英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

govern [govern 词源字典]: govern: [13] Politicians’ clichés about ‘steering the ship of state’ are no new thing; for the distant ancestor of English govern is the Greek verb kubernan ‘steer a ship’ (source also of English cybernetics). It developed the metaphorical sense ‘guide, rule’, and it was this that passed with it via Latin gubernāre and Old French governer into English. The Latin form is preserved in gubernatorial ‘of a governor’ [18].
=> cybernetics, gubernatorial[govern etymology, govern origin, 英语词源]
grab: grab: [16] Grab is a Germanic word. It was probably borrowed from Middle Dutch or Middle Low German grabben. These were descendants of a prehistoric Germanic *grab-, which could well have been related to the *graip-, *grip- which produced grip, gripe, and grope.
=> grip, gripe, grope
grace: grace: [12] Latin grātus meant ‘pleasing’. Its most obvious English descendants are grateful, gratify, gratuity, etc, but it is also responsible for grace (not to mention the even better disguised agree). Its derived noun grātia ‘pleasure, favour, thanks’ passed into English via Old French grace. Gracious [13] comes ultimately from Latin grātiōsus; grateful [15] is an English formation. (The apparently similar gracile ‘slender’ [17], incidentally, is not etymologically related; it comes from Latin gracilis ‘slender’.)
=> agree, grateful
gradual: gradual: [16] Latin grādus ‘step’ has been a remarkably prolific source of English words. Beside grade [16] itself, it has contributed the derivatives gradation [16], gradient [19], gradual (from medieval Latin graduālis, literally ‘proceeding by steps’), graduate [15], and retrograde [14]. The derived verb gradī ‘walk, go’ has produced ingredient, and its past participial stem gress- has given, among others, aggression, congress, digress [16], progress [15], and transgress [16].

And degrade and degree are of the same parentage, the latter filtered through Old French. The origins of Latin grādus itself are not known.
=> aggression, congress, degrade, degree, digress, grade, gradient, ingredient, progress, transgress
graffiti: graffiti: [19] Although it denotes ‘writing’, graffiti has no etymological connection with Greek gráphein, source of English graphic. It comes from the plural of Italian graffito, a diminutive form of the noun graffio ‘scratching’. This was derived from the verb graffiare ‘scratch’, itself originally formed from graffio ‘hook’.
graft: graft: [15] Graft, in its original sense ‘plant part inserted into a living plant’ (the application to skin and other animal tissue is a late 19thcentury development), came from its resemblance in shape to a pencil. Greek graphíon meant ‘writing implement, stylus’ (it was a derivative of the verb gráphein ‘write’, source of English graphic). It passed via Latin graphium into Old French as grafe, gradually changing in its precise application with the advance of writing technology.

By the time it reached Old French it denoted a ‘pencil’, and it was then that the resemblance to two artificially united plant stems was noted and the metaphor born. English took the word over as graff in the late 14th century (it actually survived in that form into the 19th century), and within a hundred years had added a -t to the end to give modern English graft. Graft ‘corruption’, first recorded in mid 19th-century America, may be the same word, perhaps derived from the notion of a graft as an ‘insertion’, hence ‘something extra, on the side’. Graft ‘hard work’ [19], on the other hand, is probably a different word, perhaps based on the English dialect verb graft ‘dig’, an alteration of grave ‘dig’.
=> graphic
grain: grain: [13] Grain comes via Old French from Latin grānum ‘seed’. Its prehistoric Indo- European ancestor was *grnóm, literally ‘worndown particle’, which also produced English corn, and it has given English a remarkably wide range of related forms: not just obvious derivatives like granary [16], granule [17], and ingrained [16], but also garner [12] (originally a noun derived from Latin grānārium ‘granary’), gram ‘chick-pea’ [18] (from the Portuguese descendant of grānum, now mainly encountered in ‘gram flour’), grange, granite, gravy, grenade, and the second halves of filigree and pomegranate.
=> filigree, garner, granary, granite, gravy, grenade, ingrained, pomegranate
gram: gram: [18] Gram, or gramme as it is sometimes spelled, was borrowed at the end of the 18th century from French gramme, the term adopted in 1799 as the basic unit of weight in the metric system. The word itself goes back via late Latin gramma ‘small unit’ to Greek grámma (source of English grammar), which originally meant ‘letter of the alphabet’ but later came to be used for ‘small weight’.
=> grammar
grammar: grammar: [14] Etymologically, grammar is the ‘art of letters’. The word comes via Anglo- Norman gramere, Old French gramaire, and Latin grammatica from Greek grammatiké, a noun use of the adjective grammatikós ‘of letters’ (whence English grammatical [16]). This was a derivative of the noun grámma ‘something written’, hence ‘letter of the alphabet’, which was related to the verb gráphein ‘write’ (source of English graphic) and also gave English gram and the suffix -gram that appears in a wide range of English words, from anagram and diagram to telegram and kissagram.
=> glamour, gram, graphic
gramophone: gramophone: [19] The term gramophone was registered as a trademark in 1887 by the German-born American inventor Emil Berliner for a sound recording and reproducing device he had developed using a disc (as opposed to the cylinder of Edison’s phonograph). He coined it simply by reversing the elements of phonogram, a term adopted for a ‘sound recording’ in the early 1880s and composed of descendants of Greek phōné ‘voice, sound’ and grámma ‘something written’. It seems to have begun to give way to record player in the mid 1950s.
granary: granary: see grain
grand: grand: [16] The original Latin word for ‘big’ was magnus (as in magnify, magnitude, etc). However, it also had grandis. This not only denoted great physical size; it also had connotations of moral greatness or sublimity, and in addition often carried the specialized meaning ‘full-grown’. This last, together with a possibly etymologically connected Greek brénthos ‘pride’ and Old Church Slavonic gradi ‘breast’ suggest that its underlying meaning may be ‘swelling’.

