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ammonia [ammonia 词源字典]: ammonia: [18] Ammonia gets its name ultimately from Amon, or Amen, the Egyptian god of life and reproduction. Near the temple of Amon in Libya were found deposits of ammonium chloride, which was hence named sal ammoniac – ‘salt of Amon’. The gas nitrogen hydride is derived from sal ammoniac, and in 1782 the Swedish chemist Torbern Bergman coined the term ammonia for it.
[ammonia etymology, ammonia origin, 英语词源]
ammonite: ammonite: [18] Like ammonia, the ammonite gets its name from a supposed connection with Amon, or Amen, the Egyptian god of life and reproduction. In art he is represented as having ram’s horns, and the resemblance of ammonites to such horns led to their being named in the Middle Ages cornu Ammōnis ‘horn of Amon’. In the 18th century the modern Latin term ammonītēs (anglicized as ammonite) was coined for them. Earlier, ammonites had been called snake stones in English, a term which survived dialectally well into the 19th century.
ammunition: ammunition: [17] Ammunition is one of many words which resulted from a mistaken analysis of ‘article’ plus ‘noun’ (compare ADDER). In this case, French la munition ‘the munitions, the supplies’ was misapprehended as l’ammunition, and borrowed thus into English. At first it was used for military supplies in general, and it does not seem to have been until the beginning of the 18th century that its meaning became restricted to ‘bullets, shells, etc’.

The word munition itself was borrowed into English from French in the 16th century. It originally meant ‘fortification’, and came from the Latin noun mūnītiō; this was a derivative of the verb munīre, ‘defend, fortify’, which in turn was based on the noun moenia ‘walls, ramparts’ (related to mūrus ‘wall’, the source of English mural).

Also from munīre, via medieval Latin mūnīmentum, comes muniment [15], a legal term for ‘title deed’; the semantic connection is that a title deed is a means by which someone can ‘defend’ his or her legal right to property.
=> muniment, munition, mural
backgammon: 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
clammy: clammy: [14] Etymologically, clammy means ‘sticky as if smeared with clay’. It comes from the now obsolete verb clam ‘smear, stick’. This goes back to Old English clǣman, a word of ancient ancestry: its prehistoric Germanic source was *klaimjan, a verb derived from *klaimaz ‘clay’; this was formed from the base *klai-, which is also the ultimate source of English clay and can be traced back to the Indo-European base *gloi-, *glei-, *gli-, from which English gets glue and gluten.
=> clay, glue
comma: comma: [16] Greek kómma meant literally ‘piece cut off, segment’. It derived from the verb kóptein ‘cut’, relatives of which include Russian kopje ‘lance’, source of the coin-name kopeck, and probably English capon. Kómma came to be applied metaphorically, as a technical term in prosody, to a small piece of a sentence, a ‘short clause’, a sense which it retained when it reached English via Latin comma. It was not long before, like colon, it was applied to the punctuation mark signifying the end of such a clause.
=> capon, kopeck
command: command: [13] Ultimately, command and commend are the same word. Both come from Latin compound verbs formed from the intensive prefix com- and the verb mandāre ‘entrust, commit to someone’s charge’ (from which we get mandate). In the classical period this combination produced commendāre ‘commit to someone’s charge, commend, recommend’, which passed into English in the 14th century (recommend, a medieval formation, was acquired by English from medieval Latin in the 14th century).

Later on, the compounding process was repeated, giving late Latin commandāre. By this time, mandāre had come to mean ‘order’ as well as ‘entrust’ (a change reflected in English mandatory). Commandāre inherited both these senses, and they coexisted through Old French comander and Anglo- Norman comaunder into Middle English commande.

