英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

adopt [adopt 词源字典]: adopt: see opinion
[adopt etymology, adopt origin, 英语词源]
aeroplane: aeroplane: [19] The prefix aero- comes ultimately from Greek āér ‘air’, but many of the terms containing it (such as aeronaut and aerostat) reached English via French. This was the case, too, with aeroplane, in the sense of ‘heavier-than-air flying machine’. The word was first used in English in 1873 (30 years before the Wright brothers’ first flight), by D S Brown in the Annual Report of the Aeronautical Society – he refers vaguely to an aeroplane invented by ‘a Frenchman’.

The abbreviated form plane followed around 1908. (An earlier, and exclusively English, use of the word aeroplane was in the sense ‘aerofoil, wing’; this was coined in the 1860s, but did not long survive the introduction of the ‘aircraft’ sense.) Aeroplane is restricted in use mainly to British English (and even there now has a distinctly old-fashioned air). The preferred term in American English is airplane, a refashioning of aeroplane along more ‘English’ lines which is first recorded from 1907.
=> air
allopathy: allopathy: see homeopathy
alopecia: alopecia: [14] This word appears to derive from the resemblance observed by the Greeks between baldness in human beings and mange in foxes. The Greek for ‘fox’ was alōpēx, hence alōpekía, borrowed into Latin as alopēcia. Alōpēx is related to Latin vulpēs ‘fox’, from which English gets vulpine ‘foxlike’ [17].
=> vulpine
antelope: antelope: [15] Antelope comes from medieval Greek antholops. In the Middle Ages it was applied to an outlandish but figmentary beast, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘haunting the banks of the Euphrates, very savage, hard to catch, having long saw-like horns with which they cut in pieces and broke all “engines” and even cut down trees’. The term was subsequently used for a heraldic animal, but it was not until the early 17th century that it was applied, by the naturalist Edward Topsell, to the swift-running deerlike animal for which it is now used.
apoplexy: apoplexy: [14] The Greek verb apopléssein meant ‘incapacitate by means of a stroke’. It was formed from the prefix apo- ‘away, off’ (here used as an intensive) and the verb pléssein ‘hit’ (source of English plectrum [17] and related to English complain, plangent, plankton, and plague). The derived noun, apoplēxíā, entered English via Latin and Old French.
=> complain, plague, plangent, plankton, plectrum
apostrophe: apostrophe: [17] Apostrophe comes originally from the Greek phrase prosōidiā apóstrophos, literally ‘accent of turning away’, hence, a mark showing where a letter or sound has been omitted. Apóstrophos itself was derived from the compound verb apostréphein, formed from the prefix apo- ‘away’ and the verb stréphein ‘turn’ (related to the second element of catastrophe [16], whose Greek original meant literally ‘overturning’). English acquired the word via French and Latin.
=> catastrophe
appropriate: appropriate: see proper
bishop: bishop: [OE] Bishop originally had no ecclesiastical connections; its Greek source, episkopos, at first meant simply ‘overseer’, from epi- ‘around’ and skopein ‘look’ (antecedent of English scope, and related to spy). From the general sense, it came to be applied as the term for various government officials, and was waiting to be called into service for a ‘church officer’ as Christianity came into being and grew. The Greek word was borrowed into ecclesiastical Latin as episcopus (source of French évêque), and in more popular parlance lost its e-, giving *biscopus, which was acquired by English in the 9th century.
=> scope, spy
canopy: canopy: [14] Etymologically, a canopy is a ‘mosquito net’. The word comes ultimately from Greek kōnōpeion, a derivative of kónops ‘mosquito’. This passed via Latin cōnōpūum into medieval Latin as canopeum, which meant both ‘mosquito net’ and ‘couch with such a net’. English adopted it directly from Latin as canope or canape, meaning ‘covering suspended over a throne, bed, etc’.

