英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

pitchfork [pitchfork 词源字典]: pitchfork: see pike
[pitchfork etymology, pitchfork origin, 英语词源]
pitta: pitta: see pizza
pittance: pittance: see pity
pituitary: pituitary: see pine
pity: pity: [13] Latin pius ‘pious’, an adjective of unknown origin which gave English expiate and pious, had a noun derivative pietās. This has come into English in three distinct forms. First to arrive, more or less contemporaneously, were pity and piety [13], which were borrowed from respectively Old French pite and piete. These both developed from Latin pietās, and were originally synonymous, but they became differentiated in meaning before they arrived in English.

The Italian descendant of the Latin noun was pietà, which English took over in the 17th century as a term for a ‘statue of Mary holding the body of the crucified Christ’. Vulgar Latin *pietantia, a derivative of pietās, meant ‘charitable donation’. It has given English pittance [13].
=> expiate, piety, pious, pittance
pizza: pizza: [20] Italian pizza is quite a broad term, signifying ‘cake’, ‘tart’ or ‘pie’ and encompassing dishes as diverse as a closed fruit pie and a flat bread-dough base with a topping. It is the latter, of course, that brought the word into English. At first, both the word and the foodstuff were unfamiliar enough for the tautologous name ‘pizza pie’ to be deemed necessary, but the fast-food revolution from the 1960s onwards has thoroughly naturalized pizza (US fast-food outlets have their own abbreviation, za).

The origin of the Italian word is uncertain. It has been linked with Vulgar Latin *picea, a derivative of Latin pyx ‘pitch’ (in which case it would be paralleled by Welsh bara pyglyd, literally ‘pitchy bread’, possibly a reference to its colour, from which English gets pikelet [18], the name of a type of tea-cake), but it could also be related to modern Greek pitta (source of English pitta [20]), which may be a descendant of classical Greek peptos ‘cooked’.
placate: placate: see please
place: place: [13] A place is etymologically a ‘broad’ area. The word comes ultimately from the Greek expression plateia hodós ‘broad way’ (the adjective platús ‘broad’ is probably related to English flat). Plateia came to be used on its own as a noun, and passed into Latin as platea ‘broad street, open area’. This became changed in postclassical times to *plattja, which passed into English via Old French place.

Probably the closest the English word comes to its ancestral meaning is as a street name (as in Portland Place), introduced under French influence in the late 16th century, which originally denoted more an ‘open square’ than a ‘street’. But closer still are piazza [16] and plaza [17], borrowed respectively from the Italian and Spanish versions of the word. The homophonous plaice the fish-name is a distant relative.
=> flat, piazza, plaice, plate, platypus, plaza
placebo: placebo: [13] Placebo started life as the first person future singular of the Latin verb placēre ‘please’ (source of English please), and hence meant originally ‘I will please’. It was the first word of the antiphon to the first psalm in the Roman Catholic service for the dead, Placēbo Dominō in rēgiōne vivōrum ‘I will please the Lord in the land of the living’. The word’s medical use emerged at the end of the 18th, and arose from the notion of a medicine ‘pleasing’ the patient rather than having any direct physiological effect.
=> please
placenta: placenta: [17] Latin placenta originally meant ‘flat cake’. It was borrowed from Greek plakóenta, the accusative form of plakóeis ‘flat cake’, which was derived from pláx ‘flat surface’ (possible relative of English plank). Its application to the afterbirth (originally in the phrase placenta uterīna ‘uterine cake’) is a postclassical development, inspired by the flat round shape of the afterbirth.
placid: placid: see please
plagiarize: plagiarize: [17] Latin plagium meant ‘kidnapping’ – it was a derivative of plaga ‘net’. From it was formed plagārius ‘kidnapper’, which was used metaphorically by the epigrammatist Martial for ‘literary thief’ – the sense in which the word reached English.
plague: plague: [14] Etymologically, plague means a ‘blow’ or ‘stroke’. It goes back to the same prehistoric base, *plag- ‘hit’, as produced Latin plangere ‘beat’ (source of English complain, plaintiff [14], plaintive [14], and plangent [19] – which originally denoted the sound of waves ‘beating’ against the shore) and English plankton.

From this was derived Greek plāgá ‘blow’, which was borrowed into Latin as plāga ‘blow’, hence ‘wound’. In the Vulgate it was used for an ‘infectious disease’, and was borrowed in this sense (as well as the now defunct ‘blow’) via Old French into English. (*Plak-, a parallel form to *plag-, lies behind English apoplexy and plectrum [17].)
=> apoplexy, complain, plaintive, plangent, plankton, plectrum
plaice: plaice: [13] The plaice is etymologically the ‘broad’ fish. Its name goes back ultimately to Greek platūs ‘broad’ (which makes it distantly related to place). From this was descended, via some missing links, late Latin platessa ‘flatfish’, which became Old French plaïs – whence English plaice.
=> place, plate, platypus
plain: plain: [13] Plain is etymologically the same word as plane in all its uses except the tree-name, and even that comes from the same ultimate source. This was Indo-European *plā- ‘flat’, which produced Greek platús ‘broad’ (source of English place, plaice, and platypus), Latin plānus ‘flat, clear’, and possibly English flat. The Latin word passed into English via Old French plain, but its original ‘flat’ senses have been hived off into the separately acquired plane, leaving only the metaphorically derived ‘clear’ senses. The Italian descendant of plānus has given English piano.
=> plane
plaintiff: plaintiff: see plague
plaintive: plaintive: see plague
plait: plait: see pleat
plan: plan: [18] A plan is etymologically a design that has been ‘planted’ on the ground. Indeed in French, from which English acquired the word, it was originally plant, and was not altered to plan until the 16th century, under the influence of plan ‘flat’ (source of English plane ‘flat’). It was a derivative of the verb planter ‘plant’, and originally referred to the laying-out of the ground plan of a building. The metaphor seems first to have arisen in Italian pianta ‘ground plan’, a relative of plant, which prompted its development in French.
=> plant
planchette: planchette: see plank