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pudding [pudding 词源字典]: pudding: [13] The original puddings were sausages – whose present-day survivor is the black pudding. They were encased in the intestines or stomachs of animals, and it was this casing that provided the spring-board for the word’s subsequent development in meaning. It came to be applied to any food cooked in a bag (hence the cannon-ball shape of the traditional Christmas pudding).

Such dishes could be savoury (like today’s steak-and-kidney pudding) or sweet, but it was not until the 20th century that pudding came to be used specifically for the ‘sweet course of a meal’. The word comes via Old French boudin from Vulgar Latin *botellīnus, a diminutive form of Latin botellus ‘sausage’ (source of English botulism).
=> botulism[pudding etymology, pudding origin, 英语词源]
puddle: puddle: [14] Old English pudd, a word of unknown origin but related to German dialect pfudel ‘puddle’, denoted ‘ditch, furrow’, and puddle was a diminutive formed from it. In Middle English, it was often used for quite large bodies of water, what we would now call a pond or pool, but by the 17th century it had largely narrowed down to its present-day meaning.
=> poodle
puerile: puerile: [17] Latin puer denoted ‘child’, or more specifically ‘boy’ (like Greek pais ‘child’, source of English paediatric, pedagogue, etc, it came ultimately from a base which signified ‘smallness’, and also gave English pusillanimous). The derived adjective puerīlis ‘childlike’ began to acquire its negative connotations in Latin, and brought them with it into English. The related puerperal ‘of childbirth’ [18] comes from a Latin compound formed from puer and parere ‘give birth’ (source of English parent).
=> pusillanimous
puffin: puffin: [14] Puffin probably goes back to one of the ancestral Celtic languages of the British Isles – perhaps Cornish. Its English guise is no doubt due to its plump appearance, which suggested associations with puff [13] (a word which originated as an imitation of the sound of puffing).
pugnacious: pugnacious: [17] Latin pugnus meant ‘fist’ (it may have been related to Greek pugmé ‘fist’, source of English pygmy). From it was derived the verb pugnāre ‘hit with the fist’, hence ‘fight’, which has given English impugn [14], repugnant [14], and, via the further derivative pugnāx ‘fond of fighting’, pugnacious.
=> impugn, repugnant
puke: puke: [16] The first record of puke in English is in Jaques’s famous ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It 1600: ‘At first the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms’. Its origins are not known for certain, but it presumably goes back ultimately to some Germanic base imitative of the sound of regurgitation (perhaps the same as produced German spucken ‘spew, spit’).
pull: pull: [OE] The main Old and Middle English word for ‘pull’ was draw, and pull did not really begin to come into its own until the late 16th century. It is not known for certain where it came from. Its original meaning was ‘pluck’ (‘draw, drag’ is a secondary development), and so it may well be related to Low German pūlen ‘remove the shell or husk from, pluck’ and Dutch peul ‘shell, husk’.
pullet: pullet: see poultry
pulley: pulley: [14] Although pulleys are used for ‘pulling’, there is no etymological connection between the two words. Pulley comes via Old French polie from Vulgar Latin *polidia, which was probably borrowed from the plural of a medieval Greek *polidion, a diminutive form of Greek pólos ‘pole, pivot’ (source of English pole ‘extremity’).
=> pole
pullulate: pullulate: [17] The etymological notion underlying pullulate is of rapid ‘new growth’. It goes back ultimately to Latin pullus ‘young animal’, which also produced English pony and poultry and is distantly related to foal. From this was derived the verb pullulāre ‘grow, sprout’, whose past participle provided English with pullulate. This too originally meant ‘sprout’, a sense largely displaced since the 19th century by its metaphorical descendant ‘swarm, teem’.
=> foal, pony, poultry, pullet
pulmonary: pulmonary: [18] Latin pulmō meant ‘lung’ (it was related to Greek pleúmōn ‘lung’, ultimate source of English pneumonia). From it was formed the adjective pulmōnārius, which English adopted at the beginning of the 18th century as pulmonary.
pulpit: pulpit: [14] Classical Latin pulpitum, a word of unknown origin, denoted ‘platform, stage’. This sense was originally carried over into English (Miles Coverdale, in his 1535 translation of II Chronicles 6:13, wrote ‘Salomon had made a brasen pulpit … upon the same stood he’, where the 1611 Authorized Version was later to have ‘Solomon had made a brasen scaffold … and upon it he stood’).

