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accolade [accolade 词源字典]: accolade: [17] Accolade goes back to an assumed Vulgar Latin verb *accollāre, meaning ‘put one’s arms round someone’s neck’ (collum is Latin for ‘neck’, and is the source of English collar). It put in its first recorded appearance in the Provençal noun acolada, which was borrowed into French as accolade and thence made its way into English. A memory of the original literal meaning is preserved in the use of accolade to refer to the ceremonial striking of a sword on a new knight’s shoulders; the main current sense ‘congratulatory expression of approval’ is a later development.
=> collar[accolade etymology, accolade origin, 英语词源]
accomplice: accomplice: [15] This word was borrowed into English (from French) as complice (and complice stayed in common usage until late in the 19th century). It comes from Latin complex, which is related to English complicated, and originally meant simply ‘an associate’, without any pejorative associations. The form accomplice first appears on the scene in the late 15th century (the first record of it is in William Caxton’s Charles the Great), and it probably arose through a misanalysis of complice preceded by the indefinite article (a complice) as acomplice. It may also have been influenced by accomplish or accompany.
=> complicated
accomplish: accomplish: see complete
accord: accord: [12] In its original source, Vulgar Latin *accordāre, accord meant literally ‘heart-toheart’ (from Latin ad ‘to’ and cord-, the stem of cor ‘heart’). It passed into Old French as acorder, and was borrowed comparatively early into English, turning up in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1123. Its general sense of ‘being in agreement’ has been narrowed down in English and other languages to the notion of ‘being in harmony musically’, and either Italian accordare or French accorder provided the basis for German akkordion (from which English got accordion), the musical instrument invented by Buschmann in Berlin in 1822.
=> cordial
account: account: [14] Account is of Old French origin. It was formed from compter, conter ‘count’ (which derived from Latin computāre) and the prefix a-. Its original meaning in English, too, was ‘count’ or ‘count up’; this had disappeared by the end of the 18th century, but its specialized reference to the keeping of financial records is of equal antiquity. Account for, meaning ‘explain’, arose in the mid 18th century.
=> count
accoutre: accoutre: [16] Accoutre is related to both couture and sew. English borrowed it from French accoutrer, which meant ‘equip with something, especially clothes’. A stage earlier, Old French had acoustrer, formed from cousture (whence couture) and the prefix a-. This came from Vulgar Latin *consūtūra, literally ‘sewn together’, from con- ‘together’ and sūtūra ‘sewn’ (whence English suture); sūtūra in turn came from the past participial stem of Latin suere, which derived from the same Indo- European root as English sew.
=> couture, sew, suture
acolyte: acolyte: [14] Acolyte comes, via Old French and/or medieval Latin, from Greek akólouthos ‘following’. This was formed from the prefix a- (which is related to homos ‘same’) and the noun keleuthos ‘path’, and it appears again in English in anacolouthon [18] (literally ‘not following’), a technical term for lack of grammatical sequence. The original use of acolyte in English was as a minor church functionary, and it did not acquire its more general meaning of ‘follower’ until the 19th century.
=> anacolouthon
acorn: acorn: [OE] Acorn has no etymological connection with oak; its nearest linguistic relative in English is probably acre. The Old English word was æcern, which may well have derived from æcer ‘open land’ (the related Middle High German ackeran referred to beech mast as well as acorns, and Gothic akran developed more widely still, to mean simply ‘fruit’).

