英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

about [about 词源字典]: about: [OE] About in Old English times meant ‘around the outside of’; it did not develop its commonest present-day meaning, ‘concerning’, until the 13th century. In its earliest incarnation it was onbūtan, a compound made up of on and būtan ‘outside’ (this is the same word as modern English but, which was itself originally a compound, formed from the ancestors of by and out – so broken down into its ultimate constituents, about is on by out).
=> but, by, out[about etymology, about origin, 英语词源]
algorithm: algorithm: [13] Algorithm comes from the name of an Arab mathematician, in full Abu Ja far Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi (c. 780–c. 850), who lived and taught in Baghdad and whose works in translation introduced Arabic numerals to the West. The last part of his name means literally ‘man from Khwarizm’, a town on the borders of Turkmenistan, now called Khiva. The Arabic system of numeration and calculation, based on 10, of which he was the chief exponent, became known in Arabic by his name – al-khwarizmi.

This was borrowed into medieval Latin as algorismus (with the Arabic -izmi transformed into the Latin suffix -ismus ‘-ism’). In Old French algorismus became augorime, which was the basis of the earliest English form of the word, augrim. From the 14th century onwards, Latin influence gradually led to the adoption of the spelling algorism in English.

This remains the standard form of the word when referring to the Arabic number system; but in the late 17th century an alternative version, algorithm, arose owing to association with Greek árithmos ‘number’ (source of arithmetic [13]), and this became established from the 1930s onwards as the term for a stepby- step mathematical procedure, as used in computing. Algol, the name of a computer programming language, was coined in the late 1950s from ‘algorithmic language’.
=> allegory, allergy, arithmetic
alma mater: alma mater: [17] Alma mater literally means ‘mother who fosters or nourishes’. The Latin adjective almus ‘giving nourishment’, derives from the verb alere ‘nourish’ (source of English alimony and alimentary). The epithet alma mater was originally applied by the Romans to a number of goddesses whose particular province was abundance, notably Ceres and Cybele.

In the 17th century it began to be used in English with reference to a person’s former school or college, thought of as a place of intellectual and spiritual nourishment (Alexander Pope was amongst its earliest users, although the reference is far from kind: ‘Proceed, great days! ’till Learning fly the shore … ’Till Isis’ Elders reel, their pupils’ sport, And Alma mater lie dissolv’d in Port!’ Dunciad 1718).

If that which nourishes is almus, those who are nourished are alumni (similarly derived from the verb alere). Alumnus was first applied in English to a pupil – and more specifically a former pupil or graduate – in the 17th century; an early reference combines the notions of alumnus and alma mater: ‘Lieutenant Governor … promised his Interposition for them, as become such an Alumnus to such an Alma Mater’, William Sewall’s Diary 12 October 1696.

The first example of the feminine form, alumna, comes in the 1880s.
=> alimentary, alimony, alumnus
almanac: almanac: [14] One of the first recorded uses of almanac in English is by Chaucer in his Treatise on the astrolabe 1391: ‘A table of the verray Moeuyng of the Mone from howre to howre, every day and in every signe, after thin Almenak’. At that time an almanac was specifically a table of the movements and positions of the sun, moon, and planets, from which astronomical calculations could be made; other refinements and additions, such as a calendar, came to be included over succeeding centuries.

The earliest authenticated reference to an almanac comes in the (Latin) works of the English scientist Roger Bacon, in the mid 13th century. But the ultimate source of the word is obscure. Its first syllable, al-, and its general relevance to medieval science and technology, strongly suggest an Arabic origin, but no convincing candidate has been found.
amaze: amaze: [OE] Old English āmasian meant ‘stupefy’ or ‘stun’, with perhaps some reminiscences of an original sense ‘stun by hitting on the head’ still adhering to it. Some apparently related forms in Scandinavian languages, such as Swedish masa ‘be sluggish’ and Norwegian dialect masast ‘become unconscious’, suggest that it may originally have been borrowed from Old Norse.

