英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

accomplice [accomplice 词源字典]: 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[accomplice etymology, accomplice origin, 英语词源]
accomplish: accomplish: see complete
acrylic: acrylic: [19] Acrylic was based ultimately on acrolein [19], the name of a very pungent poisonous organic compound. This in turn was formed from Latin acer ‘sharp, pungent’ (source of English acrid) and olere ‘smell’.
adrenaline: adrenaline: [20] The hormone adrenaline is secreted by glands just above the kidneys. From their position these are called the ‘adrenal glands’ [19], a term based on Latin rēnes ‘kidney’, which has also given English renal [17] and (via Old French) the now obsolete reins ‘kidneys’ [14]. The discovery of adrenaline and the coining of its name are both disputed: they may have been the work of Dr Jokichi Takamine or of Dr Norton L. Wilson.
aeolian harp: aeolian harp: [18] Aeolus was the Greek god of the winds (the form of the name is Latin; the original Greek was Aiolos, deriving from the adjective aiolos ‘quick-moving’). Hence the application of the epithet to a musical instrument whose strings are sounded by the breeze blowing over them. The term is first recorded in the writings of Erasmus Darwin, at the end of the 18th century.
afflict: afflict: [14] When it originally entered English, afflict meant ‘overthrow’, reflecting its origins in Latin afflīgere ‘throw down’, a compound verb formed from the prefix ad- ‘to’ and flīgere ‘strike’. English afflict comes either from the Latin past participle afflictus, from a new Latin verb formed from this, afflictāre, or perhaps from the now obsolete English adjective afflict, which was borrowed from Old French aflit and refashioned on the Latin model. The meaning ‘torment, distress’ developed in the early 16th century.
alibi: alibi: [18] In Latin, alibi means literally ‘somewhere else’. It is the locative form (that is, the form expressing place) of the pronoun alius ‘other’ (which is related to Greek allos ‘other’ and English else). When first introduced into English it was used in legal contexts as an adverb, meaning, as in Latin, ‘elsewhere’: ‘The prisoner had little to say in his defence; he endeavoured to prove himself Alibi’, John Arbuthnot, Law is a bottomless pit 1727.

But by the end of the 18th century it had become a noun, ‘plea of being elsewhere at the time of a crime’. The more general sense of an ‘excuse’ developed in the 20th century. Another legal offspring of Latin alius is alias. This was a direct 16th-century borrowing of Latin aliās, a form of alius meaning ‘otherwise’.
=> alias, else
alien: alien: [14] The essential notion contained in alien is of ‘otherness’. Its ultimate source is Latin alius ‘other’ (which is related to English else). From this was formed a Latin adjective aliēnus ‘belonging to another person or place’, which passed into English via Old French alien. In Middle English an alternative version alient arose (in the same way as ancient, pageant, and tyrant came from earlier ancien, pagin, and tyran), but this died out during the 17th century.

The verb alienate ‘estrange’ or ‘transfer to another’s ownership’ entered the language in the mid 16th century, eventually replacing an earlier verb alien (source of alienable and inalienable).
=> alibi, else
alike: alike: [OE] Alike is an ancient word whose ultimate Germanic source, *galīkam, meant something like ‘associated form’ (*līkam ‘form, body’ produced German leiche ‘corpse’ and Old English lic, from which we get lychgate, the churchyard gate through which a funeral procession passes; and the collective prefix *gameant literally ‘with’ or ‘together’).

In Old English, *galīkam had become gelīc, which developed into Middle English ilik; and from the 14th century onwards the prefix i-, which was becoming progressively rarer in English, was assimilated to the more familiar a-. The verb like is indirectly related to alike, and the adjective, adverb, preposition, and conjunction like was formed directly from it, with the elimination of the prefix.
=> each, like
alimony: alimony: [17] Alimony is an anglicization of Latin alimōnia, which is based on the verb alere ‘nourish’ (source of alma ‘bounteous’, as in alma mater, and of alumnus). This in turn goes back to a hypothetical root *al-, which is also the basis of English adolescent, adult, altitude (from Latin altus ‘high’), and old.