There are cognate words in other, non- Germanic, Indo-European languages, such as Russian yagoda ‘berry’ and Welsh aeron ‘fruits’. Left to develop on its own, æcern would have become modern English achern, but the accidental similarity of oak and corn have combined to reroute its pronunciation.
=> acre
acoustic: acoustic: [17] Appropriately enough, acoustic may be distantly related to hear. It first appeared in English in Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning 1605, borrowed from Greek akoustikós. This in turn was derived from the Greek verb for ‘hear’, akoúein, which, it has been speculated, may have some connection with *khauzjan, the original Germanic source of English hear, not to mention German hören and Dutch horen (as well as with Latin cavēre ‘be on one’s guard’, and hence with English caution and caveat).
=> caution, caveat, hear
alcohol: alcohol: [16] Originally, alcohol was a powder, not a liquid. The word comes from Arabic alkuhul, literally ‘the kohl’ – that is, powdered antimony used as a cosmetic for darkening the eyelids. This was borrowed into English via French or medieval Latin, and retained this ‘powder’ meaning for some centuries (for instance, ‘They put between the eyelids and the eye a certain black powder made of a mineral brought from the kingdom of Fez, and called Alcohol’, George Sandys, Travels 1615).

But a change was rapidly taking place: from specifically ‘antimony’, alcohol came to mean any substance obtained by sublimation, and hence ‘quintessence’. Alcohol of wine was thus the ‘quintessence of wine’, produced by distillation or rectification, and by the middle of the 18th century alcohol was being used on its own for the intoxicating ingredient in strong liquor.

The more precise chemical definition (a compound with a hydroxyl group bound to a hydrocarbon group) developed in the 19th century.
=> kohl
alcove: alcove: [17] Alcove is of Arabic origin. It reached English, via French alcôve and Spanish alcoba (where it means ‘recessed area for a bed’), from Arabic al-qobbah ‘the arch, the vault’, hence ‘the vaulted room’, which was derived from the verb qubba ‘vault’.
alfresco: alfresco: see fresh
anacolouthon: anacolouthon: see acolyte
anaconda: anaconda: [18] The term anaconda has a confused history. It appears to come from Sinhalese henakandayā, literally ‘lightningstem’, which referred to a type of slender green snake. This was anglicized as anaconda by the British naturalist John Ray, who in a List of Indian serpents 1693 described it as a snake which ‘crushed the limbs of buffaloes and yoke beasts’.

And the 1797 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica notes it as a ‘very large and terrible snake [from Ceylon] which often devours the unfortunate traveller alive’. However, in the early 19th century the French zoologist François Marie Daudin for no known reason transferred the name to a large South American snake of the boa family, and that application has since stuck.
apricot: apricot: [16] The word apricot reached English by a peculiarly circuitous route from Latin. The original term used by the Romans for the apricot, a fruit which came ultimately from China, was prūnum Arminiacum or mālum Arminiacum ‘Armenian plum or apple’ (Armenia was an early source of choice apricots). But a new term gradually replaced these: mālum praecocum ‘early-ripening apple’ (praecocus was a variant of praecox, from which English gets precocious). Praecocum was borrowed by a succession of languages, making its way via Byzantine Greek beríkokkon and Arabic al birqūq ‘the apricot’ to Spanish albaricoque and Portuguese albricoque.