The modern sense ‘astonish’ did not develop until the end of the 16th century; Shakespeare was one of its earliest exponents: ‘Crystal eyes, whose full perfection all the world amazes’, Venus and Adonis 1592. By the end of the 13th century both the verb and its related noun had developed a form without the initial a-, and in the late 14th century the word – maze – had begun to be applied to a deliberately confusing structure.
=> maze
ambulance: ambulance: [19] Originally, ambulance was a French term for a field hospital – that is, one set up at a site convenient for a battlefield, and capable of being moved on to the next battlefield when the army advanced (or retreated). In other words, it was an itinerant hospital, and the ultimate source of the term is the Latin verb ambulāre ‘walk’ (as in amble). The earliest recorded term for such a military hospital in French was the 17th-century hôpital ambulatoire.

This was later replaced by hôpital ambulant, literally ‘walking hospital’, and finally, at the end of the 18th century, by ambulance. This sense of the word had died out by the late 19th century, but already its attributive use, in phrases such as ambulance cart and ambulance wagon, had led to its being used for a vehicle for carrying the wounded or sick.
=> acid, alacrity, amble, perambulator
apple: apple: [OE] Words related to apple are found all over Europe; not just in Germanic languages (German apfel, Dutch appel, Swedish äpple), but also in Balto-Slavonic (Lithuanian óbuolas, Polish jabtko), and Celtic (Irish ubhall, Welsh afal) languages. The Old English version was æppel, which developed to modern English apple.

Apparently from earliest times the word was applied not just to the fruit we now know as the apple, but to any fruit in general. For example, John de Trevisa, in his translation of De proprietatibus rerum 1398 wrote ‘All manner apples that is, “fruit” that are enclosed in a hard skin, rind, or shell, are called Nuces nuts’. The term earth-apple has been applied to several vegetables, including the cucumber and the potato (compare French pomme de terre), and pineapple (which originally meant ‘pine cone’, with particular reference to the edible pine nuts) was applied to the tropical fruit in the 17th century, because of its supposed resemblance to a pine cone.
appraise: appraise: [15] Originally, appraise meant simply ‘fix the price of’. It came from the Old French verb aprisier ‘value’, which is ultimately a parallel formation with appreciate; it is not clear whether it came directly from late Latin appretiāre, or whether it was a newly formed compound in Old French, based on pris ‘price’. Its earliest spellings in English were thus apprize and apprise, and these continued in use down to the 19th century, with the more metaphorical meaning ‘estimate the worth of’ gradually coming to the fore.

From the 16th century onwards, however, it seems that association with the word praise (which is quite closely related etymologically) has been at work, and by the 19th century the form appraise was firmly established. Apprise ‘inform’, with which appraise is often confused (and which appears superficially to be far closer to the source pris or pretium ‘price’), in fact has no etymological connection with it.

It comes from appris, the past participle of French apprendre ‘teach’ (closely related to English apprehend).
=> appreciate, price
apprehend: apprehend: [14] The underlying notion in apprehend is of ‘seizing’ or ‘grasping’; it comes ultimately from the Latin verb prehendere ‘seize’ (source also of comprehend, predatory, and prehensile). Latin apprehendere ‘lay hold of’, formed with the prefix ad-, developed the metaphorical meaning ‘seize with the mind’ – that is, ‘learn’; and that was the earliest meaning apprehend had in English when it was borrowed either directly from Latin or via French appréhender: John de Trevisa, for instance, in his translation of De proprietatibus rerum 1398 writes ‘he holds in mind … without forgetting, all that he apprehends’.

More familiar modern senses, such as ‘arrest’ and ‘understand’, followed in the 16th century. A contracted form of the Latin verb, apprendere, became Old French aprendre, modern French apprendre ‘learn’. This provided the basis for the derivative aprentis ‘someone learning’, from which English gets apprentice [14]; and its past participle appris, in the causative sense ‘taught’, was the source of English apprise [17].

