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bulb [bulb 词源字典]: bulb: [16] Bulb can be traced back to Greek bólbos, which was a name for various plants with a rounded swelling underground stem. In its passage via Latin bulbus to English it was often applied specifically to the ‘onion’, and that was its original meaning in English. Its application to the light bulb, dating from the 1850s, is an extension of an earlier 19th-century sense ‘bulbshaped swelling in a glass tube’, used from the 1830s for thermometer bulbs.
[bulb etymology, bulb origin, 英语词源]
bulb (n.): 1560s, "an onion," from Middle French bulbe (15c.), from Latin bulbus "bulb, bulbous root, onion," from Greek bolbos "plant with round swelling on underground stem." Expanded by 1800 to "swelling in a glass tube" (thermometer bulb, light bulb, etc.).
bulbous (adj.): 1570s, "pertaining to a bulb," from Latin bulbosus, from bulbus (see bulb). Meaning "bulb-shaped" is recorded from 1783. Related: Bulbously; bulbousness.
olfactory bulb: "A bulb-like terminal expansion of the telencephalon on which the olfactory nerve fibres end", Mid 19th cent.; earliest use found in Robley Dunglison (1798–1869), physician and medical writer. From olfactory + bulb, apparently after post-classical Latin bulbus olfactorius.