The original sense ‘nourishment, sustenance’ has now died out, but the specialized ‘support for a former wife’ is of equal antiquity in English. The -mony element in the word represents Latin -mōnia, a fairly meaning-free suffix used for forming nouns from verbs (it is related to -ment, which coincidentally was also combined with alere, to form alimentary), but in the later 20th century it took on a newly productive role in the sense ‘provision of maintenance for a former partner’. Palimony ‘provision for a former non-married partner’ was coined around 1979, and in the 1980s appeared dallymony ‘provision for somebody one has jilted’.
=> adult, altitude, alumnus, old
alive: alive: [OE] Alive comes from the Old English phrase on life, literally ‘on life’. Līfe was the dative case of līf ‘life’; between two vowels f was pronounced /v/ in Old English, hence the distinction in modern English pronunciation between life and alive.
=> life
alkali: alkali: [14] English acquired alkali via Latin from Arabic al-qalīy ‘the ashes’, a derivative of the verb qalay ‘fry’. The implicit reference is to the plant saltwort (Latin name Salsola kali), which was burnt to obtain its alkaline ashes (Chaucer’s canon’s yeoman, the alchemist’s assistant, mentions it: ‘Salt tartre, alcaly, and salt preparat, And combust matieres, and coagulat’, 1386). The modern chemical sense of a compound which combines with an acid to form a salt was first used in 1813, by the chemist Sir Humphry Davy.
alligator: alligator: [16] The Spanish, on encountering the alligator in America, called it el lagarto ‘the lizard’. At first English adopted simply the noun (‘In this river we killed a monstrous Lagarto or Crocodile’, Job Hortop, The trauailes of an Englishman 1568), but before the end of the 16th century the Spanish definite article el had been misanalysed as part of the noun – hence, alligator. Spanish lagarto derived from Latin lacerta ‘lizard’, which, via Old French lesard, gave English lizard.
=> lizard
alliteration: alliteration: [17] Alliteration is an anglicization of alliterātiō, a modern Latin coinage based on the prefix ad- ‘to’ and litera ‘letter’ – from the notion of an accumulation of words beginning with the same letter. The verb alliterate is an early 19th-century back-formation from alliteration.
=> letter
aquiline: aquiline: see eagle
bacchanalian: bacchanalian: [16] Bákkhos was the Greek god of wine. Son of Zeus and Semele, he was also known as Diónūsos. The Romans adopted him, amending his name to Bacchus, and his worshippers went in for a brand of licentious revelry, in his honour, known as Bacchanalia. Hence the metaphorical application of the English adjective to anything drunkenly orgiastic.
bailiff: bailiff: [13] Latin bājulus meant literally ‘carrier’ (it is probably the ultimate source of English bail in some if not all of its uses). It developed the metaphorical meaning ‘person in charge, administrator’, which passed, via the hypothetical medieval adjectival form *bājulīvus, into Old French as baillif, and hence into English.
=> bail
ballistic: ballistic: see parable
basilisk: basilisk: [14] Greek basilískos meant literally ‘little king’ – it was a diminutive of basiléus ‘king’, source also of English basil [15] (probably from the herb’s use by the Greeks in certain royal potions) and of English basilica [16] (a church built originally on the plan of a royal palace). The Greeks used it for a ‘goldcrested wren’, but also for a type of serpent, and it is this latter use which developed into the fabulous monster of classical and medieval times, whose breath and glance could kill. The name was said by Pliny to be based on the fact that the basilisk had a crown-shaped mark on its head.
=> basil, basilica
battalion: battalion: see battle
believe: believe: [OE] Believing and loving are closely allied. Late Old English belēfan took the place of an earlier gelēfan ‘believe’ (with the associative prefix ge-), which can be traced back to a prehistoric West and North Germanic *galaubjan (source also of German glauben ‘believe’). This meant ‘hold dear, love’, and hence ‘trust in, believe’, and it was formed on a base, *laub-, which also produced, by various routes, English love, lief ‘dear’, leave ‘permission’, and the second element of furlough.
=> furlough, leave, lief, love
bellicose: bellicose: see rebel
belligerent: belligerent: see rebel
billiards: billiards: [16] Billiard comes from French billard, which is the name not only of the game, but also of the cue it is played with. And the cue is the clue to the word’s history, for it comes from French bille ‘tree trunk’, hence ‘long cylindrical bit of wood’. The import of the -ard suffix is not altogether clear, but another suffix used with bille was the diminutive -ette, from which English got billet ‘piece of wood’ [15] (not to be confused with billet ‘assignment to lodgings’; see BILL). Bille itself came from medieval Latin billa or billus, which may have been of Celtic origin.
=> billet
blight: blight: [17] Blight appeared out of the blue in the early 17th century in agricultural and horticultural texts, and its origins are far from clear. It has, however, been speculated that it may be connected with the Old English words blǣce and blǣcthu, both terms for some sort of itchy skin condition such as scabies. These in turn are probably related to Old English blǣcan ‘bleach’, the link being the flaky whiteness of the infected skin.