The chief modern meaning of the derived noun apprehension, ‘fear’, arose via the notion of ‘grasping something with the mind’, then ‘forming an idea of what will happen in the future’, and finally ‘anticipation of something unpleasant’.
=> apprentice, comprehend, impregnable, predatory, prehensile
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
aspic: aspic: [18] Aspic was borrowed from French, where, like the archaic English asp which reputedly bit Cleopatra, it also means ‘snake’ (ultimately from Greek aspís). This has led to speculation that aspic the jelly was named from aspic the snake on the basis that the colours and patterns in which moulds of aspic were made in the 18th and 19th centuries resembled a snake’s coloration.

There does not appear to be any watertight evidence for this rather far-fetched theory, and perhaps more plausible is some connection with French aspic ‘lavender, spikenard’, formerly used for flavouring aspic, or with Greek aspís ‘shield’ (source of aspidistra [19]), on the basis that the earliest aspic moulds were shield-shaped.
asthma: asthma: [14] The original idea contained in asthma is that of ‘breathing hard’. The Greek noun asthma was derived from the verb ázein ‘breathe hard’ (related to áein ‘blow’, from which English gets air). In its earliest form in English it was asma, reflecting its immediate source in medieval Latin, and though the Greek spelling was restored in the 16th century, the word’s pronunciation has for the most part stuck with asma.
=> air
bamboo: bamboo: [16] Bamboo appears to come from a Malay word mambu. This was brought back to Europe by the Portuguese explorers, and enjoyed a brief currency in English from the 17th to the 18th century. However, for reasons no one can explain, the initial m of this word became changed to b, and it acquired an s at the end, producing a form found in Latin texts of the time as bambusa. This appears to have passed into English via Dutch bamboes, so the earliest English version of the word was bambos. As so often happens in such cases, the final s was misinterpreted as a plural ending, so it dropped off to give the new ‘singular’ bamboo.
bank: bank: [12] The various disparate meanings of modern English bank all come ultimately from the same source, Germanic *bangk-, but they have taken different routes to reach us. Earliest to arrive was ‘ridge, mound, bordering slope’, which came via a hypothetical Old Norse *banki. Then came ‘bench’ [13] (now obsolete except in the sense ‘series of rows or tiers’ – as in a typewriter’s bank of keys); this arrived from Old French banc, which was originally borrowed from Germanic *bangk- (also the source of English bench).

Finally came ‘moneylender’s counter’ [15], whose source was either French banque or Italian banca – both in any case deriving ultimately once again from Germanic *bangk-. The current sense, ‘place where money is kept’, developed in the 17th century. The derived bankrupt [16] comes originally from Italian banca rotta, literally ‘broken counter’ (rotta is related to English bereave and rupture); in early times a broken counter or bench was symbolic of an insolvent moneylender.

The diminutive of Old French banc was banquet ‘little bench’ (perhaps modelled on Italian banchetto), from which English gets banquet [15]. It has undergone a complete reversal in meaning over the centuries; originally it signified a ‘small snack eaten while seated on a bench (rather than at table)’.
=> bench
baron: baron: [12] The earliest historical sense of baron, ‘tenant under the feudal system who held his land and title directly from the king’, can be traced back to its probable source, medieval Latin barō, which originally meant simply ‘man’, and hence ‘vassal’ or ‘retainer’. The word was of course brought into English by the Normans, as Anglo-Norman barun, and from earliest times was used as a title for someone belonging to the lowest order of peerage. Some have suggested an ultimate Germanic origin, and compared Old High German baro ‘freeman’.
bask: bask: [14] When English first acquired this word, probably from Old Norse bathask, it was in the sense ‘wallow in blood’: ‘seeing his brother basking in his blood’, John Lydgate, Chronicles of Troy 1430. It was not until the 17th century that the modern sense ‘lie in pleasant warmth’ became established: ‘a fool, who laid him down, and basked him in the sun’, Shakespeare, As You Like It 1600. The word retains connotations of its earliest literal sense ‘bathe’ – Old Norse bathask was the reflexive form of batha ‘bathe’.
=> bathe
beetle: beetle: English has three separate words beetle. The commonest, beetle the insect, comes from Old English bitula, which was a derivative of the verb bītan ‘bite’: beetle hence means etymologically ‘the biter’. Beetle ‘hammer’, now largely restricted to various technical contexts, is also Old English: the earliest English form, bētel, goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *bautilaz, a derivative of the verb *bautan, from which English gets beat (the cognate Old Norse beytill meant ‘penis’).