But ‘entrust’ was gradually taken over from the 14th century by commend, and by the end of the 15th century command meant simply ‘order’. Commandeer and commando are both of Afrikaans origin, and became established in English at the end of the 19th century largely as a result of the Boer War. Commodore [17] is probably a modification of Dutch komandeur, from French commandeur ‘commander’.
=> commend, commodore, demand, mandatory, recommend, remand
commensurate: commensurate: see measure
comment: comment: [15] In Latin, a commentum was originally ‘something invented or devised’. It was derived from the verb comminiscī ‘devise, contrive by thought’, a compound formed from the prefix com- ‘with’ and a base *men- (this also produced Latin mens and mentiō, source respectively of English mental and mention). It was used in the 7th century by the Spanish theologian Isidore in the sense ‘interpretation, annotation’, and it was with that meaning rather than the original ‘contrivance’ that the word passed eventually into English.
=> mental, mention, mind
commerce: commerce: [16] Commerce is etymologically related to market, merchandise, merchant, and mercury. It comes, perhaps via French commerce, from Latin commercium ‘trade’, a compound noun formed from the collective prefix com- ‘together’ and merx ‘merchandise’. The adjective commercial is 17th-century, its nominal use for ‘broadcast advertisement’ 20thcentury.
=> market, merchant, mercury
commit: commit: [14] Etymologically, commit simply means ‘put together’. It comes from Latin committere, a compound verb formed from the prefix com- ‘together’ and the verb mittere ‘put, send’ (whence English missile and mission). It originally meant literally ‘join, connect’, but then branched out along the lines of ‘put for safety, entrust’ (the force of com- here being more intensive than collective) and ‘perpetrate’ (exactly how this sense evolved is not clear).

The whole range of meanings followed the Latin verb into English, although ‘put together’ was never more than an archaism, and died out in the 17th century. Of derivatives based on the Latin verb’s past participial stem commiss-, commission entered English in the 14th century and commissionaire (via French) in the 18th century. Medieval Latin commissārius produced English commissary [14] and, via French, Russian commissar, borrowed into English in the 20th century.
=> commissar, committee, missile, mission
committee: committee: [15] Committee was formed from the verb commit by adding the suffix -ee. Following the pattern of all such formations, it originally meant ‘person to whom something is committed’; it was not until the 17th century that the sense ‘body of people delegated to perform a particular function’ developed.
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
commodore: commodore: see command
common: common: [13] Common comes ultimately from an Indo-European base *moi-, *mei-, signifying ‘change, exchange’, which also produced English immune, mutate, mutual, and remunerate. A derivative of this base, *moin-, *mein- seems to have joined up with the Indo- European collective *kom- to produce *komoin-, *komein- ‘shared by all’.

In Germanic this became *gamainiz, source of English mean ‘despicable’, while in Latin it gave commūnis, source, via Old French comun, of English common. Both the Latin and French forms have given English a number of derivatives: from the former we have community [14] (Latin commūnitātis), communion [14] (Latin commūniō), and communicate [16] (Latin commūnicāre), while the latter has yielded commune [13] (Old French comuner) and communism [19] (French communisme, coined around 1840).
=> communicate, communism, community, immune, mean, mutual, mutate, remunerate
commonwealth: commonwealth: see wealth
commotion: commotion: see motor
consummate: consummate: see sum
dilemma: dilemma: [16] Dilemma was originally a technical term in rhetoric, denoting a form of argument in which one’s opponent is faced with a choice of two unfavourable alternatives. It comes via Latin dilemma from Greek dilēmma, a compound formed from di- ‘two’ and lēmma ‘proposition, premise’. (Lēmma itself, which English acquired in the 16th century, came ultimately from *lab-, the base of Greek lambánein ‘talk’.) The ‘looser’ general sense ‘choice between unpleasant alternatives’ developed in the late 16th century.
gammon: gammon: Gammon ‘bacon’ [15] is not related to the gammon [18] of backgammon. It comes from Old Northern French gambon (source also of modern French jambon ‘ham’), which was a derivative of gambe ‘leg’ – hence etymologically ‘leg meat’. This seems to go back ultimately to Greek kampé ‘bend’, which was used particularly as an anatomical term for joints of the body.

