quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- backgammon[backgammon 词源字典]
- backgammon: [17] Backgammon appears to mean literally ‘back game’, although the reason for the name is far from clear (gammon had been used since at least the early 18th century for a particular type of victory in the game, but it is hard to say whether the term for the victory came from the term for the game, or vice versa). Either way, gammon represents Old English gamen, the ancestor of modern English game. The game backgammon goes back far further than the 17th century, of course, but before that it was called tables in English.
=> game[backgammon etymology, backgammon origin, 英语词源] - backgammon (n.)
- 1640s, baggammon, the second element from Middle English gamen, ancestor of game; the first element apparently because pieces sometimes are forced to go "back." Known 13c.-17c. as tables.
- background (n.)
- 1670s, from back (adj.) + ground (n.); original sense was theatrical, later applied to painting. Figurative sense is first attested 1854.
- blackguard (n.)
- 1530s, scullion, kitchen knave. Perhaps once an actual military or guard unit; more likely originally a mock-military reference to scullions and kitchen-knaves of noble households, of black-liveried personal guards, and of shoeblacks. By 1736, sense had emerged of "one of the criminal class." Hence the adjectival use (1784), "of low or worthless character."
- ginkgo (n.)
- 1773, from Japanese ginkyo, from Chinese yin-hing, from yin "silver" + hing "apricot" (Sino-Japanese kyo). Introduced to New World 1784 by William Hamilton in his garden near Philadelphia; also formerly known as the maidenhair-tree, from resemblance of the tree's leaves to those of the fern.
- KGB
- national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1991, attested from 1955 in English, initialism (acronym) of Russian Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti "Committee for State Security."