This was the source of the English word, but its earliest form, abrecock, shows that it had already acquired the initial abrof French abricot, and the final -t followed almost immediately. Spellings with p instead of b are also found in the 16th century.
=> precocious
bacon: bacon: [12] Originally, bacon meant literally ‘meat from a pig’s back’. It comes ultimately from a prehistoric Germanic *bakkon, which was related to *bakam, the source of English back. It reached English via Frankish báko and Old French bacon, and at first meant ‘a side of pig meat (fresh or cured)’. Gradually it narrowed down to ‘a side of cured pig meat’ (bringing it into competition with the Old English word flitch, now virtually obsolete), and finally to simply ‘cured pig meat’.
=> back
balcony: balcony: [17] Balcony entered English from Italian balcone, but it seems to be ultimately of Germanic origin. It was probably borrowed into Old Italian, with the meaning ‘scaffold’. from Germanic *balkon ‘beam’, source of English balk – perhaps from the notion of a platform or scaffold being built from beams of timber, although the connection is not altogether clear.
=> balk
beacon: beacon: [OE] In Old English, bēacen meant simply ‘sign’; it did not develop its modern senses ‘signal fire’ and ‘lighthouse’ until the 14th century. Its source is West Germanic *baukna, from which English also gets beckon [OE].
=> beckon
become: become: [OE] Become is a compound verb found in other Germanic languages (German bekommen, for instance, and Dutch bekomen), which points to a prehistoric Germanic source *bikweman, based on *kweman, source of English come. Originally it meant simply ‘come, arrive’, but the modern senses ‘come to be’ and ‘be suitable’ had developed by the 12th century. A parallel semantic development occurred in French: Latin dēvenīre meant ‘come’, but its modern French descendant devenir means ‘become’.
=> come
bellicose: bellicose: see rebel
boycott: boycott: [19] The word boycott sprang into general use in the year 1880, to describe the activities of the Irish Land League. This was an organization set up in 1879 by the Irish nationalist Michael Davitt to press for agrarian reforms, rent reductions, etc. Those who did not agree with its aims, it subjected to an organized campaign of ostracism. One of the first to suffer from this was one Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832–97), a British estate manager in County Mayo. Hence ‘to boycott’, which became a buzzword of the early 1880s, was quickly adopted by other European languages, and has remained in current use ever since.
broccoli: broccoli: see broach
calico: calico: [16] Calico, a plain cotton cloth, was originally Calicut-cloth. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was the main export of Calicut, now known as Kozhikode, a city and port on the southwest coast of India whose first European visitor was the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama (c. 1469–1524). In the 19th century Calicut was South India’s major port. (It has no connection with Calcutta.)
catacomb: catacomb: [17] Catacomb derives from the name of an underground cemetary in ancient Rome, the Coemetērium Catacumbas, beneath the Basilica of St Sebastian near the Appian Way. It is said that the bodies of St Peter and St Paul were deposited in or near its subterranean passages. The word’s more general application to any underground labyrinth dates from the 17th century. The original significance of Latin Catacumbas is not known.
charcoal: charcoal: [14] The words char and charcoal are related, but not in the way commonsense might lead one to suppose: for the verb char [17], originally apparently a charcoal-burner’s term, appears to derive from charcoal. So etymologically, the element char has nothing to do with ‘burning’. There are two main suggestions as to charcoal’s origins: firstly that it comes from Old French charbon ‘charcoal’ (related to English carbon); and secondly that it represents the now obsolete English verb chare (see CHARWOMAN), which in Old English times (cerran) meant ‘turn’.

On the basis of this theory, the etymological meaning of the word would be ‘turning into charcoal’ (for in Old English, coal meant ‘charcoal’ as well as ‘coal’).
chocolate: chocolate: [17] Chocolate is one of the contributions made to English by the Nahuatl language of the Aztec people. Their xocolatl was a compound noun formed from xococ ‘bitter’ and atl ‘water’, and therefore when first adopted by European languages (via Spanish) it was used for the drink ‘chocolate’. This was its original sense in English, and it was not for half a century or more that it came to be applied to solid, edible ‘chocolate’.
coach: coach: [16] Coach is one of the few English words borrowed from Hungarian. It comes (via French coche and German kutsche) from Hungarian kocsi, an adjective meaning ‘of Kocs’ (Kocs is a village in north-east Hungary, between Budapest and Györ, where carriages, carts, etc were made). In Hungarian the original full form was kocsi szeker ‘cart from Kocs’. The modern sense ‘instructor, trainer’ originated in 19th-century university slang, the notion being that the student was conveyed through the exam by the tutor as if he were riding in a carriage.
coal: coal: [OE] In Old English, col meant ‘glowing ember’. It came from a prehistoric Germanic *kolam (source also of German kohle and Dutch kool), which may be related to Irish Gaelic gual ‘coal’. By the 12th century at the latest it was also being used for ‘charcoal’ (the word charcoal is based on it), but it was not until the mid 13th century that the modern application to the black solid fossil fuel appears.