In Middle English, blǣcthu would have become *bleht, which could plausibly have been the source of blight. A related piece in the jigsaw is blichening ‘blight or rust in corn’, found once in Middle English, which may have come ultimately from Old Norse blikna ‘become pale’.
=> bleach
blighty: blighty: [20] Blighty is a legacy of British rule in India. Originally a term used by British soldiers serving in India for ‘home, Britain’, it is an anglicization of Hindi bilāyatī, which meant ‘foreign’, and particularly ‘European’. This was actually a borrowing from Arabic wilāyat ‘district, country’, which was independently acquired by English in the 19th century in its Turkish form vilayet. It was a derivative of the Arabic verb waliya ‘rule’, and is related to walī ‘ruler’.
blimp: blimp: [20] The original blimp was a sort of small non-rigid military airship used in World War I. Its name is said to have come from its official designation as ‘type B (limp)’ (as opposed to ‘type A (rigid)’). Its rotund flaccidity suggested it in 1934 to the cartoonist David Low (1891– 1963) as a name for a character he had invented, a fat pompous ex-army officer (in full, Colonel Blimp) who was always cholerically airing reactionary views. The British public evidently recognized the character as an all too common type, and his name became a generic one, to the extent of inspiring spin-offs such as blimpish.
blind: blind: [OE] The connotations of the ultimate ancestor of blind, Indo-European *bhlendhos, seem to have been not so much ‘sightlessness’ as ‘confusion’ and ‘obscurity’. The notion of someone wandering around in actual or mental darkness, not knowing where to go, naturally progressed to the ‘inability to see’. Related words that fit this pattern are blunder, possibly from Old Norse blunda ‘shut one’s eyes’, blunt, and maybe also blend.

By the time the word entered Old English, as blind, it already meant ‘sightless’, but ancestral associations of darkness and obscurity were retained (Pepys in his diary, for instance, writes of a ‘little blind [that is, dark] bed-chamber’ 1666), and traces of them remain in such usages as ‘blind entrance’.
=> blend, blunder, blunt
blindfold: blindfold: [16] The original term for covering someone’s eyes with a bandage was blindfell [OE], which survived until the 16th century. This meant literally ‘strike someone blind’, the second element being the fell of ‘felling trees’. It appears that its past form, blindfelled, came to be mistaken for a present form, and this, together with some perceived connection with fold (presumably the ‘folding’ of the bandage round somebody’s head), conspired to produce the new verb blindfold.
bliss: bliss: [OE] Despite its formal and semantic similarity, bliss has no connection with bless. It comes ultimately from Germanic *blīthiz ‘gentle, kind’, which is the source of English blithe ‘happy’ [OE]. The addition of the noun suffix *-tjō produced the derivative *blīthsjō, which entered Old English as blīths ‘happiness’, later reduced to bliss.
=> blithe
blister: blister: [13] Blister and its now extinct variant blester first appear in English at the end of the 13th century, possibly borrowed from Old French blestre, blostre. It seems that this in turn may have come from Middle Dutch bluyster ‘swelling’, but further back than that it has not proved possible to trace the word.
botulism: botulism: [19] The fact that Latin botulus was used metaphorically for ‘intestine’ is in this case just a red herring; its principal meaning was ‘sausage’, and it was the discovery of the foodpoisoning germ in cooked meats, such assausages, which led to the term botulism. Early work on unmasking the bacterium responsible (now known as Clostridium botulinum) was done in Germany, and at first the German form of the word, botulismus, was used in English, but by the late 1880s we find the naturalized botulism fairly well established.
brilliant: brilliant: [17] Brilliant comes from French brilliant, the present participle of briller ‘shine’. French borrowed the verb from Italian brillare, but it is not altogether clear where Italian got it from. One theory is that it came from Vulgar Latin *bērillāre, a derivative of bērillus ‘precious stone’ (whence English beryl [13]). The source of the Latin noun was Greek bérullos, which may have come from one of the Indo-European languages of India (Sanskrit vaidūrya ‘cat’s-eye’ has been compared).
broccoli: broccoli: see broach
bulimia: bulimia: [19] The condition now called ‘bulimia’ – in which bouts of overeating are followed by bouts of purging – was recognized and so named in the 1970s. The word used to name it, however, is much more ancient than that. It goes back to Greek boulimia, which meant ‘ravenous hunger’ (it was formed from limos ‘hunger’, with the prefix bou-; this may well have been adapted from bous ‘ox’, in which case the word would have meant literally ‘the hunger of an ox’).

