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hidebound [hidebound 词源字典]: hidebound: [16] The term hidebound was originally applied to cattle so emaciated that their skin (or hide) was dry and stiff and clung closely to their bones. The idea of being trapped immovably inside one’s skin had led by the early 17th century to the meaning we are most familiar with today: ‘set immovably in one’s opinions, narrow-minded’.
[hidebound etymology, hidebound origin, 英语词源]
hierarchy: hierarchy: [14] Greek hierós meant ‘sacred, holy’. Combined with -arkhēs ‘ruling’ (as in English archbishop) it produced hierárkhēs ‘chief priest’. A derivative of this, hierarkhíā, passed via medieval Latin hierarchia and Old French ierarchie into Middle English as ierarchie (the modern spelling was introduced on the basis of the Latin form in the 16th century).

At first the word was used in English for the medieval categorization of angels (into cherubs and seraphs, powers and dominions, etc), and it was not until the early 17th century that it was applied to the clergy and their grades and ranks. The metaphorical use for any graded system soon followed.
hieroglyphic: hieroglyphic: [16] Etymologically, hieroglyphic means ‘of sacred carving’. It came via French hiéroglyphique from Greek hierogluphikós, a compound of hierós ‘sacred’ and gluphé ‘carving’ (which derived from the same source as English cleave ‘split’). It was applied to the picture writing of the ancient Egyptians because this was used in sacred texts.
=> cleave
high: high: [OE] High is an ancient word. It goes right back to Indo-European *koukos, which is related to a number of terms denoting roughly ‘rounded protuberance’: Sanskrit kucas ‘breast’, for instance, Russian húcha ‘heap’, and Lithuanian kaukas ‘swelling, boil’. Evidently the notion of ‘tallness’, central to modern English high, is historically a secondary development from the notion of being ‘heaped up’ or ‘arched up’. The Germanic descendant of *koukos was *khaukhaz, which produced German hoch, Dutch hoog, Swedish hög, Danish hoj, and English high. Height is a derivative of *khaukh-.
=> height
hill: hill: [OE] The ultimate source of hill was Indo- European *kel-, *kol-, which denoted ‘height’ and also produced English column, culminate, and excellent. A derivative *kulnís produced Germanic *khulniz, which now has no surviving descendants apart from English hill, but related words for ‘hill’ or ‘mountain’ in other Indo- European language groups include French colline, Italian colle, and Spanish and Romanian colina (all from Latin collis ‘hill’), Lithuanian kálnas, and Latvian kalns.
=> column, culminate, excellent
him: him: [OE] Him was originally the dative case of Old English hē ‘he’, which in the late Old English period gradually started to take over from the original accusative hine as the general object form (the ’un or ’n still occasionally found in southern English dialects for ‘him’ may represent the last vestiges of this). The dative ending -m is also found in, for example, German ihm (dative of er ‘he’) and Dutch hem.
=> he
hind: hind: English has two words hind. The adjective meaning ‘rear’ [13] probably came mainly from behind, a compound formed in Old English times from bi- ‘by’ and hindan ‘from behind’, whose ultimate origins are unknown. Related are German hinter ‘behind’, the first element of hinterland, which English borrowed in the 19th century, and the verb hinder [OE], etymologically ‘put behind or back’. Hind ‘female deer’ [OE] comes ultimately from Indo- European *kemti-, a derivative of *kem- ‘hornless’.
=> behind, hinder, hinterland
hinge: hinge: [13] Hinge is generally agreed to be related to the verb hang, and to mean etymologically ‘something on which a door hangs’, but the circumstances of its formation are obscure (as indeed are the reasons for its rhyming with singe, a 16th-century development; before that it rhymed with sing).
=> hang
hip: hip: English has two hips. The anatomical hip [OE] comes from a prehistoric Germanic *khupiz, whose formal and semantic similarity to Greek kúbos ‘six-sided figure’, hence ‘pelvic cavity’ (source of English cube) suggests that the two may be related. The rose-hip [OE] goes back to a West Germanic *kheup-, which survives also in Dutch joop ‘rose-hip’.
=> cube
hippopotamus: hippopotamus: [16] Etymologically, a hippopotamus is a ‘river horse’. The word comes, via Latin, from late Greek hippopótamos, a lexicalization of an earlier phrase híppos ho potámios, literally ‘horse of the river’. Other English descendants of híppos (a relative of Latin equus ‘horse’) include hippodrome [16], from a Greek compound that meant originally ‘horse-race’ (-drome occurs also in aerodrome and dromedary), and the name Philip, literally ‘lover of horses’. The abbreviation hippo, incidentally, dates from the mid-19th century.
=> equine, hippodrome
hire: hire: [OE] Hire probably originated in North Germany, in the area where the set of dialects known as Low German was spoken. It comes from a prehistoric *khūr-, which also produced Dutch huren (Swedish hyra and Danish hyre were borrowed from Low German).
his: his: [OE] His originated as the standard genitive form of the masculine personal pronoun he, with the genitive ending -s – what in modern English would be expressed as of him. But comparatively early in the Old English period it began to replace the ancestral third person possessive adjective sīn (a relative of modern German sein ‘his’), and by the year 1000 it was also being used as a possessive pronoun, as in ‘It’s his’.
=> he
history: history: [15] Etymologically, history denotes simply ‘knowledge’; its much more specific modern meaning is decidedly a secondary development. Its story begins with Greek hístōr ‘learned man’, a descendant of Indo-European *wid- ‘know, see’, which also produced English wit and Latin vidēre ‘see’. From hístōr was derived historíā ‘knowledge obtained by enquiry’, hence ‘written account of one’s enquiries, narrative, history’.

