英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

mood [mood 词源字典]: mood: English has two words mood. The original one, ‘emotional state’ [OE], goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *mōthaz or *mōtham, whose descendants have denoted a wide range of such states: ‘anger’, for instance (Old Norse móthr), and ‘courage’ (German mut). Old English mōd meant ‘mind, thought’, ‘pride’, ‘courage’, and ‘anger’ as well as ‘frame of mind’, but it is only the last that has survived. Mood ‘set of verb forms indicating attitude (such as the subjunctive)’ [16] is an alteration of mode, influenced by mood ‘frame of mind’.
=> mode[mood etymology, mood origin, 英语词源]
moon: moon: [OE] Indo-European *mēnes- meant both ‘moon’ and ‘month’. It was probably a derivative of the base *me- (source of English measure), reflecting the fact that in ancient times the passage of time was measured by the revolutions of the moon. Both strands of meaning have been preserved in the Germanic languages, represented by different forms: the ‘moon’ strand has differentiated into German mond, Dutch maan, Swedish måane, Danish maane, and English moon. Etymologically, Monday is ‘moon day’.
=> measure, metre, monday, month
moor: moor: Counting the capitalized form, English has three separate words moor. The oldest, ‘open land’ [OE], comes from a prehistoric Germanic *mōraz or *mōram, whose other modern descendants, such as German moor, mean ‘swamp’, suggest the possibility of some connection with English mere ‘lake’ (see MARINE). Moor ‘tie up a boat’ [15] was probably borrowed from a Middle Low German mōren, a relative of Dutch meren ‘moor’.

And Moor ‘inhabitant of North Africa’ [14] comes ultimately from Greek Mauros, a word no doubt of North African origin from which the name of the modern state Mauritania is derived. English relatives include morello [17], the name of a dark-skinned cherry which comes via Italian from Latin morellus or maurellus, a derivative of Maurus ‘Moor’; and morris dance.
=> marine, mere; morello, morris dance
moose: moose: [17] The moose’s name is a native American word. It comes from Natick moos, which has been linked by some with Narragansett moosu ‘he strips’, an allusion to the moose’s habit of stripping the bark from trees.
moot: moot: [OE] Etymologically, a ‘moot point’ is one talked about at a ‘meeting’. For ‘meeting’ is the original sense of the noun moot – particularly as applied in early medieval England to a meeting functioning as a court of law. The word goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *mōtam ‘meeting’, source also of English meet. Its modern adjectival usage seems to have emerged in the 16th century. The derived verb moot goes back to Old English times (mōtian ‘converse, plead in court’), but again its present-day use, for ‘suggest, propose’, is a more recent development, dating from the 17th century.
=> meet
mop: mop: [15] Mop first appeared in the guise mappe, a late 15th-century sailors’ term for an improvised brush used for caulking ships’ seams with tar. The modern form mop, presumably the same word, did not emerge until the mid-17thcentury. It may be a truncation of an earlier mapple ‘mop’ [15], which came from late Latin mappula ‘towel, cloth’, a diminutive form of Latin mappa ‘cloth’ (source of English map).
=> map
moral: moral: [14] Latin mōs ‘custom’ is the starting point of the English family of ‘morality’-words (and its plural mōres was acquired by English as mores in the 20th century). Its derived adjective mōrālis was coined, according to some by Cicero, as a direct translation of Greek ēthikós ‘ethical’, to denote the ‘typical or proper behaviour of human beings in society’, and was borrowed directly into English in the 14th century. Morale [18] was borrowed from French, where it is the feminine form of the adjective moral.

At first it was used in English for ‘morality, moral principles’; its modern sense ‘condition with regard to optimism, cheerfulness, etc’ is not recorded until the early 19th century.
=> morale, mores
moratorium: moratorium: see demur
mordant: mordant: see morsel
more: more: [OE] The Indo-European term for ‘more’ was *meis (it was formed from the same base as produced Latin magis ‘more’, source of Spanish mas ‘more’ and English master, and Latin magnus ‘large’, source of English magnitude). Its Germanic descendant was *maiz, which evolved into modern German mehr ‘more’, and also into Old English mā ‘more’, which survived dialectally until fairly recently as mo. From the adverb *maiz was derived the adjective *maizon, and it was this that has given English more. Most is, of course, closely related.
=> magnitude, master, most
morello: morello: see moor
morganatic: morganatic: [18] A morganatic marriage is one between people of different social status, in which the rank and entitlements of the higherstatus partner are not shared by the lower or their offspring. The word morganatic is a survival of an ancient Germanic marriage custom. On the morning after the wedding night, after the marriage had been consummated, the husband gave the wife a symbolic gift, which removed any further legal claim the wife or their children might have on his possessions.