It seems quite likely that the word’s underlying etymological meaning is ‘glow’. Derived from coal are collier [14], which originally meant ‘charcoal-burner’, colliery [17], and possibly collie [17], on the basis of its dark colour.
=> charcoal, collier
coarse: coarse: [14] For such an everyday word, the origins of coarse are surprisingly clouded. It first appears in the forms corse or course, and meaning ‘ordinary, everyday’, which has led to speculation that it is an application of the noun course, in the sense ‘the ordinary run of things, the usual practice’; however, not all etymologists accept this. The modern spelling coarse became established in the 18th century.
coast: coast: [13] Latin costa meant ‘rib’ (hence the English medical term intercostal ‘between the ribs’), but also more generally ‘flank, side’. It was in this sense that it passed into Old French as coste, and subsequently into English. The modern meaning ‘seashore’ (which had already developed in Old French) arises from the shore being thought of as the ‘side’ or ‘edge’ of the land (compare seaside).

Amongst the senses of the French word little represented in English is ‘hillside, slope’; it was however adopted in North America for a ‘slope down which one slides on a sledge’, and came to be used in the mid 19th century as a verb meaning ‘sledge down such a slope’. That was the source of the modern verbal sense ‘freewheel’. The coster of costermonger [16] was originally costard, a variety of apple named from its prominent ‘ribs’.

And another hidden relative is cutlet [18], borrowed from French côtelette, literally ‘little rib’.
=> costermonger, cutlet, intercostal
coat: coat: [13] Coat seems originally to have signified a sort of short close-fitting cloth tunic with sleeves, worn by men. Over the centuries fashion has lengthened the garment, and its male exclusivity has disappeared (originally, as a woman’s garment a coat was a skirt, a sense preserved in petticoat). The word is of Germanic origin (it has been traced back to Frankish *kotta), but it reached English via Old French cote.
coax: coax: [16] In the 16th and 17th century a cokes was a ‘simpleton, someone easily duped’ (it is not known where the word came from, although it might perhaps be related to cockney). To cokes someone was thus to ‘make a cokes of them, fool them’. This spelling survived until the 18th century, when it was supplanted by coax. The word’s meaning, meanwhile, had passed via ‘treat as a simpleton or pet’ and ‘fondle’ to ‘wheedle’.
cob: cob: [15] Cob has a bizarre range of meanings – ‘nut’, ‘horse’, ‘male swan’, ‘loaf’, ‘ear of maize’ – but a distillation of them points back to an original ‘head, or something similarly rounded’ (cobnuts and cobloaves, for example, are spherical, and the male swan is the ‘chief’ or ‘leader’). It is therefore tempting to see a connection with the now obsolete cop ‘top, head’ (probably represented in cobweb), and even with Latin caput ‘head’.
=> cobble
cobalt: cobalt: [17] German kobold means ‘goblin’: and in former times it was believed by German silver miners that impurities in the ore they were extracting, which lessened the value of the silver and even made them ill, were put there by these mischievous creatures. In fact these impurities were a silver-white metallic element, which was named kobalt after a Middle High German variant of kobold (the miners’ sickness was probably caused by the arsenic with which it occurred).
cobble: cobble: Cobble as in cobblestone [15] and cobble ‘mend’ [15] are two distinct words. The former was derived from cob ‘rounded lump’, with the diminutive suffix -le. The earliest evidence of it is in the compound cobblestone, and it is not recorded on its own until about 1600. The verb cobble is a back-formation from cobbler ‘shoemaker’ [14], of unknown origin. The derivative cobblers ‘nonsense’ [20] is short for cobbler’s awls, rhyming slang for ‘balls’.
=> cob
cobra: cobra: [19] Cobra is a shortening of Portuguese cobra de capella, which came into English in India in the 17th century. This meant literally ‘snake with a hood’: cobra from Latin colubra ‘snake’ and capella (referring of course to the ‘hood’ it makes when agitated, by spreading out the skin at the side of its head) from Vulgar Latin *cappellus ‘little cape’, from late Latin cappa ‘hood’.
=> cap, cape, chapel, chaperon
cobweb: cobweb: [14] A cobweb was originally literally a web woven by a cop, a Middle English word for ‘spider’. It was short for attercop ‘spider’, a compound of Old English origin which had largely died out by the 17th century. This seems to have meant literally ‘poison head’, from Old English ātōr ‘poison’ and coppe ‘head, top’ (a possible relative of English cob). It was revived by J R R Tolkien in The Hobbit 1937.
cocaine: cocaine: [19] Cocaine is made from the dried leaves of the coca bush, a plant native to the Andes, and its name was formed (perhaps originally in French, as cocaïne) from the plant’s name. That was a local name, Quechua koka, probably from the Aymara language of Bolivia and Peru, and it reached Europe in the 16th century by way of Spanish coca.
coccyx: coccyx: [17] The Greek physician Galen considered that the small tapering bone at the base of the human spine resembled a cuckoo’s beak. He therefore named it kókkux, which was Greek for ‘cuckoo’. It reached English via the Latin form coccyx.
cochineal: cochineal: [16] Cochineal ‘red dye’ comes via French cochenille from Old Spanish cochinilla, a term applied both to the dye and to the small insect related to the mealybugs, from whose dried body it is made. It is generally thought to be a derivative of Latin coccinus ‘scarlet’, which in turn came from Greek kokkinos, a derivative of kókos, the Greek term for the cochineal insect (the word originally meant ‘berry, seed’ – it was applied to various bacteria, such as streptococcus and staphylococcus, because of their spherical seedlike shape – and it was thought in ancient times that the dried body of the insect was a berry).
=> staphylococcus, streptococcus
cock: cock: [OE] The word cock is probably ultimately of onomatopoeic origin, imitative of the male fowl’s call (like the lengthier English cock-adoodle- doo [16], French coquerico, and German kikeriki). Beyond that it is difficult to go with any certainty; it reflects similar words in other languages, such as medieval Latin coccus and Old Norse kokkr, but which if any the English word was borrowed from is not clear.