The French version of the word, however, concentrated on other aspects of canopeum’s meaning; French canapé means ‘couch, sofa’. Its metaphorical extension, ‘piece of bread or biscuit with a savoury topping’, was borrowed into English towards the end of the 19th century.
=> canapé
catastrophe: catastrophe: see apostrophe
chiropodist: chiropodist: see surgeon
chop: chop: There are three distinct words chop in English. The oldest [14] originally meant ‘trade, barter’, but it is now found only in the phrase chop and change. It appears to come from Old English cēapian ‘trade’, which is related to English cheap. Chop ‘jaw, jowl’ [15] (now usually in the plural form chops) is of unknown origin; the now archaic chap is a variant. Chop ‘cut’ [16] seems ultimately to be the same word as chap (as in ‘chapped lips’), and may be related to Middle Low German kappen ‘chop off’. The specific noun sense ‘meat cutlet’ dates from the 15th century.
=> chap, cheap
chopstick: chopstick: [17] A chopstick is literally a ‘quick stick’. The element chop occurs more recognizably in chop-chop ‘quickly’; it is a Pidgin English modification of Cantonese Chinese gap ‘urgent’. ‘Quick stick’ is a rather free translation of the Chinese term for ‘chopsticks’, Cantonese kuàizi, literally ‘fast ones, nimble ones’.
=> chop-chop
claustrophobia: claustrophobia: see cloister
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.
coop: coop: see cup
cooperate: cooperate: see operate
co-opt: co-opt: see opinion
cope: cope: There are two distinct words cope in English. The now more familiar one, ‘deal with’ [14], comes from Old French coper, and originally meant ‘hit, punch’. The Old French verb was a derivative of the noun cop ‘blow’, which in turn was a variant of colp (from which modern French gets coup, borrowed into English in the 18th century). This came via medieval Latin colpus (ultimate source of English coppice) and Latin colaphus from Greek kólaphos ‘blow, punch’.

The modern English sense of the verb developed via ‘come to blows with’ and ‘contend with’ to ‘handle successfully’. Cope ‘cloak’ [13] was borrowed from medieval Latin cāpa, a variant of cappa, which produced English cap and cape as well as chapel and chaperone. It may ultimately be descended from Latin caput ‘head’.
=> coppice, coup; cap, cape, chapel, chaperon
copious: copious: [14] Copious comes, either directly or via Old French copieux, from Latin copiōsus, a derivative of copia ‘abundance’ (from which English also gets copy). Copia itself was originally a compound noun, formed from the intensive prefix com- and ops ‘wealth, power’.
=> copy, opulent
copper: copper: [OE] A major source of copper in the ancient world was the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, so the Romans called it cyprium aes ‘metal of Cyprus’. This became cuprum in late Latin, from which it was borrowed into prehistoric West and North Germanic as *kupar, source of Old English coper. (Copper the slang term for ‘policeman’ [19] is simply the agent noun formed from the verb cop ‘seize’, which probably comes via Old French caper from Latin capere ‘seize, take’, source of English capture.)
coppice: coppice: [14] The notion underlying coppice is of ‘cutting’. Its ultimate source is the Greek noun kólaphos ‘blow’, which passed via Latin colaphus into medieval Latin as colpus (source of English cope and coup). From colpus was derived a verb colpāre ‘cut’, which formed the basis of Vulgar Latin colpātīcium ‘having the quality of being cut’. Its Old French descendant copeïz came to be applied to an area of small trees regularly cut back. English borrowed this as coppice (and in the 16th century spawned a new contracted form copse).
=> cope, copse, coup
copulate: copulate: see couple
copy: copy: [14] Copy has a very devious semantic history. It comes from Latin copia ‘abundance’ (source also of English copious), and came into English via Old French copie. In addition to its central sense ‘abundance’, Latin copia could also mean ‘power, right’, and it appears that its use in such phrases as ‘give someone the right to transcribe’ led to its application to ‘right of reproduction’ and ultimately to simply ‘reproduction’.
=> copious
crop: crop: [OE] Old English cropp meant ‘bird’s craw’ and ‘rounded head of a plant’, and it was presumably the latter that gave rise to the word’s most familiar modern sense, ‘cultivated plant produce’, at some time in the 13th century. Its relatives in other Germanic languages, including German kropf and Dutch krop, are used for ‘bird’s craw’ but also for various bodily swellings in the throat and elsewhere, indicating the word’s underlying meaning is ‘round mass, lump’.

