英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

skim [skim 词源字典]: skim: see scum
[skim etymology, skim origin, 英语词源]
skin: skin: [11] The ancestral English word for ‘skin’ is hide. Skin was borrowed at the end of the Old English period from Old Norse skinn (source of Swedish skin and Danish skind). The etymological notion underlying the word is of ‘peeling’ or ‘slicing’ off an outer layer (it goes back ultimately to a prehistoric Indo-European base *sken- ‘cut off’, which was an extension of *sek- ‘cut’, source of English section, sector, sickle, etc), and so it presumably referred originally to the pelts removed from hunted animals.
=> section, segment, sickle
skipper: skipper: see ship
skirmish: skirmish: [14] English adapted skirmish from eskermiss-, the present stem of Old French eskermir ‘fight with a sword’. This in turn went back to a Frankish *skirmjan, a relative of modern German schirmen. A variant of skirmish arose with the i and r sounds reversed, giving scrimish, which is the source of modern English scrimmage [15] and also of scrummage [19] and its abbreviation scrum [19].
=> scrimmage, scrummage
skirt: skirt: [13] Essentially skirt is the same word as shirt. It was borrowed from Old Norse skyrta ‘shirt’, which came from the same prehistoric Germanic source as English shirt, and likewise meant etymologically ‘short garment’. It is not clear why English came to use the word for ‘woman’s garment hanging from the waist’, but a link may be provided by modern Icelandic skyrta, which denotes a sort of long shirt with full tails that come down well below the waist. Swedish skört and Danish skørt ‘skirt’ were borrowed from the related Middle Low German schorte ‘apron’.
=> shear, shirt, short
skive: skive: see eschew
skol: skol: see scale
skull: skull: [13] The Old English word for ‘skull’ was hēafodpanne, literally ‘head-pan’. It has never been firmly established where its Middle English replacement skull came from, but is seems more than likely that it was borrowed from a Scandinavian language (Swedish and Norwegian have skalle ‘skull’).
sky: sky: [13] Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors called the sky heofon ‘heaven’. Not until the early Middle English period did heaven begin to be pushed aside by sky, a borrowing from Old Norse ský ‘cloud’. This came ultimately from an Indo- European base meaning ‘cover’, which also produced Latin obscūrus, source of English obscure [14]. (For a while English continued to use sky for ‘cloud’ as well as for ‘sky’: the medieval Scots poet William Dunbar wrote, ‘When sable all the heaven arrays with misty vapours, clouds, and skies’.)
=> obscure
slack: slack: [OE] In common with Dutch and Swedish slak, slack comes from a prehistoric Germanic *slakaz. This was derived from the same ultimate source that produced Latin laxus ‘loose’ (source of English lax, relax, release, and relish) and languēre ‘languish’ (source of English languish). The plural noun slacks was first used for ‘trousers’ in the early 19th century. (The noun slack ‘small pieces of coal’ [15] is a different word, probably borrowed from Middle Dutch slacke ‘waste produced by smelting metal’.)
=> languish, lax, relax, release, relinquish
slander: slander: [13] Slander and scandal are ultimately the same word. Both go back to Latin scandalum ‘cause of offence’. This passed into Old French as escandle, which in due course had its consonants switched round to produce esclandre, source of English slander. Scandal was borrowed from the later French form scandale.
=> scandal
slang: slang: [18] Slang is a mystery word. It first appeared in underworld argot of the mid-18th century. It had a range of meanings – ‘cant’, ‘nonsense’, ‘line of business’, and, as a verb, ‘defraud’. Most of these have died out, but ‘cant’ is the lineal ancestor of the word’s modern meaning. It is not clear where it came from, although the use of the verb slang for ‘abuse’, and the expression slanging match ‘abusive argument’, suggest some connection with Norwegian dialect sleng- ‘offensive language’ (found only in compounds).
slat: slat: [14] Slat was adapted from Old French esclat ‘piece broken off, splinter’. This was derived from the verb esclater ‘shatter’, a descendant of Vulgar Latin *esclatāre or *exclatāre. And this in turn may have been formed from a base *clatsuggestive of the sound of breaking. An alternative theory, however, is that it goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *slaitan ‘cause to split or break’, a variant of *slītan ‘split, break’ (from which English gets slice and slit).