It has been suggested that it goes back to a Germanic base *kuk-, of which a variant was the source of chicken, but typical Old English spellings, such as kok and kokke, suggest that it may have been a foreign borrowing rather than a native Germanic word – perhaps pointing to Germanic coccus. The origin of the interconnected set of senses ‘spout, tap’, ‘hammer of a firearm’, and ‘penis’ is not known; it is possible that it represents an entirely different word, but the fact that German hahn ‘hen’ has the same meanings suggests otherwise.

Of derived words, cocker [19], as in ‘cocker spaniel’, comes from cocking, the sport of shooting woodcock, and cocky [18] is probably based on the notion of the cock as a spirited or swaggering bird, lording it over his hens (there may well be some connection with cock ‘penis’, too, for there is an isolated record of cocky meaning ‘lecherous’ in the 16th century). Cockerel [15] was originally a diminutive form.
=> chicken, cocky
cock-a-hoop: cock-a-hoop: [16] Cock-a-hoop comes from a 16th- and 17th-century expression set the cock on the hoop ‘make merry’ – but exactly how the expression arose is not clear. One obvious interpretation is that it meant ‘put the tap on the barrel’ – that is, let the wine or beer flow freely – but it has also been suggested that hoop here means ‘measure of grain’ (a sense which originated in the 16th century), the notion being that to put a cockerel on a heap of grain implied prodigality.
cockatoo: cockatoo: [17] Cockatoo was originally a Malay word, although it has changed somewhat under the influence of English cock. It comes via Dutch kaketoe from Malay kakatua, a compound formed from kakak ‘elder brother or sister’ and tua ‘old’. A related word is cockatiel ‘small Australian parrot’ [19]; it comes ultimately from Portuguese cacatilha, formed from Malay kakatua with the Portuguese diminutive suffix -ilha, and it reached English via Dutch kaketielje.
cockatrice: cockatrice: [14] The name of the cockatrice, a mythical serpent whose glance could kill, has a bizarre history. It started life as medieval Latin calcātrix, which meant literally ‘tracker, hunter’ (it was formed from the verb calcāre ‘tread, track’, a derivative of calx ‘heel’). This was a direct translation of Greek ikhneúmōn (a derivative of ikhneúein ‘track’), a name given to a mysterious Egyptian creature in ancient times which was said to prey on crocodiles.