The adjective beetle [14], as in ‘beetle brows’, and its related verb are of unknown origin, although it has been speculated that there is some connection with the tufted antennae of certain species of beetle, which may suggest eyebrows.
=> bite; beat
berry: berry: [OE] Berry is a strictly Germanic word, not found in other branches of Indo-European (German has beere, Dutch bes, and Danish bær). Its earliest application seems to have been specifically to grapes; the only record of it in Old Saxon and Gothic is in the compound ‘wineberry’, and around 1000 Aelfric translated Deuteronomy 23:24 into Old English as ‘If you go into your friend’s vineyard, eat the berries’.

But by the Middle Ages the term had broadened out to encompass the sorts of fruit we would recognize today as berries. The word goes back ultimately to a prehistoric Germanic *basj-, which it has been speculated may be related to Old English basu ‘red’.
big: big: [13] Big is one of the notorious mystery words of English etymology – extremely common in the modern language, but of highly dubious origin. In its earliest use in English it meant ‘powerful, strong’, and it is not really until the 16th century that we get unequivocal examples of it in the modern sense ‘large’. It occurs originally in northern texts, only slowly spreading south, which suggests that it may be of Scandinavian origin; some have compared Norwegian dialect bugge ‘important man’.
blade: blade: [OE] The primary sense of blade appears to be ‘leaf’ (as in ‘blades of grass’, and German blatt ‘leaf’). This points back to the ultimate source of the word, the Germanic stem *bhlō-, from which English also gets bloom, blossom, and the now archaic blow ‘come into flower’. However, the earliest sense recorded for Old English blæd was the metaphorical ‘flattened, leaflike part’, as of an oar, spade, etc. The specific application to the sharp, cutting part of a sword or knife developed in the 14th century.
=> bloom, blossom, blow
bombast: bombast: [16] Bombast originally meant ‘cotton-wool’, especially as used for stuffing or padding clothes, upholstery, etc; hence, before the end of the 16th century, it had been transferred metaphorically to ‘pompous or turgid language’. The ultimate source of the word was Greek bómbux ‘silk, silkworm’, which came into English via Latin bombyx, bombax (source also of English bombazine [16]) and Old French bombace. The earliest English form was bombace, but it soon developed an additional final -t.
=> bombazine
bridge: bridge: [OE] A distant relative of bridge, Old Slavic bruvino ‘beam’, coupled with the meaning of the cognate Old Norse bryggja ‘gangway’, suggest that the underlying etymological meaning of the word is not ‘spanning structure’ but ‘road or structure made of logs’. The Norse word, incidentally, produced the Scottish and northern English brig ‘bridge’.

The card game bridge is first unambiguously mentioned in English in the 1880s, and its name has no connection with the ‘spanning’ bridge. The earliest recorded form of the word is biritch. Its source has never been satisfactorily explained, but since a game resembling bridge is known to have been played for many centuries in the Middle East, it could well be that the name originated in that area.

One suggestion put forward is that it came from an unrecorded Turkish *bir-ü, literally ‘one-three’ (one hand being exposed during the game while the other three are concealed).
budget: budget: [15] Originally, a budget was a ‘pouch’. English got the word from Old French bougette, which was a diminutive form of bouge ‘leather bag’ (from which we get bulge). This came from Latin bulga, which may have been of Gaulish origin (medieval Irish bolg ‘bag’ has been compared). The word’s financial connotations arose in the 18th century, the original notion being that the government minister concerned with treasury affairs opened his budget, or wallet, to reveal what fiscal measures he had in mind.