Its Germanic ancestor, *kruppō, was borrowed into Vulgar Latin as *cruppa, which made its way via Old French into English as croup ‘horse’s (round) rump’ [13], and as the derivative crupper [13]. Croupier [18] is based on French croupe, having originally meant ‘person who rides on the rump, behind the saddle’. The Germanic base *krup- ‘round mass, lump’ is also the ancestor of English group.
=> croup, croupier, crupper, group
develop: develop: [17] The history of develop and its close relative envelop is hazy. English acquired it from développer, the modern French descendant of Old French desveloper. This was a compound verb formed from the prefix des- ‘un-’ and voloper ‘wrap’. But where did voloper come from? Some have proposed a hypothetical Celtic base *vol- ‘roll’, while others have pointed to similarities, formal and semantic, with Italian viluppo ‘bundle’ and viluppare ‘wrap’, which come from an assumed late Latin *faluppa ‘husk’. Beyond that, however, the trail has gone cold.
=> envelop
dope: dope: [19] Dope originated in the USA, where it was borrowed from Dutch doop ‘sauce’. This was a derivative of the verb doopen ‘dip’, which is related to English dip. It was at first used as a general colloquialism for any thick semi-liquid preparation, whether used as a food or, for example, as a lubricant, but during the 19th century some specific strands began to emerge: notably ‘drug’, and in particular ‘opium’, and ‘varnish painted on the fabric of an aircraft’.

The effects of the former led to its use in the sense ‘fool’, and to the coinage of the adjective dopey, first recorded in the 1890s. The sense ‘information’ dates from around 1900.
=> deep, dip
doppelganger: doppelganger: [19] English borrowed doppelganger from German doppelgänger, which means literally ‘double-goer’. It was originally used in the sense ‘ghostly apparition of a living person, especially one that haunts its real counterpart’ (‘hell-hounds, doppel-gangers, boggleboes’, M A Denham, Denham tracts 1851), but in the course of the 20th century it has become increasingly restricted to a flesh-andblood ‘person identical to another, double’.
=> double
drop: drop: [OE] Drop, droop, and drip are closely related. Droop [13] was borrowed from Old Norse drūpa, which came from a Germanic base *drūp-. A variant of this, *drup-, produced Middle Danish drippe, the probable source of English drip [15], and a further variant, *drop-, lies behind Old English dropa, ancestor of modern English drop.

All three go back ultimately to a prehistoric Indo-European *dhreub-, source of Irish drucht ‘dew’. The English noun originally meant ‘globule of liquid’, and its related verb ‘fall in drops’. The main modern transitive sense, ‘allow to fall’, developed in the 14th century, giving English a single word for the concept of ‘letting fall’ not shared by, for example, French and German, which have to use phrases to express it: respectively, laisser tomber and fallen lassen.
=> drip, droop
elope: elope: [17] Etymologically, elope signifies ‘leap away’. It was originally an Anglo-Norman legal term applied to a married woman running off with a lover, and only in the past couple of hundred years has it come to be applied to a couple leaving home to get married when parental permission is denied. It is thought that the Anglo-Norman term was an adaptation of Middle English *alopen, past participle of an unrecorded verb *alepen ‘run away’, which would have been formed from the prefix a- ‘away’ and lepen ‘run, leap’ (source of modern English leap and related to lope and German laufen ‘run’).
=> leap, lope
encyclopedia: encyclopedia: [16] Etymologically, encyclopedia means ‘general education’. It is a medieval formation, based on the Greek phrase egkúklios paideíā (egkúklios, a compound adjective formed from the prefix en- ‘in’ and kúklos ‘circle’ – source of English cycle – meant originally ‘circular’, and hence ‘general’, and is the ultimate source of English encyclical [17]; paideíā ‘education’ was a derivative of país ‘boy, child’, which has given English paederast [18], paedophilia [20], pedagogue [14], pedant [16], and paediatrician [20]).