Latin took it over as a veterinary expression, gamba, denoting a ‘horse’s hoof’, and it passed in due course into Italian as gamba (whence English gambit, gambol, jamb [14], and the gamba of viola da gamba [18], played between the legs) and into French as jambe, both meaning ‘leg’. The gammon of backgammon comes from Middle English gamen, the ancestor of modern English game (see also BACKGAMMON).
=> gambit, gambol, jamb
gimmick: gimmick: [20] Gimmick originally meant ‘dishonest contrivance’ – indeed, in the first known printed reference to it, in George Maine’s and Bruce Grant’s Wise-crack dictionary 1926 (an American publication), it is defined specifically as a ‘device for making a fair game crooked’. The modern sense ‘stratagem for gaining attention’ seems to have come to the fore in the 1940s. The origins of the word are a mystery, although it has been suggested that it began as gimac, an anagram of magic used by conjurers.
glimmer: glimmer: see gleam
grammar: grammar: [14] Etymologically, grammar is the ‘art of letters’. The word comes via Anglo- Norman gramere, Old French gramaire, and Latin grammatica from Greek grammatiké, a noun use of the adjective grammatikós ‘of letters’ (whence English grammatical [16]). This was a derivative of the noun grámma ‘something written’, hence ‘letter of the alphabet’, which was related to the verb gráphein ‘write’ (source of English graphic) and also gave English gram and the suffix -gram that appears in a wide range of English words, from anagram and diagram to telegram and kissagram.
=> glamour, gram, graphic
hammer: hammer: [OE] Hammer is part of a widespread Germanic word-family, including also German and Danish hammer, Dutch hamer, and Swedish hammar. The ancestor of the Scandinavian forms, Old Norse hamarr, meant ‘stone crag’ as well as ‘hammer’. This and possible connections with the standard words for ‘stone, rock’ in the Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavonic language groups (such as Sanskrit açman and Russian kamen’) suggest that hammer originally denoted some sort of tool with a stone head.
hammock: hammock: [16] Hammock is a product of early European explorations in the New World. When Spanish crews first sailed into the Caribbean, they encountered a word in the Taino language of the Arawakan people for a hanging bed suspended between two trees. They adopted it into Spanish as hamaca, which English borrowed as hamaca or ‘Englished’ as hammaker (hammock is a 17th-century alteration).
immaculate: immaculate: [15] A macula in Latin was a ‘spot’ or ‘stain’ (as well as a ‘hole in a net’, which gave English the mail of chain mail). Hence anything that was immaculātus (an adjective formed with the negative prefix in-) was ‘spotless’ – ‘perfect’.
=> chainmail
immediate: immediate: see medium
immense: immense: see measure
immerse: immerse: see merge
imminent: imminent: see prominent
immolate: immolate: see mill
immune: immune: [15] The -mune of immune is the same as that of remunerate and of commune (and hence of common). It represents Latin mūnis ‘ready to give service’. The addition of the negative prefix in- gave immūnis, which in classical Latin denoted literally ‘exempt from a service, charge, etc’, and hence by metaphorical extension ‘free from something, devoid of something’. This general sense still survives, of course, in English (as in ‘grant immunity from prosecution’); and the more specific ‘not liable to infection’ did not emerge until as recently as the 1870s, probably under the influence of French or German.
=> common, commune, remunerate
immure: immure: see mural
Lammas: Lammas: see loaf
mammal: mammal: [19] Etymologically, mammal denotes an ‘animal that suckles its young’. The word is a derivative of mammalia [18], the term for that whole class of animals, coined by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus from Latin mammālis ‘of the breast’. This in turn was based on mamma ‘mother, breast’, which has been traced back to a prehistoric Indo-European *mammā.