The first reference to the expression occurs in a pamphlet called The budget opened 1733 directed against Sir Robert Walpole: ‘And how is this to be done? Why by an Alteration only of the present Method of collecting the publick Revenues … So then, out it comes at last. The Budget is opened; and our State Empirick hath dispensed his packets by his Zany Couriers through all parts of the Kingdom … I do not pretend to understand this Art of political Legerdemain’.

The earliest recorded use of the word non-satirically in this sense seems to be from 1764.
=> bulge
buffer: buffer: Neither buffer ‘fellow’ [18] nor buffer ‘shock absorber’ [19] can be traced back with any certainty to a source, but the likeliest conjecture is that they both come (independently) from an obsolete English verb buff, which was probably originally (like puff) imitative of the sound of blowing or breathing out. The earliest recorded sense of this, in the late 13th century, was ‘stammer’, and so the human buffer may originally have been a ‘stammerer’. By the 16th century we find the verb being used in the sense ‘make the sound of something soft being hit’, which is a likely source of buffer ‘shock absorber’.
bug: bug: [14] Originally, bug meant ‘something frightening’ – and in fact one of the earliest known uses of the word was for what we would now call a ‘scare-crow’. It is one of a set of words (others are bogle and perhaps bugaboo) for alarming or annoying phenomena, usually supernatural, whose interrelationship and ultimate source have never been adequately explained (see BOGEY). Bug ‘insect’ [16] is probably the same word, although it has also been connected with Old English budd ‘beetle’. The meanings ‘defect’ (from the 19th century) and ‘germ’ and ‘hidden microphone’ (both 20th-century) all developed from ‘insect’.
bumf: bumf: [20] The earliest, literal, but now long discontinued sense of bumf is ‘toilet paper’ (first recorded in 1889), which does much to elucidate its origin: it is short for bum fodder. The element of contempt is carried over into its modern meaning, ‘unwanted or uninteresting printed material’, which dates from around 1930.
bump: bump: [16] The earliest recorded sense of bump is ‘swelling, lump’, but the evidence suggests that the primary meaning is ‘knock’, and that this led on to ‘swelling’ as the result of being hit. It is not clear where the word came from, although it may be of Scandinavian origin; no doubt ultimately it imitates the sound of somebody being hit. The verbal sense ‘swell’, now obsolete, is probably responsible for bumper, which originally meant ‘full glass or cup’, and in the 19th century was extended to anything large or abundant (as in ‘bumper crop’).
bust: bust: There are two different words bust in English. The one meaning ‘break’ [18] is simply an alteration of burst. Bust ‘sculpture of head and chest’ [17] comes via French buste from Italian busto ‘upper body’, of uncertain origin (Latin had the temptingly similar bustum ‘monument on a tomb’, but this does not seem to fit in with the word’s primary sense ‘upper body’).