But it was eventually swamped by a subsidiary sense which emerged in medieval Latin: pulpitum had been applied particularly to platforms on which people stood to speak in public, and in ecclesiastical usage it came to denote a ‘raised structure on which preachers stand’.
pulse: pulse: English has two separate words pulse. The older, ‘seeds of beans, lentils, etc’ [13], comes via Old French pols from Latin puls ‘thick gruel (often made from beans and the like)’. This was a relative of Latin pollen ‘flour’ (source of English pollen) and Latin pulvis ‘powder’ (source of English powder and pulverize).

Its plural pultes has given English poultice [16]. Pulse ‘beat of the blood’ [14], comes via Old French pouls from Latin pulsus ‘beating’, a noun use of the past participle of pellere ‘drive, beat’ (source of English appeal, compel [14], dispel [17], expel [14], propel [15], and repel [15]). The derivative pulsāre gave English pulsate [18], and also push.
=> pollen, poultice, powder, pulverize; appeal, compel, dispel, expel, propel, pulsate, push, repel
pulverize: pulverize: see powder
pumice: pumice: [15] Pumice comes via Old French pomis from Latin pūmex ‘pumice’. This went back to a prehistoric Indo-European *poimo-, source also of English foam and of Latin spūma ‘foam, froth’ (from which English gets spume).
=> foam, spume
pump: pump: [15] The precise origins of pump have never been established. It is now widespread throughout the European languages, by dint of assiduous borrowing (French pompe, for instance), but its epicentre appears to have been northwestern Europe, with Middle Low German pumpe or Middle Dutch pompe. It started out, no doubt, as a vocal imitation of the sound of pumping.
pumpkin: pumpkin: [17] Much as they look as though they had been blown up with a pump, pumpkins have no etymological connection with pumps. Greek pépōn denoted a variety of melon that was not eaten until it was fully ripe (the word was a noun use of the adjective pépōn ‘ripe’). Latin took it over as pepō, and passed it on to Old French as *pepon. Through a series of vicissitudes this evolved via popon to early modern French pompon. This was borrowed into English in the 16th century, and soon altered to pompion; and in the 17th century the native diminutive suffix -kin was grafted on to it to produce pumpkin.
pun: pun: [17] Snappy monosyllables produced by breaking off a piece of a longer word were all the rage in late 17th- and early 18th-century England (mob is a well-known example), and it is thought that pun may be one of them. It seems to be short for pundigrion, a short-lived fanciful 17th- and 18th-century term for a ‘pun’ or ‘quibble’ which may have been adapted from Italian puntiglio ‘nice point, quibble’ (source of English punctilious).
punch: punch: English has three distinct words punch, not counting the capitalized character in the Punch and Judy show, but two of them are probably ultimately related. Punch ‘hit’ [14] originated as a variant of Middle English pounce ‘pierce, prod’. This came from Old French poinsonner ‘prick, stamp’, a derivative of the noun poinson ‘pointed tool’ (source of the now obsolete English puncheon ‘pointed tool’ [14]).

And poinson in turn came from Vulgar Latin *punctiō, a derivative of *punctiāre ‘pierce, prick’, which went back to the past participle of Latin pungere ‘prick’ (source of English point, punctuation, etc). Punch ‘tool for making holes’ [15] (as in ‘ticket punch’) probably originated as an abbreviated version of puncheon. Punch ‘drink’ [17] is said to come from Hindi pānch, a descendant of Sanskrit panchan ‘five’, an allusion to the fact that the drink is traditionally made from five ingredients: spirits, water, lemon juice, sugar, and spice.

This has never been definitely established, however, and an alternative possibility is that it is an abbreviation of puncheon ‘barrel’ [15], a word of uncertain origin. The name of Mr Punch [17] is short for Punchinello, which comes from a Neapolitan dialect word polecenella. This may have been a diminutive of Italian polecena ‘young turkey’, which goes back ultimately to Latin pullus ‘young animal, young chicken’ (source of English poultry).

It is presumably an allusion to Punch’s beaklike nose.
=> point, punctuation
punctuation: punctuation: [16] Punctuation is one of a small family of English words that go back to punctus, the past participle of Latin pungere ‘prick’ (source of English expunge [17], poignant [14], and pungent [16]). They include point, which arrived via Old French; punctilious [17] (which comes via Italian and may be related to pun) and punctual [14], both of them containing the etymological notion of ‘adherence to a precise point’; puncture [14]; punt ‘bet’; and punctuation itself, whose present-day meaning comes from the insertion of ‘points’ or dots into written texts to indicate pauses (also termed pointing from the 15th to the 19th centuries).
=> expunge, poignant, point, pungent, punt