英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

acid [acid 词源字典]: acid: [17] The original notion contained in the word acid is ‘pointedness’. In common with a wide range of other English words (for example acute, acne, edge, oxygen) it can be traced back ultimately to the Indo-European base *ak-, which meant ‘be pointed or sharp’. Among the Latin derivatives of this base was the adjective ācer ‘sharp’.

From this was formed the verb acere ‘be sharp or sour’, and from this verb in turn the adjective acidus ‘sour’. The scientist Francis Bacon seems to have been the first to introduce it into English, in the early 17th century (though whether directly from Latin or from French acide is not clear). Its use as a noun, in the strict technical sense of a class of substances that react with alkalis or bases, developed during the 18th century.
=> acacia, acne, acrid, acute, alacrity, ear, edge, oxygen[acid etymology, acid origin, 英语词源]
cup: cup: [OE] Cup is a member of a large Indo- European family of words denoting broadly ‘round container’ that go back ultimately to the bases *kaup- (source of English head) and *keup-. This produced Greek kúpellon ‘drinking vessel’, English hive, and Latin cūpa ‘barrel’, source of English coop [13] (via Middle Dutch kūpe) and cooper ‘barrel-maker’ [14] (from a derivative of Middle Dutch kūpe). A postclassical by-form of cūpa was cuppa, from which came German kopf ‘head’ and English cup.
=> coop, cupola
air raid (n.): 1914, from air (n.1) + raid (n.); originally in reference to British attacks Sept. 22, 1914, on Zeppelin bases at Cologne and Düsseldorf in World War I. The German word is Fliegerangriff "aviator-attack," and if Old English had survived into the 20th century our word instead might be fleogendeongrype.
One didn't dare to inhale for fear of breathing it in. It was the sound of eighteen hundred airplanes approaching Hamburg from the south at an unimaginable height. We had already experienced two hundred or even more air raids, among them some very heavy ones, but this was something completely new. And yet there was an immediate recognition: this was what everyone had been waiting for, what had hung for months like a shadow over everything we did, making us weary. It was the end. [Hans Erich Nossack, "Der Untergang," 1942]
ant (n.): c. 1500, from Middle English ampte (late 14c.), from Old English æmette "ant," from West Germanic *amaitjo (cognates: Old High German ameiza, German Ameise) from a compound of bases *ai- "off, away" + *mai- "cut," from PIE *mai- "to cut" (cognates: maim). Thus the insect's name is, etymologically, "the biter off."
As þycke as ameten crepeþ in an amete hulle [chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, 1297]
Emmet survived into 20c. as an alternative form. White ant "termite" is from 1729. To have ants in one's pants "be nervous and fidgety" is from 1934, made current by a popular song; antsy embodies the same notion.
polyhedron (n.): 1560s, from Latinized form of Greek polyedron, neuter of adjective polyedros "having many bases or sides," from polys "many" (see poly-) + hedra "seat, base, chair, face of a geometric solid," from PIE root *sed- (1) "to sit" (see sedentary).