In English, application of the word to the human chest probably developed in the 18th century (one of the earliest examples is from Byron’s Don Juan 1819: ‘There was an Irish lady, to whose bust I ne’er saw justice done’), although as late as the early 19th century it could still be used with reference to men’s chests, and had not become particularized to female breasts: ‘His naked bust would have furnished a model for a statuary’, Washington Irving, A tour on the prairies 1835.
cancan: cancan: [19] The English word was borrowed from French, where it originally, in the 16th century, meant ‘noise, uproar’. Its ultimate source is unknown, although it has traditionally been associated with Latin quanquam ‘although’, taken to be the prelude to a noisy scholastic argument. Its application to the uproarious dance began in the 19th century, in French as well as English; however, its presentday association with high-kicking chorus girls (with, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘extravagant and indecent gestures’) seems to be a slightly later development, since the earliest examples of its use quoted by the OED apparently refer to men: ‘He usually compromises by dancing the Can-can’, A E Sweet, Texas Siftings 1882.
candle: candle: [OE] Candle is one of the earliest English borrowings from Latin. It probably arrived with Christianity at the end of the 6th century, and is first recorded in a gloss from around the year 700. Latin candēla was a derivative of the verb candēre ‘be white, glow’, also the source of English candid and related to incandescent and incense. Candelabrum [19] is a Latin derivative. The Christian feast of Candlemas [OE] (February 2) gets its name from the blessing of church candles on that day.
=> candelabrum, candid, incandescent, incense
cantankerous: cantankerous: [18] Cantankerous is a rather mysterious word. It first appears in the 1770s, and the earliest known reference to it is in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer 1772: ‘There’s not a more bitter cantanckerous road in all christendom’. Its origin is disputed: perhaps the likeliest source is Middle English contekour ‘brawler’, from contek ‘strife’, a borrowing from an unrecorded Anglo-Norman *contek, but an Irish origin has also been suggested, perhaps from Irish cannrán ‘strife, grumbling’ (another early user of the word was the Irish playwright Thomas Sheridan).
canter: canter: [18] Canter comes from phrases such as Canterbury trot, Canterbury pace, etc, which were terms applied to the pace at which medieval pilgrims rode on their way by horse to the shrine of Thomas à Beckett at Canterbury in Kent (earliest references to it are from the 17th century, much later than the time of Chaucer’s pilgrims in the Middle Ages). The abbreviated from canter appeared in the 18th century, initially as a verb, and Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary 1755 defined Canterbury gallop as ‘the hand gallop of an ambling horse, commonly called a canter’.
caper: caper: Caper ‘jump about’ [16] and the edible caper [15] are two different words. The former is a shortening of capriole ‘leap’, now obsolete except as a technical term in horsemanship, which comes via early French capriole from Italian capriola, a derivative of the verb capriolare ‘leap’, which in turn was formed from capriolo ‘roebuck’; its ultimate source was Latin capreolus, a diminutive form of caper ‘goat’ (whence the English astrological term Capricorn, literally ‘goat’s horn’). (The French by-form cabrioler was the source of English cab.) Caper ‘edible bud’ came via French câpres and Latin capparis from Greek kápparis; the earliest English form was capres, but this came to be misinterpreted as a plural, and the -s was dropped from the singular in the 16th century.
=> cab, capricorn, capriole
career: career: [16] Originally, a career was a ‘road or racetrack for vehicles’. Its ultimate source was Latin carrus ‘wheeled vehicle’ (from which we get car), which produced the Vulgar Latin derivative *carāria ‘track for wheeled vehicles’. This passed into English via Provençal carreira, Italian carriera, and French carrière. Its earliest meaning was ‘racecourse’, and hence, by extension, ‘swift course’; the main present-day sense ‘course of someone’s working life’ did not develop until the 19th century, probably owing to renewed influence of French carrière.
=> car
carol: carol: [13] English acquired carol from Old French carole, and the similarity of form and meaning naturally suggests that this in turn came from late Latin choraula ‘choral song’. In classical Latin times this had meant ‘person who accompanies a choir on a flute or reed instrument’, and it came from Greek khoraúlēs, a compound formed from khorós ‘choir’ (source of English chorus and choir) and aulos ‘reed instrument’.

However, the fact that the earliest recorded use of the word is for a dance in a ring, accompanied by singing, has led some etymologists to speculate that the underlying notion contained in it may be not ‘song’ but ‘circle’ (perhaps from Latin corolla ‘little crown, garland’).
=> choir, chorus
carpet: carpet: [14] Originally, carpet was simply a sort of rough cloth, and medieval Latin carpīta, for example, was sometimes used for a garment made from it. In earliest English use it was a ‘table-cloth’ or ‘bed-spread’, and it was not until the 15th century that the specialized ‘floorcovering’ began to establish itself. The word itself entered English via either Old French carpite or medieval Latin carpīta, which was derived from carpīre, an alteration of Latin carpere ‘pluck’ (related to English harvest).

