英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

pellicle [pellicle 词源字典]: pellicle: see fell
[pellicle etymology, pellicle origin, 英语词源]
pelmet: pelmet: see palm
pelt: pelt: see fell, pellet
pen: pen: English has three words pen. The oldest, ‘enclosure’ [OE], is something of a mystery term. It has no known relatives in the other European languages, and even in English it is not unequivocally found in its current sense until the 14th century. Pent [16], as in ‘pent up’, originated in the past participle of the verb pen. The earliest writing implements known as ‘pens’ were of course made from feathers, and so it is not surprising that the word pen [13] comes from a word that meant ‘feather’.

This was Latin penna, source also of English pennon [14] and a distant relative of English feather. It entered English via Old French penne. Pen ‘female swan’ [16] is of unknown origin.
=> pent; feather, pennon
penal: penal: see pain
penalty: penalty: see pain
penance: penance: see pain
penchant: penchant: see pendulum
pencil: pencil: [14] Etymologically, a pencil is a ‘little penis’. It originally denoted a ‘paintbrush’ – the current sense ‘writing implement filled with a graphite rod’ did not emerge until the 17th century – and came via Old French pincel from Vulgar Latin *pēnicellum, an alteration of Latin pēnicillum ‘paintbrush’. This was a diminutive form of pēniculus ‘brush’, which was in turn a diminutive of pēnis. Pēnis originally meant ‘tail’ (whence the metaphor of the ‘brush’), and only by extension was it used for ‘male sex organ’ (in which sense English adopted it as penis [17]).

The term penicillin [20] was based on Latin pēnicillum, in allusion to the tuft-like shape of its spore-bearing structures.
=> penicillin, penis
pendulum: pendulum: [17] A pendulum is etymologically simply something that ‘hangs’. It is a noun use of the neuter form of the Latin adjective pendulus ‘hanging’ (source of English pendulous [18]). This was a derivative of the verb pendēre ‘hang’, which has contributed a wide range of words to English, among them penchant [17], pendant [14], pendent [15], pending [17], and penthouse, and derived forms such as append [15], appendix [16], depend, impend [16], perpendicular [14], and suspend.
=> append, appendix, depend, impend, penchant, pendant, pendent, penthouse, perpendicular, suspend
penguin: penguin: [16] Penguin is one of the celebrated mystery words of English etymology. It first appears towards the end of the 16th century (referring to the ‘great auk’ as well as to the ‘penguin’) in accounts of voyages to the southern oceans, but no one has ever ascertained where it came from. A narrative of 1582 noted ‘The countrymen call them Penguins (which seemeth to be a Welsh name)’, and in 1613 John Selden speculated that the name came from Welsh pen gwyn ‘white head’.

Etymologists since have not been able to come up with a better guess than this, but it is at odds with the fact that the great auk had a mainly black head, and so do penguins. The earliest known reference to the word (from 1578) mentions the birds being found on an ‘island named Penguin’, off Newfoundland, so it could be that it was originally the name of the island (perhaps ‘white (i.e. snow-covered) headland’) rather than of the bird.

However, a further objection to this theory is that a combination based on Welsh pen gwyn would have produced penwyn, not penguin.
penicillin: penicillin: see pencil
peninsula: peninsula: see island
penis: penis: see pencil
penitence: penitence: see pain
pennon: pennon: see pen
penny: penny: [OE] Penny comes from a prehistoric Germanic *panninggaz, which also produced German pfennig and Dutch and Swedish penning. It has been speculated that this was derived from *pand- ‘pledge, security’, which also produced English pawn – in which case it would denote etymologically a ‘coin used in transactions involving the pledging of a sum as security’.
=> pawn
pension: pension: see ponder
pensive: pensive: see pansy
pent: pent: see pen