background that the sense ‘blood’, and particularly ‘coagulated blood’, emerged in the mid-16th century. Gore ‘triangular piece of cloth, as let into a skirt’ [OE] comes from Old English gāra ‘triangular piece of land’ (a sense preserved in the London street-name Kensington Gore). This was related to Old English gār ‘spear’ (as in garlic; see GOAD), the semantic connection being that a spearhead is roughly triangular. Gore ‘wound with horns’ [14] originally meant simply ‘stab, pierce’; it too may come ultimately from gār ‘spear’, although there is some doubt about this.
=> garlic
gorge: gorge: [14] Gorge originally meant ‘throat’; the metaphorical extension to ‘rocky ravine’ did not really take place until the mid 18th century (the semantic connection was presumably ‘narrow opening between which things pass’). The word was borrowed from Old French gorge ‘throat’, which goes back via Vulgar Latin *gurga to Latin gurges ‘whirlpool’ from which English gets regurgitate [17]. The superficially similar gorgeous [15], incidentally, is not related. It was adapted from Old French gorgias ‘fine, elegant’, but no one knows where that came from.
=> regurgitate
gorilla: gorilla: [19] The first we hear of gorilla is as a word used in a Greek translation of the 5thcentury BC Carthaginian explorer Hanno’s account of a voyage to West Africa. He reported encountering there a tribe of wild hairy people, whose females were, according to a local interpreter, called goríllas. In 1847 the American missionary and scientist Thomas Savage adopted the word as the species name of the great ape Troglodytes gorilla, and by the 1850s it had passed into general use.
gorse: gorse: [OE] Gorse appears to mean etymologically ‘prickly bush’. It has been traced back to an Indo-European source *ghrzddenoting ‘roughness’ or ‘prickliness’, which also produced German gerste ‘barley’. Of the plant’s other names, furze [OE] is of unknown origin, while whin [11] was probably borrowed from a Scandinavian language.
goshawk: goshawk: see goose
gosling: gosling: see goose
gospel: gospel: [OE] Etymologically, gospel is ‘good news’. It was coined in Old English as gōdspel, a compound of gōd ‘good’ and spel ‘discourse, tidings, news’ (the same word as the modern English magic spell), which was a direct translation of Latin bona annuntiatio. This in turn was a literal interpretation or gloss of ecclesiastical Latin evangelium (whence English evangelist) and its source, Greek euaggélion, which originally meant ‘reward for bringing good news’, but in its later sense ‘good news’ tout court was applied to any of the four accounts of Christ’s life written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
=> good
gossamer: gossamer: [14] It would be pleasant to think that gossamer, originally ‘fine cobwebs’, is a descendant of an earlier goose-summer, but unfortunately there is not enough evidence to make this more than a conjecture. The theory goes as follows: mid-autumn is a time when geese for the table are plentiful (November was once known as gänsemonat ‘geese-month’ in German), and so a warm period around then might have been termed goose-summer (we now call it an Indian summer); the silken filaments of gossamer are most commonly observed floating in the air on such warm autumnal days; and so the spiders’ webs were christened with the name of the season.
gossip: gossip: [OE] The Anglo-Saxons’ term for a ‘godparent’ was godsibb, a compound formed from god ‘god’ (just as in modern English godmother, godfather, etc) and sib ‘relative’ (a word of unknown origin from which modern English gets sibling). It denotes one’s ‘relative in God’, one’s ‘spiritual relative’. By Middle English times, however, it had come down in the world somewhat, to mean simply ‘close friend’, and by the 16th century it was being used for ‘one who indulges in idle talk’. The modern sense ‘idle talk’ developed from the verb in the 19th century.
=> god, sibling
gouge: gouge: [15] Gouge may be of Celtic origin – a resemblance to forms such as Welsh gylf ‘beak’ and Cornish gilb ‘borer’ has been noted. But its earliest positively identifiable ancestor is late Latin gubia, whose Old French descendant gouge was borrowed by English.
gout: gout: [13] Latin gutta meant literally ‘drop’ (the spelling of gutta in English gutta percha [19] shows its influence, although in fact the term originated in Malay getah percha ‘gum tree’). It was applied metaphorically to various diseases ascribed to the precipitation of fluids from one part of the body to another, among them pain in the joints which was supposed to be caused by poisonous material deposited from the blood (not far wide of the mark, for the condition now known as gout is due to the accumulation of uricacid products in the joints). English acquired the word via Old French goute.
=> gutter