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miscreant [miscreant 词源字典]: miscreant: see creed
[miscreant etymology, miscreant origin, 英语词源]
misery: misery: [14] Latin miser meant ‘miserable, wretched’. From it were derived miseria ‘wretchedness’, source of English misery, and miserābilis ‘pitiable’, source of English miserable [16]. Fitting in with the general semantic pattern, English miser [16] (a direct nominalization of the Latin adjective) originally meant ‘wretched person’. But people who hoarded money were evidently viewed as being basically unhappy, and so right from the beginning miser was used for an ‘avaricious person’.
=> miser
miss: miss: English has two words miss. The one used as a title for an unmarried woman [17], which originated as a shortened form of mistress (see MASTER), is a comparatively recent introduction, but the verb miss [OE] has a much longer history. It comes from a prehistoric Germanic *missjan (source of German and Dutch missen, Swedish mista, and Danish miste), which was derived from the base *missa- ‘wrongly, amiss’ (ancestor of the English prefix mis-).
=> master
mission: mission: [16] Mission, etymologically a ‘sending’, is the hub of a large family of English words that come from the Latin verb mittere ‘let go, send’ or its stem miss-. Most are prefixed forms – admit, commit, permit, promise, transmit, etc – but the unadorned verb is represented in mass ‘eucharist’, mess, missile [17] (literally ‘something capable of being sent’), mission itself and its derivative missionary [17], and missive [15] (‘something sent’).

The source of mittere is not known, but what does seem clear is that it originally meant ‘let go, throw’. This subsequently developed to ‘send’ and, in the post-classical period, to ‘put’ (hence French metre ‘put’).
=> admit, commit, mess, message, missile, missive, permit, promise, submit, transmit
mist: mist: [OE] Mist is a member of quite a widespread Indo-European family of ‘mist’-words. Dutch and Swedish share mist, and among the non- Germanic languages Greek has omíkhlē, Lithuanian and Latvia migla, Serbo-Croat màgla, Polish mgła, and Russian mgla, all meaning ‘mist’, besides Sanskrit mēghas ‘cloud’, which all point back to an Indo- European ancestor *migh-, *meigh-.
mistake: mistake: [13] Mistake originally meant literally ‘take in error, take the wrong thing’. It was borrowed from Old Norse mistaka, a compound verb formed from the prefix mis- ‘wrongly’ and taka ‘take’. This sense survived in English for some time (‘to be ever busy, and mistake away the bottles and cans … before they be but half drunk of’, Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair 1614), but gradually through the late Middle English period the notion of ‘error’ came to the fore (it was already present in the Old Norse verb, which was used reflexively for ‘go wrong’, and was probably reinforced by Old French mesprendre, literally ‘take wrongly’, which was also used for ‘err’).

