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off [off 词源字典]: off: [OE] Off originated simply as the adverbial use of of. The spelling off, denoting the extra emphasis given to the adverb, began to appear in the 15th century, but the orthographic distinction between off for the adverb, and for prepositional uses associated with it (‘removal, disengagement’), and of for the ordinary preposition did not become firmly established until after 1600.
=> of[off etymology, off origin, 英语词源]
offal: offal: [14] Etymologically, offal is simply material that has ‘fallen off’. English borrowed the word from Middle Dutch afval, a compound formed from af ‘off’ and vallen ‘fall’ which denoted both the ‘extremities of animals cut off by the butcher, such as feet, tail, etc’ and ‘shavings, peelings, or general refuse’. English originally took it over in the latter sense, but by the 15th century offal was being used for ‘animals’ entrails’.
=> fall, off
offend: offend: [14] Latin offendere meant ‘strike against’. It was a compound verb formed from the prefix ob- ‘against’ and -fendere ‘hit’ (source also of English defend). Its literal sense survived into English (‘The navy is a great defence and surety of this realm in time of war, as well to offend as defend’ proclaimed an act of parliament of Henry VIII’s time), and continues to do so in the derivatives offence [14] and offensive [16], but as far as the verb is concerned only the metaphorical ‘hurt the feelings’ and ‘violate’ remain.
=> defend, fend
offer: offer: [OE] Latin offerre was a compound verb formed from the prefix ob- ‘to’ and ferre ‘bring, carry’ (a distant relative of English bear), and it meant ‘present, offer’. It was borrowed into Old English from Christian Latin texts as offrian, in the specific sense ‘offer up a sacrifice’; the more general spread of modern meanings was introduced via Old French offrir in the 14th century. The past participle of offerre was oblātus, from which English gets oblation [15].
=> bear, oblation
office: office: [13] Office comes from a Latin source that originally meant ‘do work’. This was officium, a reduced form of an earlier *opificium, which was compounded from opus ‘work’ (source of English opera, operate, etc) and -ficium, a derivative of facere ‘do’ (source of English fact, faction, etc). That original literal sense has now disappeared from English (which got the word via Old French office), but it has left its mark in ‘position, post, job’ and ‘place where work is done’, both of which existed in Latin.