The underlying notion seems to be that such cloth was originally made from ‘plucked’ fabric, that is, fabric which had been unravelled or shredded.
caterwaul: caterwaul: [14] The earliest known use of this word comes in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue 1386: ‘If the cat’s skin be slick and grey, forth she will, ere any day be dawned, to show her skin, and go a-caterwauling’. The first element of the word is generally accepted to be cat, while the second (in Middle English it was usually -wawe or -wrawe) is presumably onomatopoeic, imitating the sound of a cat wailing or yowling. It is not clear whether it was a purely native creation, or whether English borrowed it from Low German katerwaulen (where kater means ‘tom cat’).
cattle: cattle: [13] Ultimately, cattle is the same word as chattel [13], and when it first entered English it had the same meaning, ‘property’. From earliest times, however, it was applied specifically to livestock thought of as property. In the Middle Ages it was a wide-ranging term in animal husbandry, being used for horses, sheep, pigs, and even poultry and bees, as well as cows, and such usages survived dialectally until comparatively recently, but from the mid 16th century onwards there is increasing evidence of the word’s being restricted solely to cows.

Its ultimate source is medieval Latin capitāle ‘property’, which came to English via Old French chatel as chattel and via Anglo-Norman catel as cattle. Capitāle itself goes back to classical Latin capitālis (from caput ‘head’), from which English gets capital.
=> capital, chattel
child: child: [OE] For a word of so central importance, child is surprisingly isolated, having no known living relatives in other Germanic languages. Its prehistoric Germanic ancestor has been reconstructed as *kiltham, which some have linked with Gothic kilthei ‘womb’ and even with Sanskrit jathara ‘belly’. The plural children is not an original feature; it developed in the 12th century. In earliest Old English times the plural was unchanged, like sheep.
chime: chime: [13] Etymologically, chime is the same word as cymbal – indeed it originally meant ‘cymbal’ in English – but the route by which it reached English is not altogether clear. Latin cymbalum was borrowed into Old French as chimbe, which is perhaps the most likely source of the English word, whose earliest forms include chimbe. However, Old English also acquired the Latin word, as cimbal, and it has been speculated that this may have survived into the Middle English period as *chimbel, whose last syllable was misinterpreted as bell.

This would have opened the way to a misanalysis of the word as chime bell, a term which does actually occur from the 13th to the 15th centuries. This theory has the advantage of explaining the transference of the word’s meaning from ‘cymbals’ to ‘bells’, which occurred between the 14th and 15th centuries.
=> cymbal
cipher: cipher: [14] The central meaning of cipher is ‘zero’ (a word to which it is related); its use since the 16th century in connection with encrypted communications derives from the fact that in their earliest forms such codes usually consisted of numbers representing letters, and cipher had by then broadened in use from ‘nought’ to ‘any numeral’. It entered English through Old French cifre, which came via medieval Latin cifra from Arabic sifr (source of English zero); this was a nominal use of an adjective meaning ‘empty’.
=> zero
citrus: citrus: [19] Latin citrus signified the ‘citron’, a tree (Citrus medica) of Asian origin with a lemon-like fruit which was the earliest of the citrus fruits to become known in the West. Like the fruit itself, the name is presumably of Eastern origin – perhaps from a non-Indo- European language from around the eastern end of the Himalayas. Citron is a French derivative of citrus, coined on the model of French limon ‘lemon’; it was borrowed into English in the 16th century.
clown: clown: [16] Clown’s antecedents are obscure. Its earliest recorded sense is ‘unsophisticated or boorish country fellow’, which has led to speculation that it may come ultimately from Latin colonus ‘colonist, farmer’ (residence in the country often being associated with backwardness or lack of sophistication, as in the case heathen and pagan). Others, however, see a more direct source in a Germanic language from the Low Countries or Scandinavia: North Frisian klönne and Icelandic klunni, both meaning ‘clumsy person’, have been compared.
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
coffee: coffee: [16] The word coffee first reached us in a form which we would now recognize in the 17th century, probably via Italian caffè. It is ultimately, however, of Middle Eastern origin, and the earliest spellings recorded in English reflect this: chaoua, cauwa, kahue, cahve, etc are modelled closely on Turkish kahveh and its source, Arabic qahwah.