It originally came into English, via medieval Latin, in the late 14th century, and for many hundred years its standard form was bulimy. It was applied to a sort of hunger so extreme that it could be categorized as an illness.
bullion: bullion: [14] The immediate source of bullion was Anglo-Norman bullion, which meant ‘place where coins are made, mint’, so presumably the underlying connotation is of melting, or ‘boiling’, metal down and then turning it into coins. On this reasoning it would come ultimately from Vulgar Latin *bulliōnem, a nominal derivative of Latin bullīre ‘boil’, from bulla ‘bubble’ (source of English boil). The present-day meaning ‘gold and silver in bulk’ had developed by the mid-15th century.
=> boil
calibre: calibre: [16] Calibre, and the related calliper, are of Arabic origin. They come ultimately from Arabic qālib ‘shoemaker’s last, mould’ (there is some dispute over the source of this: some etymologists simply derive it from the Arabic verb qalaba ‘turn, convert’, while others trace it back to Greek kalapoús, literally ‘wooden foot’, a compound formed from kalon ‘wood’, originally ‘firewood’, a derivative of kaiein ‘burn’, and poús ‘foot’).

English acquired the Arabic word via Italian calibro and French calibre. The original Western meaning, ‘diameter of a bullet, cannon-ball, etc’, derives from the Arabic sense ‘mould for casting metal’. Calliper [16], which originally meant ‘instrument for measuring diameters’, is generally taken to be an alteration of calibre.
=> calliper
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.)
calligraphy: calligraphy: see kaleidoscope
calliper: calliper: see calibre
callisthenics: callisthenics: see kaleidoscope
camellia: camellia: [18] The camellia, a shrub of oriental origin, was named in the mid-18th century by the Swedish taxonomist Linnaeus after the Moravian Jesuit missionary and botanist Joseph Kamel (in modern Latin, Camellus) (1661– 1706), who described the flora on the Philippine island of Luzon. The spelling of its name, with a double l, encourages a short ‘e’ pronunciation, but in practice most people say ‘cameelia’.
capercaillie: capercaillie: [16] The name of the capercaillie, a very large species of grouse, means literally ‘horse of the woods’ in Scots Gaelic. The Gaelic form of the word is capalcoille, a compound formed from capall ‘horse’ (probably borrowed from Latin caballus ‘horse’, source of English cavalier) and coille ‘woods’.
=> cavalier
catholic: catholic: [14] Etymologically, the Catholic Church is the universal church, comprising all Christians. For catholic comes ultimately from a Greek word, katholikós, meaning ‘relating to all, general’. It was a derivative of kathólou, a compound formed from katá ‘relating to’ and hólos ‘whole’ (source of English holism and holistic). It passed into English via Old French catholique or ecclesiastical Latin catholicus. Its original meaning is preserved today in such contexts as ‘catholic tastes’ – that is, ‘wideranging tastes’.
=> holistic
cauliflower: cauliflower: [16] Cauliflower is literally ‘flowered cabbage’. English probably borrowed and adapted the word from Italian cavoli fiori, plural of cavolo fiore ‘cabbage flower’. Cavolo came from late Latin caulus, a variant of Latin caulis ‘cabbage’. This word originally meant ‘stem’, but the notion ultimately underlying it is ‘hollow stem’, for it can be traced back to an Indo-European base which also produced hole and hollow.

