英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

hamlet [hamlet 词源字典]: hamlet: [14] Hamlet is a double diminutive: etymologically it means ‘little little village’. It comes from Old French hamelet, a diminutive form of hamel, which was itself a diminutive of ham ‘village’. This was borrowed from a Germanic word related to English home, and to the -ham in many English place-names.
=> home[hamlet etymology, hamlet origin, 英语词源]
hammer: hammer: [OE] Hammer is part of a widespread Germanic word-family, including also German and Danish hammer, Dutch hamer, and Swedish hammar. The ancestor of the Scandinavian forms, Old Norse hamarr, meant ‘stone crag’ as well as ‘hammer’. This and possible connections with the standard words for ‘stone, rock’ in the Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavonic language groups (such as Sanskrit açman and Russian kamen’) suggest that hammer originally denoted some sort of tool with a stone head.
hammock: hammock: [16] Hammock is a product of early European explorations in the New World. When Spanish crews first sailed into the Caribbean, they encountered a word in the Taino language of the Arawakan people for a hanging bed suspended between two trees. They adopted it into Spanish as hamaca, which English borrowed as hamaca or ‘Englished’ as hammaker (hammock is a 17th-century alteration).
hamster: hamster: [17] The hamster is a native of western Asia and southeastern Europe, and its English name is of Slavic origin. In Old Slavic it was called chomestoru, and it appears that at some point in the past an ancestor of this was borrowed into Germanic. Old High German had hamustro, which became modern German hamster, source of the English word. In the 18th century the animal was also called the German rat.
hand: hand: [OE] Hand is a widespread Germanic word (German, Dutch, and Swedish also have it), but it has no relatives outside Germanic, and no one is too sure where it comes from. Perhaps the likeliest explanation is that it is related to Gothic frahinthan ‘seize, pursue’, Swedish hinna ‘reach’, and English hunt, and that is underlying meaning is ‘body part used for seizing’. The derived adjective handsome [15] originally meant simply ‘easy to handle’. The modern sense ‘attractive’ did not develop until the late 16th century.
=> handsome, hunt
handicap: handicap: [17] The word handicap originally denoted a sort of game of chance in which one person put up one of his or her personal possessions against an article belonging to someone else (for example one might match a gold watch against the other’s horse) and an umpire was appointed to adjudicate on the respective values of the articles. All three parties put their hands into a hat, together with a wager, and on hearing the umpire’s verdict the two opponents had to withdraw them in such a way as to indicate whether they wished to proceed with the game.

If they agreed, either in favour of proceeding or against, the umpire took the money; but if they disagreed, the one who wanted to proceed took it. It was the concealing of the hands in the hat that gave the game its name hand in cap, hand i’ cap, source of modern English handicap. In the 18th century the same term was applied to a sort of horse race between two horses, in which an umpire decided on a weight disadvantage to be imposed on a superior horse and again the owners of the horses signalled their assent to or dissent from his adjudication by the way in which they withdrew their hands from a hat.

Such a race became known as a handicap race, and in the 19th century the term handicap first broadened out to any contest in which inequalities are artificially evened out, and was eventually transferred to the ‘disadvantage’ imposed on superior contestants – whence the main modern meaning, ‘disadvantage, disability’.
handkerchief: handkerchief: [16] Handkerchief is a compound formed from hand and the now obsolete kerchief ‘cloth for covering the head’ [13] (what in modern English would be called a head-scarf). This was acquired via Anglo-Norman courchef from Old French couvrechef, a compound of couvrir ‘cover’ and chief ‘head’. The colloquial abbreviation hanky is first recorded in the 1890s.
=> chef, chief, cover, hand, kerchief
handle: handle: [OE] Etymologically, a handle is nothing more or less than ‘something to be held in the hand’. Likewise the verb handle, together with Germanic relatives like German handeln and Swedish handla, began life as ‘hold, touch, feel with the hands’ (the German and Swedish verbs have since lost this original literal meaning, and now have only the metaphorical senses ‘deal with’, ‘trade’, etc).
=> hand
handsome: handsome: see hand
hang: hang: [OE] Hang is a general Germanic verb, represented also in German and Dutch hangen and Swedish hānga. These point back to a prehistoric Germanic *khang-, which some have linked with the Latin verb cunctārī ‘deal’. Hanker [17] (which originally meant ‘loiter, hang about’) probably comes ultimately from the same source, as does hinge; but hangar ‘structure housing aircraft’ [19] does not – it goes back via French hangar to medieval Latin angarium ‘shed in which horses are shod’.
=> hanker, hinge
hank: hank: see hook
hansom: hansom: [19] The hansom cab, the taxi of the second half of the 19th century, was the brainchild of James Aloysius Hansom (1803– 82), an architect, whose other main claim to fame is that he designed Birmingham town hall. In 1834 he took out a patent for a Safety Cab, which included many features incorporated into the hansom cab when it came into general use in the late 1840s. In the 1890s the word was used as a verb: ‘To think that I … a raging Democrat, should be hansoming it to and fro between my Ladies and Honourables’, Sabine Baring-Gould Armine 1890.
happen: happen: [14] Surprisingly for such a common verb, happen is a comparatively recent addition to the English language. Old English had a number of verbs denoting ‘occurrence’, all long since defunct, including gelimpan and gescēon, and in the 13th century befall began to be used for ‘happen’, but the first signs we see of the coming of happen are when English acquired the noun hap ‘chance, luck’ in the 13th century.

