quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- almond[almond 词源字典]
- almond: [13] The l in almond is a comparatively recent addition; its immediate source, Latin amandula, did not have one (and nor, correspondingly, do French amande, Portuguese amendoa, Italian mandola, or German mandel). But the relative frequency of the prefix al- in Latin-derived words seems to have prompted its grafting on to amandula in its passage from Latin to Old French, giving a hypothetical *almandle and eventually al(e)mande.
French in due course dropped the l, but English acquired the word when it was still there. Going further back in time, the source of amandula was Latin amygdula, of which it was an alteration, and amygdula in turn was borrowed from the Greek word for ‘almond’, amygdálē. The Latin and Greek forms have been reborrowed into English at a much later date in various scientific terms: amygdala, for instance, an almond-shaped mass of nerve tissue in the brain; amygdalin, a glucoside found in bitter almonds; and amygdaloid, a rock with almondshaped cavities.
[almond etymology, almond origin, 英语词源] - catamaran
- catamaran: [17] Catamaran is a word borrowed from the Tamil language of the southeast coast of India. It is a compound meaning literally ‘tied wood’, made up of kattu ‘tie’ and maram ‘wood, tree’. It was first recorded in English in William Dampier’s Voyages 1697: ‘The smaller sort of Bark-logs are more governable than the others … This sort of Floats are used in many places both in the East and West Indies. On the Coast of Coromandel … they call them Catamarans’.
- fractal (n.)
- "never-ending pattern," 1975, from French fractal, from Latin fractus "interrupted, irregular," literally "broken," past participle of frangere "to break" (see fraction). Coined by French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010) in "Les Objets Fractals."
Many important spatial patterns of Nature are either irregular or fragmented to such an extreme degree that ... classical geometry ... is hardly of any help in describing their form. ... I hope to show that it is possible in many cases to remedy this absence of geometric representation by using a family of shapes I propose to call fractals -- or fractal sets. [Mandelbrot, "Fractals," 1977]