This referred to the general course of education which it was customary to give a child in classical Greece, and after it was merged into a single word egkuklopaideíā and transmitted via medieval Latin encyclopedia into English, it retained that meaning at first. However, in the 17th century the term began to be applied to compendious reference works (the first, or at least the one which did most to establish the name, was perhaps that of J H Alsted in 1632).

The Encyclopedia Britannica was first published in 1768.
=> cycle, encyclical, paederast, pedagogue, pedant, pediatrician
entropy: entropy: [19] The term entropy was coined (as entropie) in 1865 by the German physicist Rudolph Clausius (1822–88), formulator of the second law of thermodynamics. It was he who developed the concept of entropy (a measure of the disorder of a system at atomic or molecular level), and he created the name for it (on the model of energy) from Greek en- ‘in’ and tropé ‘turning, transformation’ (source of English trophy and tropical). The first record of the English version of the word is from 1868.
=> trophy, tropical
envelope: envelope: [18] English borrowed envelope from French enveloppe in the sense ‘wrapper’, and more specifically ‘cover for a letter’, at the start of the 18th century. It was a derivative of the verb envelopper ‘wrap’, whose ancestor, envoloper, gave English envelop in the 14th century. As in the case of its first cousin develop, the origin of the verb remains a mystery.

It is a compound formed from the prefix en- ‘in’ and voloper ‘wrap’, but the source of voloper has never been satisfactorily explained. It may come from a hypothetical Celtic base *vol- ‘roll’, but an equally good candidate is late Latin *faluppa ‘husk’, from which come Italian viluppo ‘bundle’ and viluppare ‘wrap’.
=> develop
gramophone: gramophone: [19] The term gramophone was registered as a trademark in 1887 by the German-born American inventor Emil Berliner for a sound recording and reproducing device he had developed using a disc (as opposed to the cylinder of Edison’s phonograph). He coined it simply by reversing the elements of phonogram, a term adopted for a ‘sound recording’ in the early 1880s and composed of descendants of Greek phōné ‘voice, sound’ and grámma ‘something written’. It seems to have begun to give way to record player in the mid 1950s.
grope: grope: see grip
helicopter: helicopter: [19] The term helicopter was coined in the mid-19th century from Greek hélix ‘spiral’ (source of English helix [16] and helical [17]) and Greek ptéron ‘wing’ (source of English pterodactyl and related to feather). The French were first in the field with hélicoptère, and the earliest record of the word in English, in 1861, was the barely anglicized helicoptere, but by the late 1880s the modern form helicopter was being used. (These 19th-century helicopters were of course a far cry from the present-day rotorblade- driven craft, which were introduced in the late 1930s; as their name suggests, they were lifted – or more usually not lifted – by rotating spiral-shaped aerofoils.)
=> feather, helical, helix, pterodactyl
heliotrope: heliotrope: [17] The heliotrope, a plant of the forget-me-not family, gets its name because its flowers always turn to face the sun (the word comes via Latin hēliotropium from Greek hēliotrópion, a compound formed from hélios ‘sun’ and -tropos ‘turning’ – as in English trophy and tropical – which designated such plants, and was also used for ‘sundial’).