It was borrowed from Old Norse happ, a word of uncertain ancestry but probably related to Old Slavic kobu ‘fate’ and Old Irish cob ‘victory’, and represented in Old English by gehæp ‘fit’. In the 14th century it began to be used as a verb meaning ‘happen by chance’, and hence simply ‘happen’, and before the century was very old it had been extended with the verbal suffix -en to happen.
=> happy, perhaps
happy: happy: [14] The Old and Middle English word for ‘happy’ was what in modern English has become silly. This began to change its meaning around the 15th century, and obviously an opportunity began to open up for an adjective expressing ‘contentment’ (as opposed to positive ‘joy’, denoted then by glad, fain, and joyful). The gap was partly filled by a weakening in the meaning of glad, but waiting in the wings was happy, a derivative of the noun hap ‘chance, luck’ (source of happen), which when it was coined in the 14th century meant ‘lucky, fortunate, prosperous’.

The main modern sense ‘highly pleased or contented’ developed in the early 16th century.
=> happen
hara-kiri: hara-kiri: [19] Hara-kiri is a Japanese form of ritual suicide, now little practised, involving disembowelment. The term, which means literally ‘belly-cutting’, is a relatively colloquial one in Japanese; the more dignified expression is seppuku, literally ‘cut open the stomach’.
harangue: harangue: [15] The original notion underlying harangue may have been of a large group of people crowded round, with the idea of ‘addressing’ them only developing later. The word comes via Old French harangue from medieval Latin harenga, and it has been speculated that this was perhaps acquired from a prehistoric Germanic *kharikhring- ‘assembly’, a compound of *kharjaz ‘crowd’ (source of English harbinger, harbour, harry, and herald and related to harness) and *khringaz ‘ring’.
=> harbinger, harbour, harness, harry, herald
harbinger: harbinger: [12] Originally, a harbinger was simply someone who provided ‘harbour’ – that is, ‘shelter, lodging’. The word began life as a derivative of Old French herberge ‘lodging’, a borrowing from heriberga, the Old Saxon equivalent of Old English herebeorg (whence modern English harbour). English acquired it as herbergere, and the n did not put in an appearance until the 15th century (it was quite a common phenomenon, seen also in messenger and passenger).

As for its meaning, it developed in the 14th century to ‘someone sent on ahead to arrange for lodging for an army, an official royal party, etc’, and from this came the present-day figurative sense ‘forerunner’.
=> harbour
harbour: harbour: [OE] Etymologically, a harbour is a ‘shelter for a crowd of people’. English acquired it in the late Anglo-Saxon period as herebeorg, perhaps borrowed from Old Norse herbergi, but it began life as a compound of prehistoric Germanic *kharjaz, originally ‘crowd’, later specifically ‘army’ (source also of English harry and related to harness) and *berg- ‘protect’ (which occurs in a range of English words, including barrow ‘mound’, borough, borrow, and bury).

The original sense ‘shelter for a crowd or army’ had broadened out by historic times to the more general ‘shelter, lodging’. That is what Old English herebeorg meant, and gradually it underwent further semantic development, via ‘place in which shelter can be obtained’, to (as recently as the 16th century) ‘place of shelter for ships, port’.
=> barrow, borough, borrow, bury, harbinger, harness, harry, herald
hard: hard: [OE] Hard comes ultimately from a prehistoric Indo-European *krátus, which denoted ‘power, strength’. This original meaning was carried over into Greek krátos ‘strength, power, authority’ (source of the ending -cracy in such English words as democracy and plutocracy), but the Germanic languages took it over mainly in the sense ‘resistant to physical pressure’.

The prehistoric Germanic form *kharthuz produced, besides English hard, German hart, Dutch hard, Swedish hård, and Danish haard. The sense ‘difficult’, incidentally, developed in the 14th and 15th century from the notion ‘resistant to one’s efforts’. A Germanic derived verb *kharthjan ‘harden’ was borrowed into Old French as hardir ‘embolden’, and its past participle hardi ‘bold’ reached English as hardy [13].

Its main modern sense, ‘robust, tough’, presumably a harking back to its distant English relative hard, developed in the 16th century.
=> hardy
hare: hare: [OE] The hare seems originally to have been named from its colour. The word comes from prehistoric West and North Germanic *khason, which also produced German hase, Dutch haas, and Swedish and Danish hare, and if as has been suggested it is related to Old English hasu ‘grey’ and Latin cascus ‘old’, its underlying meaning would appear to be ‘grey animal’ (just as the bear and the beaver are etymologically the ‘brown animal’, and the herring may be the ‘grey fish’). Harrier ‘dog for hunting hares’ [16] was derived from hare on the model of Old French levrier (French lièvre means ‘hare’, and is related to English leveret ‘young hare’ [15]); it was originally harer, and the present-day form arose from confusion with harrier ‘falcon’ [16], a derivative of the verb harry.
=> harrier, herring, hoar