English has a small cluster of derivatives, including officer [14], official [14], officiate [17], and officious [16].
=> fact, factory, fashion, opera, operate
often: often: [14] Oft was the Old English word for ‘often’. It came from a prehistoric Germanic adverb of unknown origin, which also produced German oft, Swedish ofta, and Danish ofte. In early Middle English it was extended to ofte. This developed a form often before vowels and h, which by the 16th century had begun to oust oft(e).
oil: oil: [12] Around the Mediterranean in ancient times the only sort of oil encountered was that produced by pressing olives, and so ‘oil’ was named after the olive. The Greek word for ‘olive’ was elaíā, and from it was derived elaíon ‘olive oil’. This passed into Latin as oleum, and reached English via Old French oile. By now it had begun to be applied to similar substances pressed from nuts, seeds, etc, but its specific modern use for the mineral oil ‘petroleum’ is a much more recent, essentially 19th-century development.
=> olive
OK: OK: [19] Few English expressions have had so many weird and wonderful explanations offered for their origin as OK. There is still some doubt about it, but the theory now most widely accepted is that the letters stand for oll korrect, a facetious early 19th-century American phonetic spelling of all correct; and that this was reinforced by the fact that they were also coincidentally the initial letters of Old Kinderhook, the nickname of US president Martin Van Buren (who was born in Kinderhook, in New York State), which were used as a slogan in the presidential election of 1840 (a year after the first record of OK in print).
old: old: [OE] Etymologically, old means ‘grown-up’. It comes from a prehistoric West Germanic *altha (source also of German alt and Dutch oud) which was a past-participial adjective formed from the base of a verb meaning ‘grow, nourish’. (A precisely similar formation from the related Latin verb adolēscere ‘grow’ has given English adult, and Latin altus ‘high’ – source of English altitude [14] – was originally a past-participial adjective too, derived from alēre ‘nourish’, although it has metaphoricized ‘growing’ to ‘height’ rather than ‘age’.) Elderly and the comparative and superlative elder, eldest come ultimately from the same source. World began life as a compound noun of which the noun *ald- ‘age’, a relative of old, formed the second element.
=> adult, altitude, elder, world
olfactory: olfactory: [17] Olfactory means etymologically ‘making smell’. It was borrowed from Latin *olfactōrius, a derivative of the verb olfacere ‘smell’. This in turn was a blend of olēre ‘smell’ (source of English redolent and related to odour) and facere ‘make’ (source of English fact, faction, etc).
=> odour, redolent
olive: olive: [13] The word olive probably originated in a pre-Indo-European language of the Mediterranean area. Greek took it over as elaíā, and passed it on to English via Latin olīva and Old French olive. The olive’s chief economic role is as a source of oil (indeed the very word oil comes from a Greek derivative of elaíā), and before the word olive arrived in English, it was called eleberge, literally ‘oil-berry’.
=> oil
ombudsman: ombudsman: [20] The word ombudsman, denoting an ‘investigator of public complaints’, was introduced into English from Swedish, and was first used as a quasi-official term in the 1960s: New Zealand was the first Englishspeaking country to introduce such a post, in 1962, and Britain followed four years later. The Swedish word is a descendant of Old Norse umbothsmathr, literally ‘administration-man’; and umboth was originally a compound of um ‘about’ and both ‘command’ (a relative of English bid).
=> bid
omelette: omelette: [17] The omelette seems to have been named for its thinness, like a sheet of metal. The word was borrowed from French omelette, the modern descendant of Old French amelette. This meant literally ‘thin sheet of metal’, and was an alteration, by metathesis (the reversal of sounds) of alumette. This in turn was a variant of alumelle, which arose through the mistaking of la lemelle ‘the blade’ as l’alemelle. And lemelle goes back to Latin lāmella ‘thin sheet of metal’, a diminutive form of lāmina ‘plate, layer’ (from which English gets laminate [17]).
=> laminate
omen: omen: [16] Omen was a direct borrowing from Latin ōmen, whose derivative ōminōsus also gave English ominous [16]. From the same source comes abominable.
=> abominable, ominous
on: on: [OE] On is an ancient Germanic preposition, with relatives in German (an), Dutch (aan), and Swedish (å), and also connections outside Germanic (such as Greek aná ‘on’ and Russian na ‘on’)
onager: onager: see ass
once: once: [12] Once originated as the genitive form of one (the genitive case was widely used in Old and Middle English for making adverbs out of nouns – other examples include always, needs, nowadays, and towards). To begin with, this was clearly indicated by its spelling – ones – but from about the start of the 16th century -es was gradually replaced by -ce (reflecting the fact that once retained a voiceless /s/ at its end, whereas in ones it had been voiced to /z/).
=> one
one: one: [OE] One is the English member of an ancient and widespread family of ‘one’-words that goes back ultimately to Indo-European *oinos. This also produced Latin ūnus (ancestor of French un and Italian and Spanish uno and source of English ounce, union, unit, etc), Welsh un, Lithuanian víenas, Czech and Polish jeden, and Russian odin, all meaning ‘one’.

Its Germanic descendant was *ainaz, which has fanned out into German ein, Dutch een, Swedish and Danish en, and English one. In many languages the word is used as the indefinite article, but in English the numeral one has become differentiated from the article a, an. One lies behind alone, atone, and only (all of which preserve its earlier diphthongal pronunciation) as well as once, and its negative form is none.

The use of the word as an indefinite pronoun, denoting ‘people in general’, dates from the late 15th century.
=> alone, atone, eleven, inch, lonely, none, once, only, ounce, union, unit
onion: onion: [14] The usual Old English word for ‘onion’ was cīpe (a borrowing from Latin cēpa, source also of English chives and chipolata), but it also had ynne. This came from Latin ūniō, a word of uncertain origin but possibly identical with ūniō (a derivative of ūnus ‘one’) which denoted a ‘single large pearl’ (according to Julius Moderatus Columella, ūniō was a farmer’s term, and one can well imagine a proud onion-grower comparing his products with pearls).

An alternative explanation, also based on a derivation from ūnus, is that the word is an allusion to the ‘unity’ formed by the layers of the onion. Ynne had died out by the Middle English period, and onion represents a reacquisition of the word via Anglo-Norman union.
=> one
only: only: [OE] Only is a compound formed in the Old English period from ān, ancestor of modern English one, and -lic ‘-ly’. It originally meant ‘solitary’ as well as ‘unique’, but this sense has been taken over by the related lonely. Only preserves the early diphthongal pronunciation which its source one has lost.
=> lonely, one