In early times the word was applied to the ‘sunflower’, which has similar heliotactic habits and in Italian is called girasole (literally ‘turn-sun’), source of the Jerusalem in English Jerusalem artichoke. Another application of Greek hēliotrópion carried over into English was to a sort of green quartz which was believed to turn the sun’s rays blood-red if thrown into water.
=> trophy, tropical
hippopotamus: hippopotamus: [16] Etymologically, a hippopotamus is a ‘river horse’. The word comes, via Latin, from late Greek hippopótamos, a lexicalization of an earlier phrase híppos ho potámios, literally ‘horse of the river’. Other English descendants of híppos (a relative of Latin equus ‘horse’) include hippodrome [16], from a Greek compound that meant originally ‘horse-race’ (-drome occurs also in aerodrome and dromedary), and the name Philip, literally ‘lover of horses’. The abbreviation hippo, incidentally, dates from the mid-19th century.
=> equine, hippodrome
homeopathy: homeopathy: [19] Greek hómoios meant ‘like, similar’. It was derived from homós ‘same’, a word ultimately related to English same which has contributed homogeneous [17], homonym [17], homophone [17], and homosexual [19] to the English language. Combined with -pátheia, a derivative of Greek páthos ‘passion, suffering’, it produced German homöopathie, which was borrowed by English around 1830. Etymologically, the word means ‘cure by similarity’ – that is, by administering minute quantities of the same substance as caused the disease – and contrasts with allopathy [19], based on Greek állos ‘other’.
=> same
hoopoe: hoopoe: see dupe
hope: hope: [OE] The origins of the word hope are obscure. It appears to have started life among the Low German dialects of northern Germany (whence English hope and Dutch hoop), and later spread to Scandinavia (giving Swedish hopp and Danish haab) and High German (modern German has the verb hoffen and the derived noun hoffnung ‘hope’). Where did the original Low German forms come from, though? A suggestion that has found some favour is that the word is related to hop, and that it started from the notion of ‘jumping to safety’. The theory goes that the ‘place of refuge’ thus reached gives one ‘hope’, but it has an air of desperation.
horoscope: horoscope: see hour
interloper: interloper: [16] An interloper is literally someone who ‘runs between’. The word was coined in English, but based on Dutch loper, a derivative of lopen ‘run’ (to which English leap is related). It originally denoted someone who engaged in trade without authorization, and only in the 17th century took on its present-day meaning ‘interfering outsider’.
=> leap
isotope: isotope: [20] The term isotope for a version of an element with a particular atomic weight was coined in 1913 by the British chemist Frederick Soddy. It means literally ‘equal place’ and was formed from two Greek components, the prefix iso- ‘equal’ and the noun tópos ‘place’ (source of English topic). The reason for the coinage was that although isotopes of the same element have different atomic weights, they occupy the ‘same place’ in the periodic table of elements.
=> topic
jeopardy: jeopardy: [14] The semantic focus of jeopardy has changed subtly over the centuries. Originally it meant ‘even chance’, but gambling being the risky business it is, and human nature having a strong streak of pessimism, attention was soon focussed on the ‘chanciness’ rather than the ‘evenness’, and by the late 14th century jeopardy was being used in its modern sense ‘risk of loss or harm, danger’. The word originated in the Old French expression jeu parti, literally ‘divided play’, hence ‘even chance’. It was to begin with a term in chess and similar board games.
kaleidoscope: kaleidoscope: [19] Greek kalós meant ‘beautiful’ (it was related to Sanskrit kalyāna ‘beautiful’). It has given English a number of compound words: calligraphy [17], for instance, etymologically ‘beautiful writing’, callipygian [18], ‘having beautiful buttocks’, and callisthenics [19], literally ‘beauty and strength’. The Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster used it, along with Greek eidos ‘shape’ and the element -scope denoting ‘observation instrument’, to name a device he invented in 1817 for looking at rotating patterns of coloured glass – a ‘beautiful-shape viewer’.
=> calligraphy, callisthenics
lope: lope: see leap
lycanthropy: lycanthropy: see wolf
malapropism: malapropism: [19] English owes the word malapropism to Mrs Malaprop, a character in Richard Sheridan’s play The Rivals 1775 whose grandiloquent impulses led her to use slightly (but ludicrously) the wrong word: amongst the most familiar of her errors are ‘contagious countries’ (for contiguous), ‘a supercilious knowledge in accounts’ (for superficial), and ‘as head-strong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile’. Sheridan based the name on malapropos ‘inappropriate’ [17], an anglicization of French mal à propos, literally ‘badly to the purpose’ (on mal, see MALIGN).
=> malign, propose