英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

punish [punish 词源字典]: punish: [14] Latin pūnīre ‘punish’ was derived from the noun poena ‘penalty, punishment’ (source of English pain). It passed into Old French as punir, whose stem puniss- gave English punish. A derivative of pūnīre was pūnitīvus ‘inflicting punishment’, which has given English punitive [17].
=> pain[punish etymology, punish origin, 英语词源]
punt: punt: English has three separate words punt. The oldest is punt ‘flat-bottomed boat’ [15], which comes via Middle Low German punte or punto from Latin pontō, a term for a sort of Gaulish boat which also produced English pontoon. Punt ‘bet’ [18] (better known in the form of the agent noun punter ‘better’, hence ‘customer’) comes from French ponter, a derivative of ponte ‘bet against the banker in certain card games’.

This was adapted from Spanish punto ‘point’, a descendant of Latin punctum (source of English point). Punt ‘kick’ [19] may be a variant of bunt ‘push’ [19] (now used as a baseball term, meaning ‘hit the ball softly’); this could in turn be an alteration of butt, but it might also come from a Celtic source, related to Breton bounta ‘butt’.
=> pontoon; point, punctuation
puny: puny: [16] Etymologically, puny means ‘born later’. It was borrowed from Old French puisne, a compound adjective formed from puis ‘afterwards’ and ne ‘born’ (a relative of English native, nature, etc). This signified ‘junior’, in which sense it was originally acquired by English as puisne. This spelling survives (albeit pronounced the same as puny) as a term denoting a judge of junior rank, and the anglicized orthography has since the 18th century been reserved to ‘feeble, small’.
=> nation, native, nature
pupil: pupil: [14] Latin pūpus and pūpa meant respectively ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ (pūpa was applied by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus to ‘chrysalises’, the underlying link being ‘undeveloped creature’, and English adopted it as pupa [19]). The diminutive derivatives pūpillus and pūpilla denoted ‘orphan’, a sense which remained with pūpill- as it passed via Old French pupille into English as pupil. ‘Person being taught’ did not emerge until the 16th century.