There are obvious links with ‘mother’-terms in other languages, such as Greek mámmē, French maman, Italian mamma, Russian mama, Welsh mam, and English mamma and mummy, but whether a sustained chain of descent and borrowing is involved, or simply parallel formation based on the syllable ma, imitative of the sound of a suckling baby, is not clear. Mammary [17] is an English derivative of Latin mamma, in the sense ‘breast’.
=> mamma, mammary, mummy
mammoth: mammoth: [18] Mammoth is a Russian contribution to English. The word was borrowed from early modern Russian mammot, an adaptation of Tatar mamont ‘earth’ (the reason for the animal being so named is that the first remains of mammoths to be found were dug out of the frozen soil of Siberia). The adjectival use of the word for ‘huge’ dates from the early 19th century (‘The dancing very bad; the performers all had mammoth legs’, private diary of Sir Robert Wilson, 1814).
mummer: mummer: see mumps
mummy: mummy: English has two words mummy. The one meaning ‘mother’ [19], although not recorded in print until comparatively recently, is one of a range of colloquial ‘mother’-words, such as mama and mammy, that go back ultimately to the syllable ma, imitative of a suckling baby (see MAMMAL and MOTHER), and was probably common in dialect speech much earlier. The 19th century saw its adoption into the general language.

The abbreviation mum [19] has a parallel history. The Egyptian mummy [14] comes ultimately from Arabic mūmiyā ‘embalmed body’, a derivative of mūm ‘embalming wax’, but when it first arrived in English (via medieval Latin mumia and Old French mumie) it was used for a ‘medicinal ointment prepared from mummified bodies’ (‘Take myrrh, sarcocol [a gum-resin], and mummy … and lay it on the nucha [spinal cord]’, Lanfranc’s Science of Cirurgie, c. 1400).

The word’s original sense ‘embalmed body’ did not emerge in English until the early 17th century.
=> mama, mammy
plummet: plummet: see plumb
rummage: rummage: [16] Rummage is etymologically ‘roomage’. It originally denoted the ‘stowage of cargo in a ship’s hold’. It came from Anglo- Norman *rumage, a reduced form of Old French arrumage. This was derived from the verb arrumer ‘stow in a hold’, which itself was based on run ‘ship’s hold’. And this in turn was borrowed from Middle Dutch ruim ‘space’, a relative of English room. The verb rummage, derived from the noun, was also used for ‘search a ship’s hold’, which is where the modern notion of ‘rummaging around’ comes from.
=> room
scrimmage: scrimmage: see skirmish
scrummage: scrummage: see skirmish
shimmer: shimmer: [OE] Shimmer goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *skim- (source also of German schimmern ‘glitter, gleam’). This was an extension of the base *ski-, from which English gets sheer and shine.
=> sheer, shine
stammer: stammer: [OE] To stammer is etymologically to be ‘impeded’ in speech. The word comes (along with Dutch stameren) from a prehistoric West Germanic *stamrōjan, which was derived from the base *stam-, *stum- ‘check, impede’ (source also of English stem ‘halt, check’ and stumble).
=> stem, stumble
summer: summer: [OE] Summer is a general Germanic word, with relatives in German and Danish sommer, Dutch zomer, and Swedish sommar. It goes back ultimately to an Indo-European base *sem-, which also produced Welsh haf ‘summer’ and Sanskrit sámā ‘year, season’.
summit: summit: see sum
summon: summon: see monster
tommy gun: tommy gun: [20] The name of the tommy gun, a lightweight hand-held machine gun favoured by Chicago gangsters, commemorates its originator: as its full designation, the Thompson submachine gun, reveals, a man called Thompson. He was John T. Thompson (1860– 1940), a general in the US Army who had links with the Auto-Ordnance Corporation of New York City. The idea for the gun was originally his, and although it was actually designed by O.V. Payne, it was Thompson’s name that it carried when it came on the market in 1919. The substitution with the colloquial Tommy is first recorded in 1929.
accommodate (v.): 1530s, from Latin accomodatus "suitable," past participle of accomodare "make fit, adapt, fit one thing to another," from ad- "to" (see ad-) + commodare "make fit," from commodus "fit" (see commode). Related: Accommodated; accommodating.
accommodating (adj.): "obliging," 1771, present participle adjective from accommodate.