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grotesque[grotesque 词源字典]

grotesque: [16] Etymologically, grotesque means ‘grotto-like’. Its Italian source, grottesco, was used in the phrase pittura grottesca, literally ‘grotto-like pictures’, denoting wall paintings of the sort discovered in the excavated basements of old buildings. Many of them were evidently bizarre or highly imaginative, and so grottesca came to mean ‘fanciful, fantastic’.

English acquired the word via Old French crotesque (crotescque was the earliest English spelling, later re-formed as grotesque on the basis of French grotesque and Italian grottesca), and in general use from the mid-18th century onward it slid towards the pejorativeness of ‘ludicrous, absurd’. The colloquial abbreviation grotty is first recorded in print in 1964.
=> grotto[grotesque etymology, grotesque origin, 英语词源]