English acquired it via Latin historia, and at first used it for ‘fictional narrative’ as well as ‘account of actual events in the past’ (a sense now restricted to story, essentially the same word but acquired via Anglo-Norman).
=> story, vision, wit
hit: hit: [11] Hit is one of those words, now so common that we assume it has always been around, that is in fact a comparative latecomer to the English language, and one, what is more, whose ancestry is not at all clear. The standard Old English verb for ‘strike’ was slēan (modern English slay), but at the end of the Old English period hit suddenly appeared. It was borrowed from Old Norse hitta, a verb of unknown origin which meant not ‘strike’ but ‘come upon, find’ (as Swedish hitta still does). This sense was carried over into English (and still survives in hit upon), and it was not until the 13th century that the meaning ‘strike’ began to appear.
hive: hive: [OE] Hive comes ultimately from Indo- European *keup-, which denoted ‘round container, bowl’ and also produced Greek kúpellon ‘drinking vessel’, Latin cūpa ‘barrel’ (source of English coop, cooper, and cupola), and its post-classical offshoot cuppa (whence English cup). (A variant of the Indo-European base was the source of English head.) The Germanic descendant of *keup- was *khūf-, from which came Old Norse húfr ‘ship’s hull’ and English hive.
=> coop, cooper, cupola, cup, head
hoar: hoar: [OE] Hoar now survives mainly in hoary, a disparaging term for ‘old’, and hoarfrost, literally ‘white frost’. Between them, they encapsulate the meaning of hoar – ‘greyishwhite haired with age’. But it is the colour that is historically primary, not the age. The word goes back to an Indo-European *koi-, whose other descendants include German heiter ‘bright’ and Russian ser’iy ‘grey’.

Another Germanic offshoot was *khairaz – but here the association between ‘grey hair’ and ‘age, venerability’ began to cloud the issue. For while English took the word purely as a colour term, German and Dutch have turned it into a title of respect, originally for an elderly man, now for any man: herr and mijnheer respectively.
=> hare, herring
hoard: hoard: [OE] Etymologically, a hoard is ‘that which one hides’. The word comes from a prehistoric Germanic *khuzdam, which was derived from the same base as the verb hide. (Hoarding [19], incidentally, is not etymologically connected; it comes from an earlier hoard ‘fence’, which probably goes back via Old French hourd or hord to a prehistoric German form that also produced English hurdle [OE]. Nor is the identically pronounced horde [16] related: it goes back via Polish horda to Turkish ordū ‘camp’, source also of Urdu [18], etymologically the ‘language of the camp’.)
=> hide
hoax: hoax: see hocus pocus
hob: hob: see hub
hobbit: hobbit: [20] The name of these small furry-footed human-like creatures was invented by their creator, J.R.R. Tolkien, and first appeared in public in The Hobbit (1937). It probably simply occurred to him as a pleasing- and appropriatesounding name, but with typical linguistic thoroughness he later worked up a detailed etymological rationale for it: in their own language, he claimed, hobbits were called kuduk; this was a worn-down version of an original kûd-dûkan, which meant literally ‘holedweller’; in Old English, ‘hole-dweller’ would have been holbytla, which in modern English could plausibly have become eroded to hobbit.