The term for this useful gift was *morgangeba, a compound formed from *morgan (ancestor of English morning) and *geba (a noun formed from the same base as produced English give). The word was adopted into medieval Latin as morganaticus, from which (via either French or German) English got morganatic.
=> morning, give
morgue: morgue: [19] The original Morgue was a Parisian mortuary where unidentified corpses were displayed for visitors to try and put names to faces (a process described in gruesome detail by Émile Zola in Thérèse Raquin 1867). Its name is presumed to be a reapplication of an earlier French morgue ‘room in a prison where new prisoners were examined’, which may ultimately be the same word as morgue ‘haughty superiority’ (used in English from the 16th to the 19th centuries). Morgue was first adopted as a generic English term for ‘mortuary’ in the USA in the 1880s.
morning: morning: [13] The Old English word for ‘morning’ was morgen. It came from a prehistoric Germanic *murganaz (source also of German, Dutch, and Danish morgen ‘morning’), and links have been suggested with forms such as Old Church Slavonic mruknati ‘darken’ and Lithuanian mirgeti ‘twinkle’, which may point to an underlying etymological notion of the ‘glimmer of morning twilight’.

By the Middle English period the word morgen had evolved to what we now know as morn, and morning was derived from it on the analogy of evening. A parallel development of morgen was to Middle English morwe, from which we get modern English morrow (and hence tomorrow).
=> morn, tomorrow
morphology: morphology: see form
morris: morris: [15] Etymologically, the morris dance is a ‘Moorish dance’. The name, probably borrowed into English from Flemish mooriske dans, implies a perceived connection with a dance performed by the Moors, presumably in Spain, but the dance to which it is applied has far more ancient cultural roots than this would suggest. (The morris of nine men’s morris, incidentally, a sort of old board game, is a different word, perhaps going back ultimately to Old French merel ‘token, counter’.)
=> moor, morello
morse: morse: [19] People had for some years been experimenting with the magnetic telegraph, but it was the American inventor Samuel Morse (1791–1872) who in 1836 produced the first workable system. And with his assistant Alexander Bain he devised a set of dots and dashes representing letters and numbers which could be used for transmitting messages, and which came to be known as the Morse code. In the first half of the 20th century morse was also used as a verb: ‘It can be used for Morsing instructions about breakfast to the cook’, Punch 31 March 1920.
morsel: morsel: [13] Etymologically, a morsel is a piece ‘bitten’ off. The word comes from Old French morsel, a diminutive of mors ‘bite’. This in turn goes back to Latin morsus, a derivative of the same base as the verb mordēre ‘bite’. Other English words from the same source include mordant [15] and remorse.
=> mordant, remorse
mortal: mortal: [14] Mortal goes back ultimately to the Indo-European base *mor-, *mr- ‘die’ (source also of English murder). From it were descended the Latin words mortuus ‘dead’ (source of English mortuary [14] and the 19th-century American coinage mortician) and mors ‘death’. The adjectival derivative of mors was mortālis, which reached English via Old French mortal, mortel. Also based on mors was the late Latin verb mortificāre ‘kill’, hence metaphorically ‘subdue desires’, from which English gets mortify [14].
=> mortgage, mortify, mortuary, murder
mortar: mortar: [13] Latin mortārium, a word of unknown origin, denoted both a ‘bowl for grinding’ and, by extension, the ‘substance made in such a bowl’. These twin meanings survived through Anglo-Norman morter into modern English mortar as the ‘bowl used with a pestle’ and a ‘building mixture of cement, sand, and water’. The shape of the former led in the 17th century to the word’s application to a ‘short cannon’. The use of mortarboard for a ‘square flat academic cap’ dates from the mid-19th century.