French (grand) and Italian and Spanish (grande) have taken it over as their main adjective for ‘big’, but in English it remains a more specialized word, for things or people that are ‘great’ or ‘imposing’. Its use for denoting family relationships separated by two generations, as in grandmother, was adopted from Old French, and goes back, in the case of grandame and grandsire, to the 13th century, well before the independent adjective grand itself was borrowed.

But the underlying notion is as old as the Greeks and Romans, who used mégas and magnus in the same way.
grand prix: grand prix: see prize
grange: grange: [13] Originally, a grange was ‘somewhere for storing grain’, a ‘barn’. The word comes via Old French grange from medieval Latin grānica, a noun use of an unrecorded adjective *grānicus ‘of grain’, which was derived from grānum ‘grain, seed’ (source of English grain). Of its present-day meanings, ‘farm-house’ developed in the 14th century, ‘country house’ in the 16th century.
=> grain
granite: granite: [17] Etymologically, granite is ‘grainy or granular rock’. The word was borrowed from Italian granito, a derivative of grano ‘grain’ (which is related to English grain). (English acquired the Italian feminine form granita in the 19th century as a term for a granular form of water ice.)
=> grain
grant: grant: [13] To grant something etymologically implies an element of ‘belief’ or ‘trust’, although there is virtually no semantic trace of these left in the word today. Its ultimate source was crēdens, the present participle of Latin crēdere ‘believe’ (source of English credence, credible, etc). This was used as the basis of a new Vulgar Latin verb *crēdentāre, which passed into Old French as creanter ‘insure, guarantee’. Its later variant greanter or granter gave English grant.
=> credence, credible, credit
grape: grape: [13] Not surprisingly, given the northerliness of the British Isles, English does not have its own native word for ‘grape’. In Old English it was was called wīnberige, literally ‘wineberry’, and the Old French word grape which Middle English borrowed as grape meant ‘bunch of grapes’, not ‘grape’. It was probably a derivative of the verb graper ‘gather grapes’, which itself was based on the noun grape ‘hook’ (a relative of English cramp, crampon, and grapnel [14]).

The underlying notion is of a bunch of grapes being gathered with a sort of pruning hook. (The use of a word that originally meant ‘bunch’ for ‘grape’ is in fact fairly common: Czech hrozen, Romanian stugure, German traube, and Lithuanian keke all follow the same pattern, as does French raisin, source of English raisin.)
=> cramp, crampon, grapnel
graphic: graphic: [17] The profoundest influence that Greek gráphein ‘write’ has had on English has no doubt been through its combining form -graphos, which has provided us with a whole host of words, both original Greek formations and new English ones, from autograph to telegraph. But descendants in their own right include graphic (which came via Latin graphicus from the Greek derivative graphikós), graphite [18] (originally coined in German as graphit, from its being used in writing implements), and graph [19] (short for graphic formular, a term used in chemistry for a diagram representing in lines the relationship between elements).

Greek gráphein itself originally meant ‘scratch’ (it is etymologically related to English carve); it was applied to early methods of writing, by scratching on clay tablets with a stylus, and kept its job when writing technology moved on.
=> carve, graft, graph, graphite
grapnel: grapnel: see grape
grass: grass: [OE] Reflecting its status as the commonest and most obvious of plants (and, for agricultural communities, the most important), grass etymologically simply means ‘that which grows’. It comes from *grō-, *gra-, the prehistoric Germanic base which also produced grow (and green). This gave the noun *grasam, from which German and Dutch get gras, Swedish gräs, and English grass.
=> graze, green, grow