The noun use, ‘error’, emerged in the 17th century.
=> take
mister: mister: see master
mistletoe: mistletoe: [OE] Mistletoe is a mystery word. It means literally ‘mistletoe twig’, and comes from an Old English compound misteltān formed from mistel ‘mistletoe’ and tān ‘twig’. The origins of mistel, however (which has relatives in German mistil and Dutch and Swedish mistel), are unknown. The mistle thrush [18], or missel thrush, got its name from its predilection for mistletoe berries.
mistress: mistress: see master
mite: mite: English has two words mite, although they probably share a common origin. The older, ‘tiny insect-like creature’ [OE], goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *mītōn, which was probably derived from a base meaning ‘cut’ (hence ‘something cut up small’). Dutch has the related mijt. The original meaning of mite ‘small thing’ [14] was ‘small coin’ (as in the ‘widow’s mite’). It was used in Flanders for such a coin, worth a third of a penny, and Middle Dutch mīte was borrowed into English. It too goes back to a Germanic mītōn, which is probably the same word as produced the animated mite.
mitten: mitten: [14] Etymologically, a mitten is ‘half a glove’. The word comes via Old French mitaine from Vulgar Latin *medietāna ‘cut off in the middle’ (originally an adjective, and applied to gloves, but subsequently used independently as a noun meaning ‘cut-off glove’). This in turn came from Latin medietās ‘half’ (source of English moiety [15]), a derivative of medius ‘middle’ (source of English medium). The abbreviated mitt dates from the 18th century.
=> medium, moiety
mix: mix: [15] English originally acquired this word in the form mixt or mixed, a past participial adjective, and did not coin the new verb mix from it until the 16th century. Mixt came via Old French from Latin mixtus, the past participle of the verb miscēre ‘mix’. Derivatives of miscēre to have reached English include miscellaneous [17] and promiscuous [17], and its Vulgar Latin descendant *misculāre ‘mix up’ has given English meddle [14], medley [14], and mêlée [17]. Miscegenation [19] was coined in the USA around 1863 from miscēre and Latin genus ‘race’.
=> meddle, medley, miscellaneous, mustang, promiscuous
moat: moat: [14] The word moat originally meant a ‘mound’ or ‘embankment’ (this has since been hived off into the specialized form motte). The word was borrowed from Old French mote or motte ‘hill, mound’, whose ultimate source was probably a Gaulish mutt or mutta. The use of the word for the mound on which a castle keep was built led in Old French or Anglo-Norman to its reapplication to the ditch surrounding such a mound.
mob: mob: [17] Mob is famous as one of the then new ‘slang’ abbreviations against which Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift inveighed at the beginning of the 18th century (others included pozz for positively and rep for reputation). Mob was short for mobile, which itself was a truncated form of mobile vulgus, a Latin phrase meaning ‘fickle crowd’. Latin mōbilis ‘movable’, hence metaphorically ‘fickle’ (source of English mobile [15]), came from the base of the verb movēre ‘move’ (source of English move).
=> mobile, move
model: model: [16] Latin modus meant originally ‘measure’ (it came from the same Indo- European base, *met-, *med-, as produced English measure and metre). It subsequently spread out semantically to ‘size’, ‘limit’, ‘way, method’, and ‘rhythm, harmony’. From it was derived the diminutive form modulus, source of English modulate [16], module [16], and mould ‘form’.

It was altered in Vulgar Latin to *modellus, and passed into English via Italian modello and early modern French modelle. Its original application in English was to an ‘architect’s plans’, but the familiar modern sense ‘three-dimensional representation’ is recorded as early as the start of the 17th century. The notion of an ‘artist’s model’ emerged in the late 17th century, but a ‘model who shows off clothes’ is an early 20th-century development.

Other English descendants of modus include modern, modicum [15], modify [14], and of course mode [16] itself (of which mood ‘set of verb forms’ is an alteration).
=> measure, mete, metre, mode, modern, modulate, mood, mould
moderate: moderate: [14] Latin moderārī or moderāre meant ‘reduce, control’. They were derived from an unrecorded *modes- (source also of modest), which was related to modus ‘measure’ (source of English mode and model), and hence denoted etymologically ‘keep within due measure’. Their past participle moderātus was taken over by English as an adjective, and converted into a verb in the 15th century.
=> mode, model, modern, modest
modern: modern: [16] Latin modus (source of English mode and model) meant ‘measure’. Its ablative form modō hence originally denoted ‘to the measure’, but it subsequently came to be used as an adverb meaning ‘just now’. And in postclassical times an adjective modernus was derived from it, signifying ‘of the present time’ – source, via French, of English modern. At first it was used strictly for ‘of the present moment’, but before the end of the 16th century the now familiar sense ‘of the present age’ had begun to emerge.
=> mode, model
modest: modest: [16] Etymologically, modest means ‘kept within due measure’. It comes via French from Latin modestus, a derivative of the same source as produced English moderate. This was *modes-, a close relative of Latin modus ‘measure’ (from which English gets mode and model).
=> mode, model
modicum: modicum: see model
modify: modify: see model