It was borrowed early on into the Germanic languages, and via this route has produced in English the now rare cole ‘cabbage, rape’[14] (more familiar in the Dutch borrowing coleslaw); the Scots version kale [13], from Old Norse kál, best known south of the border in the form curly kale; and via German kohlrabi [19], the last element of which is related to English rape the plant.
=> cole, coleslaw, hole, hollow, kale, kohlrabi
cavalier: cavalier: [16] Etymologically, a cavalier is a ‘horseman’. The word comes via French cavalier from Italian cavaliere, which was derived from Latin caballus ‘horse’, either directly or via late Latin caballārius ‘horseman, rider’. From the beginning in English its connotations were not those of any old horserider, but of a mounted soldier or even a knight, and before the end of the 16th century the more general meaning ‘courtly gentleman’ was establishing itself.

This led in the mid-17th century to its being applied on the one hand to the supporters of Charles I, and on the other as an adjective meaning ‘disdainful’. Italian cavaliere was also the source of cavalleria ‘body of horsesoldiers’, which was borrowed into English in the 16th century, via French cavallerie, as cavalry. (The parallel form routed directly through French rather than via Italian was chivalry.)
=> cavalry, chivalry
ceiling: ceiling: [14] Ceiling is something of a mystery word. It originally signified the internal lining of any part of a building, including walls as well as roof (the modern sense ‘overhead inside surface of a room’ began to crystallize out in the 16th century), and the material of which it was made took in wooden planks and even tapestry hangings, as well as plaster. But where it comes from is not at all clear.

It has no apparent relations in other modern European languages, and the likeliest candidate as a source may be Latin caelāre ‘carve, engrave’. This is perhaps endorsed by an item in the accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, 1497, revealing how a ‘carver’ was paid £2 14s for ‘the ceiling of the chapel’ – an indication that the underlying notion of ceiling may be ‘carved internal surface of a room’.
chalice: chalice: [13] Latin calix ‘cup’ and its relative, Greek kálux ‘pod’, perhaps hold the record for the words most often borrowed into English. Calix first made its appearance as part of the original West Germanic stratum of English, into which it had been borrowed from Latin; this was as Old English cælc. Then came cælic, which Old English independently acquired from Latin after the conversion of the English to Christianity.

Next was calice, whose source was an Old French dialectal form descended from Latin calix. And finally, at the end of the 13th century, the main Old French form chalice was adopted. The final twist in the story is that in the 17th century Latin calyx (a descendant of the related Greek kálux) was borrowed into English as a botanical term, ‘outer covering of a flower’.
chamelion: chamelion: [14] Etymologically, a chamelion is a ‘ground lion’. The word comes from Greek khamailéōn, a compound formed from khamaí ‘on the ground’ (English humus and humble are related to it) and léōn ‘lion’. Until the 19th century the word was usually spelled camelion, which led to popular association of the first element with camel; this is turn encouraged an identification with camelopard, a now obsolete word for ‘giraffe’, and in the 14th and 15th centuries camelion was used for ‘giraffe’.
=> humble, humus, lion
chrysalis: chrysalis: [17] Etymologically, a chrysalis is a ‘gold’-coloured pupa, for the word derives ultimately from Greek khrūsós ‘gold’. Many butterflies do have pupae that, at least to start with, have a metallic sheen of gold, so the Greeks applied to them the term khrūsallís, in which the final element seems to mean something like ‘sheath’. This passed into English via Latin chrysalis. Also formed from Greek khrūsós (which is of Semitic origin) is chrysanthemum [16], which means literally ‘gold flower’.