At one point Latin calcātrix, later caucātrix, came to be used for the crocodile itself, but this application never gained much currency in English (which adopted the word via Old French cocatris). Instead, it was adopted as another name for the basilisk, a mythical serpent. The accidental similarity of the first syllable to cock led both to the embroidering of the basilisk/cockatrice legend, so that it was said to have been born from a cock’s egg, and to the word’s 16th-century rerouting as a heraldic term for a beast with the head, wings, and body of a cock and the tail of a serpent.
cockchafer: cockchafer: [18] Etymologically, cockchafer (a medium-sized beetle) is probably a ‘large gnawer’. The second part of the word, which goes back to Old English times (ceafor), can be traced to a prehistoric base *kab- ‘gnaw’, source also of English jowl. The first element, cock, may be an allusion to the species’ greater size in relation to other chafers.
=> jowl
cockle: cockle: [14] The cockle is related etymologically to another mollusc, the conch: they both began life in Greek kónkhē – which meant ‘mussel’ as well as ‘conch’. From this was formed the diminutive konkhúlion ‘small variety of conch’ – hence ‘cockle’. The Greek word subsequently became reduced to kokhúlion, whose plural passed into medieval Latin as *cochilia.

Next in the chain was Old French coquille, source of the English word. The origin of the phrase cockles of one’s heart (first recorded in the mid 17th century) are not clear: some have claimed that the heart resembles a cockle shell, or more specifically that the fibres of the heart muscle spiral like the lines on a cockle shell, while others note a supposed resemblance of cockle to corculum, a Latin diminutive of cor ‘heart’, and others again point out that the scientific name for the cockle is Cardium, from Greek kardíā ‘heart’, but none of these explanations really carries conviction.
=> conch
cockney: cockney: [14] Etymologically, a cockney is a ‘cock’s egg’ (it comes from cokene, the old genitive plural of cock, and ey, the Middle English word for ‘egg’). This was a medieval term for a small or misshapen egg, the ‘runt’ of the clutch, supposedly laid by a cock, and it came to be applied (probably egged on by Middle English cocker ‘pamper’) to a ‘pampered child’ or ‘mother’s boy’.

In the 16th century we find that it has passed on to ‘town dweller’ (the notion being that people who lived in towns were soft and effete compared with countrymen), and by around 1600 it had started to mean more specifically ‘someone born in the city of London’. The popular definition ‘someone born within the sound of Bow bells’ is first reported by the lexicographer John Minsheu in 1617.
=> cock, egg
cockroach: cockroach: [17] Cockroach is a product of folk etymology, the process by which a ‘foreign’ – sounding is adapted by speakers of a language so as to seem more familiar. In this case the foreign word was Spanish cucaracha. This was evidently too much for 17th-century English tongues, so the first element was transformed into cock and the second to roach (presumably after the freshwater fish of that name). Modern English roach ‘butt of a marijuana cigarette’ [20] is probably an abbreviation of cockroach, but this is not certain.
cocktail: cocktail: [19] The origins of the word cocktail are mysterious. It first appeared (in America) in the first decade of the 19th century, roughly contemporary with cocktail meaning ‘horse with a cocked tail’ – that is, one cut short and so made to stick up like a cock’s tail – but whether the two words are connected, and if so, how the drink came to be named after such a horse, are not at all clear.
cocoa: cocoa: [18] Like chocolate, cocoa came to English from the Nahuatl language of the Aztec people. Their cacahuatl meant ‘beans of the cocoa tree’. Its first element was borrowed into Spanish as cacao. This was adopted by English in the 16th century, and remained the standard form until the 18th century, when it was modified to cocoa. Originally it was pronounced with three syllables (/ko-ko-a/), but confusion with the coco of coconut (which was also sometimes spelled cocoa) led to the current twosyllable pronunciation.