The application of the word to the ‘black aperture in the eye’, which reached English in the mid-16th century, goes back to Latin pūpilla, which was also used for ‘doll’ – the notion being that if you stand close to someone and look into their eyes, you can see yourself reflected in the pupils like a little ‘doll’.
=> pupa, puppet, puppy
puppet: puppet: [16] Puppet, like its variant poppet [14], originally meant ‘doll’. It comes from Old French poupette, a diminutive form of *poupe ‘doll’. This in turn came from Vulgar Latin *puppa, a descendant of Latin pūpa ‘girl, doll’ (source of English pupa and pupil). The application to a ‘moving doll controlled by strings’ developed in the 16th century; in the case of poppet it has since died out, but it has taken over puppet completely.
=> pupil
puppy: puppy: [15] A puppy is etymologically a ‘toy’ dog. The word was borrowed from Old French popee ‘doll’, hence ‘toy’, which went back via Vulgar Latin *puppa (source of English puppet) to Latin pūpa ‘girl, doll’ (source of English pupa and pupil). The shift from ‘toy dog, lapdog’ to ‘young dog’ happened towards the end of the 16th century. (The Old and Middle English word for ‘puppy’, incidentally, was whelp.)
=> pupil
purchase: purchase: [13] To purchase something is etymologically to ‘hunt it down’. It comes from Old French pourchacier ‘pursue’, hence ‘try to obtain’, a compound verb formed from the intensive prefix pour- and chacier ‘pursue’ (source of English chase). It arrived in English meaning ‘obtain’. This sense had virtually died out by the end of the 17th century, but not before it had evolved in the 14th century to ‘buy’.
=> chase
pure: pure: [13] Pure goes back ultimately to Latin pūrus ‘clean’, a word of ancient ancestry which was related to Sanskrit pūtás ‘purified’. It reached English via Old French pur. Amongst its Latin derivatives were the verbs pūrificāre ‘make pure’, source of English purify [14]; pūrāre ‘make pure’, which became French purer ‘purify, strain’, source of English purée [19]; and pūrigāre, later pūrgāre ‘purify’, source of English expurgate [17] and purge [14].
=> expurgate, purge
purlieu: purlieu: [15] Purlieu has no etymological connection with French lieu ‘place’, which seems to have been grafted on to it in the 16th century in ignorance of its origins. It comes from Anglo-Norman puralee ‘act of walking round’, hence ‘area of land beyond a perimeter fixed by walking round’. This was a noun use of the past participle of Old French pouraler ‘go through, traverse’, a compound verb formed from the prefix pour- ‘round’ and aler ‘go’.
purloin: purloin: see long
purple: purple: [OE] Greek porphúrā, a word of Semitic origin, denoted a sort of shellfish from which a reddish dye was obtained (known as Tyrian purple, because it was produced around Tyre, in what is now Lebanon, it was highly prized in ancient times, and used for dyeing royal garments). It hence came to be used for the dye itself, and for cloth coloured with it, and it passed in this latter sense (with the particular connotation of ‘royal cloth’) via Latin purpura into Old English as purpura. Its derived adjective purpuran became purple by a process known as dissimilation, by which one of two similar speech sounds (here /r/) is altered.
purpose: purpose: [13] Purpose, propose [14], and propound [16] are ultimately the same word. All go back to Latin prōpōnere ‘put forward, declare’, a compound verb formed from the prefix prō- ‘forward’ and pōnere ‘place’ (source of English pose, position, etc). Its past participle prōpositus was the source of two distinct Old French verbs: the minimally altered proposer, source of English propose; and purposer, which contains the Old French descendant of the Latin prefix prō-, source of English purpose. Propound is an alteration of an earlier propone (source of proponent [16]), which was based directly on prōpōnere.
=> pose, position, propose, proponent, propound
purse: purse: [OE] Purse was borrowed into Old English from late Latin bursa (source of English bursar [13] and reimburse [17]), which went back to Greek búrsa. This originally meant ‘skin, leather’, and hence came to be used for ‘wineskin, bag’. The Latin word was also borrowed into the Celtic languages, where it produced Gaelic sporan, source of English sporran.
=> bursar, reimburse, sporran
pursue: pursue: [13] Pursue is first cousin to prosecute. Both go back ultimately to Latin prōsequī ‘follow up, pursue’. This led fairly directly to English prosecute, but it also seems to have had a Vulgar Latin descendant *prōsequere, which passed into English via Old French porsivre and Anglo-Norman pursuer as pursue.
=> prosecute, sue, suit
purvey: purvey: see provide
pus: pus: [16] English borrowed pus from Latin pūs, which was descended from the prehistoric Indo- European base *pū- (source also of English foul and Latin puter ‘rotten’, from which English gets putrid [16]). Its stem form pūr- has given English purulent [16] and suppurate [16]. The Greek relative of Latin pūs was púon ‘pus’, from which English gets pyorrhoea [18].
=> foul, purulent, putrid, pyorrhoea, suppurate
push: push: [13] Push comes ultimately from the same source as English pulsate and pulse – pulsus, the past participle of Latin pellere ‘drive, push, beat’. From it was formed the verb pulsāre ‘push, beat’, which in Old French became poulser, later pousser. Anglo-Norman took this over as *pusser, and passed it on to English as push.
=> pulsate, pulse
pusillanimous: pusillanimous: [16] Pusillanimous means etymologically ‘tiny-spirited’. It comes from late Latin pūsillanimis, a compound adjective formed from pūsillus ‘very small or weak’ (a descendant of the same base as produced Latin puer ‘child, boy’, source of English puerile) and animus ‘mind, spirit’ (source of English animate).
=> animal, animate, puerile
puss: puss: English has two distinct words puss. The origins of the one meaning ‘cat’ [16] are rather mysterious. It appears to have been borrowed from Middle Low German pūs, but there the trail goes cold. Since it is basically used for calling cats, it may have originated simply in an exclamation (like pss) used for gaining their attention. Puss the slang term for ‘mouth’ or ‘face’ [19] comes from Irish bus ‘lip, mouth’. Pussy ‘cat’ [18] is derived from puss, of course, but pussy the slang term for ‘cunt’ [19] may be Low German or Scandinavian origin (Low German had pūse ‘vulva’ and Old Norse púss ‘pocket, pouch’).
pustule: pustule: [14] Despite the fact that pustules contain pus, there is no etymological connection between the two words. Pustule comes via Old French pustule from Latin pustula ‘blister’. This was a derivative of a prehistoric Indo-European base *pu- signifying ‘blow’, so etymologically it means ‘inflated area’.