Where the Arabic word came from is not known for certain: probably it is based in some way on Kaffa, the name of an area in the south Abyssinian highlands from which the coffee tree is said to originate, but it has also been claimed to have signified originally some sort of wine. Café [19] comes of course from French café, whose source was Italian caffè. From the French word was derived caféine, from which English gets caffeine [19], while Spanish café produced cafetero ‘coffeeseller’, source of English cafeteria [20].
=> café, caffeine, cafeteria
coleslaw: coleslaw: [18] Cole is an ancient and now little used English word for plants of the cabbage family, such as cabbage or rape (it comes ultimately from Latin caulis ‘cabbage’, whose underlying meaning was ‘hollow stem’ – see CAULIFLOWER). It was used in the partial translation of Dutch koolsla when that word was borrowed into English in the late 18th century. Kool, Dutch for ‘cabbage’, became cole, but sla presented more of a problem (it represents a phonetically reduced form of salade ‘salad’), and it was rendered variously as -slaugh (now defunct) and -slaw. (Interestingly enough, the earliest record of the word we have, from America in the 1790s – it was presumably borrowed from Dutch settlers – is in the form cold slaw, indicating that even then in some quarters English cole was not a sufficiently familiar word to be used for Dutch kool. Coldslaw is still heard, nowadays as a folketymological alteration of coleslaw.)
=> cauliflower, cole, salad
commodious: commodious: [15] Latin commodus meant ‘convenient’. It was a compound adjective formed from com- ‘with’ and modus ‘measure’, and thus meaning literally ‘conforming with due measure’. From it was derived the medieval Latin adjective commodiōsus, which passed, probably via French commodieux, into English. This originally meant ‘advantageous, useful, convenient’, and it was not really until the 16th century that it developed the meaning ‘affording a conveniently large amount of space’.

The noun derivative commodity entered English in the 14th century, and from earliest times had the concrete meaning ‘article of commerce’, deriving from the more general sense ‘something useful’. Commodus was borrowed into French as commode ‘convenient’, which came to be used as a noun meaning both ‘tall headdress for women’ and ‘chest of drawers’. English adopted the word in the 17th century, and in the 19th century added the new sense ‘chair housing a chamber pot’ (a semantic development paralleling the euphemistic use of convenience for lavatory).
=> commode, commodity
concern: concern: [15] In earliest use, English concern meant ‘distinguish, discern’. This was a reflection of its ultimate source, Latin cernere ‘sift, separate’. In combination with the prefix com- ‘together’ it produced concernere, which in classical times meant specifically ‘mix together preparatory to sifting’. Later, however, the prefix seems to have taken on a more intensive role, with concernere reverting to the same range of senses as cernere.

By the Middle Ages these not only included ‘discern, perceive’ and ‘decide’ (whence English certain, from the past participle of cernere), but had widened considerably to ‘relate to’ – a meaning which emerged in English concern in the 16th century. Connotations of distress or worry began to develop in the late 17th century.
=> certain, discern
convalesce: convalesce: [15] Latin valēre meant ‘be strong or healthy’ (from it English gets valiant, valid, valour, and value). Derived from it was valēscere ‘grow strong’, which, with the addition of the intensive prefix com- produced convalēscere, source of English convalesce. It was quite a commonly used word in Scottish English from earliest times, but does not seem to have established itself south of the border until the 19th century.
=> valiant, valid, valour, value
core: core: [14] The origins of core are a mystery, over which etymologists disagree. Several candidates have been put forward, including Old French cor ‘horn’, on the grounds that two of core’s earliest applications were to the horny central part of apples and pears and to corns on the foot, and Latin cor ‘heart’, on the grounds that an apple’s core is its ‘heart’.