The feminine form of Old French esclat was esclate, which has given English slate [14]. And its modern descendant éclat was borrowed by English in the 17th century in the metaphorical sense ‘brilliance’. It has been conjectured that esclater may have been related to Old French esclachier ‘break’, which could have had a variant form *esclaschier.

This would be a plausible candidate as a source for English slash [14].
=> slate
slaughter: slaughter: [13] Slaughter was borrowed from Old Norse *slahtr, which went back to the same prehistoric Germanic base (*slakh- ‘strike’) that produced English slay. Old English appears to have had its own version of the word, *slæht, which survived into the 17th century as slaught. This forms the second syllable of onslaught [17], where it replaced the -slag in the borrowing from Middle Dutch aenslag (literally ‘onstriking’).
=> onslaught, slay
slave: slave: [13] The word slave commemorates the fate of the Slavic people in the past, reduced by conquest to a state of slavery. For ultimately slave and Slav are one and the same. The earliest record we have of the ethnic name is as Slavic Sloveninu, a word of unknown origin borrowed by Byzantine Greek as Sklábos and passed on to medieval Latin as Sclavus. It was this that was turned into a generic term sclavus ‘slave’, which passed into English via Old French esclave.
slay: slay: [OE] Etymologically, slay means ‘hit’ (its German relative schlagen still does), but from the earliest Old English times it was also used for ‘kill’. It comes from a prehistoric Germanic base *slakh-, *slag-, *slög- ‘hit’, which also produced English onslaught, slaughter, the sledge of sledgehammer, sleight, sly, and possibly slag [16] (from the notion of ‘hitting’ rock to produce fragments), slog, and slug ‘hit’.
=> onslaught, slaughter, sledge, sleight, sly
sleaze: sleaze: [20] It is common practice to name fabrics after their place of manufacture, and from the 17th century that applied to cloth made in Silesia (a region in east-central Europe, now mainly within Poland), and in particular to a type of fine linen or cotton. It did not take long for Silesia to be worn down to Slesia or Sleasia and finally to Sleasie. Also in the 17th century we find sleasie being applied as an adjective to fabrics that are thin or flimsy, and although a connection between the two usages has never been proved, the closeness of meaning seems unlikely to be coincidental.

Soon sleasie (or sleazy) was being used metaphorically for ‘slight, flimsy, insubstantial’. It took a sudden sideways semantic leap in the 1930s and 40s when it began to be used as a term of moral disapproval, denoting squalor, depravity or slatternliness, and it was in this sense that the back-formed noun sleaze first emerged in the 1960s. Then in the 1980s the word shifted its target from sex to financially motivated misdemeanours, notably the taking of bribes (the new usage is first recorded in ‘The sleaze factor’, a chapter heading in the book Gambling with History (1983) by the US journalist Laurence Barrett).
sledge: sledge: English has two words sledge. The sledge [OE] of sledgehammer [15] was once a word in its own right, meaning ‘heavy hammer’. It goes back to the prehistoric Germanic base *slakh- ‘hit’, source also of English slaughter, slay, etc. Sledge ‘snow vehicle’ [17] was borrowed from Middle Dutch sleedse. Like Dutch slee (source of English sleigh [18]) and Middle Low German sledde (source of English sled [14]), its ultimate ancestor was the prehistoric Germanic base *slid- ‘slide’ (source of English slide). Sledging ‘unsettling a batsman with taunts’ [20], which originated in Australia in the 1970s, may have been derived from sledgehammer.
=> slaughter, slay, sly; sled, sleigh, slide
sleek: sleek: [16] Sleek originated as a variant form of slick [14], which probably went back to an unrecorded Old English *slice. It apparently has relatives in Icelandic slíkja and Norwegian slikja ‘smoothen’.
=> slick
sleep: sleep: [OE] Sleep comes from a prehistoric West Germanic *slǣpan, which also produced German schlafen and Dutch slapen. Its ancestry has not been pieced together in detail, but it is related to Dutch slap ‘sluggish’ and German schlaff ‘slack, loose’, and a link has been suggested with Lithuanian slabnas ‘weak’.