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account [account 词源字典]: account: [14] Account is of Old French origin. It was formed from compter, conter ‘count’ (which derived from Latin computāre) and the prefix a-. Its original meaning in English, too, was ‘count’ or ‘count up’; this had disappeared by the end of the 18th century, but its specialized reference to the keeping of financial records is of equal antiquity. Account for, meaning ‘explain’, arose in the mid 18th century.
=> count[account etymology, account origin, 英语词源]
agoraphobia: agoraphobia: [19] Agoraphobia – fear of open spaces or, more generally, of simply being out of doors – is first referred to in an 1873 issue of the Journal of Mental Science; this attributes the term to Dr C Westphal, and gives his definition of it as ‘the fear of squares or open places’. This would be literally true, since the first element in the word represents Greek agorá ‘open space, typically a market place, used for public assemblies’ (the most celebrated in the ancient world was the Agora in Athens, rivalled only by the Forum in Rome).

The word agorá came from ageirein ‘assemble’, which is related to Latin grex ‘flock’, the source of English gregarious. Agoraphobia was not the first of the -phobias. That honour goes to hydrophobia in the mid 16th century. But that was an isolated example, and the surge of compounds based on Greek phóbos ‘fear’ really starts in the 19th century.

At first it was used for symptoms of physical illness (photophobia ‘abnormal sensitivity to light’ 1799), for aversions to other nationalities (Gallophobia 1803; the synonymous Francophobia does not appear until 1887), and for facetious formations (dustophobia, Robert Southey, 1824), and the range of specialized psychological terms familiar today does not begin to appear until the last quarter of the century (CLAUSTROPHOBIA 1879, acrophobia ‘fear of heights’ from Greek akros ‘topmost’ – see ACROBAT – 1892).
=> aggregate, allegory, gregarious, segregate
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
bowl: bowl: Bowl ‘round receptacle’ [OE] and bowl ‘ball used in bowls’ [15] come from different sources. The former (Old English bolle or bolla) comes ultimately from the Germanic base *bul-, *bal-, which was also the source of English ball, balloon, and ballot. The Middle Dutch form corresponding to Old English bolle was bolle, which was borrowed into English in the 13th century as boll, initially meaning ‘bubble’ but latterly ‘round seed-head’.

The other bowl was originally simply a synonym for ball, but its modern specialized uses in the game of bowls, and the verbal usage ‘deliver the ball’ in cricket and other games, had already begun their development in the 15th century. The word came via Old French boule from Latin bulla ‘bubble’, which also lies behind English boil, bull (as in ‘papal bull’), bullion, bullet, bulletin, and bully (as in ‘bully beef’), as well, perhaps, as bill.
=> ball, balloon, ballot; boil, bull, bullet, bulletin, bully
bowler: bowler: [19] The bowler hat was apparently named after the Bowlers, a family of 19thcentury London hatters who specialized in its manufacture. The first known reference to it comes in the Saturday Review 21 September 1861: ‘We are informed that he … wore … a white bowler hat’.
brand: brand: [OE] A brand was originally a ‘piece of burning wood’; the word comes from West and North Germanic *brandaz, a derivative of the same base (*bran-, *bren-) as produced burn, brandy, and perhaps broil. In the 16th century it came to be applied to an ‘(identifying) mark made with a hot iron’, which provided the basis for the modern sense ‘particular make of goods’, a 19th-century development.

A specialized (now archaic) sense of the word in English and other Germanic languages was ‘sword’ (perhaps from the flashing sword blade’s resemblance to a burning stick). This was borrowed into Vulgar Latin as *brando, and its derived verb *brandīre came into English via Old French as brandish [14]. Brand-new [16] may be from the notion of emerging pristine from the furnace.
=> brandish, brandy, broil, burn
bread: bread: [OE] The general Germanic word for ‘bread’ in prehistoric times was what we now know as loaf; bread probably originally meant simply ‘(piece of) food’, but as bread was among the commonest foods, the word bread gradually became more specialized, passing via ‘piece of bread’, ‘broken bread’, to simply ‘bread’. Old English brēad and related Germanic forms such as German brot and Swedish bröd point to a hypothetical Germanic precursor *brautham, but the word’s ultimate origins are unknown. Some etymologists have derived it from Indo- European *bhreu-, source of English brew.
calculate: calculate: [16] Calculate comes from the past participial stem of the Latin verb calculāre, a derivative of the noun calculus, which meant ‘pebble’. This was almost certainly a diminutive form of Latin calx, from which English gets calcium and chalk. The notion of ‘counting’ was present in the word from ancient times, for a specialized sense of Latin calculus was ‘stone used in counting, counter’ (its modern mathematical application to differential and integral calculus dates from the 18th century).

Another sense of Latin calculus was ‘stone in the bladder or kidney’, which was its meaning when originally borrowed into English in the 17th century.
=> calcarious, calcium, calculus, causeway, chalk
camp: camp: [16] Latin campus meant ‘open field’. It branched out into various more specialized meanings. One of them, for example, was ‘battle field’: this was borrowed into the Germanic languages as ‘battle’ (German has kampf, for instance, as in the title of Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf ‘My struggle’). Another was ‘place for military exercises’, and this seems to have developed, in the word’s passage via Italian campo and French camp, to ‘place where troops are housed’.

English got the word from French. Camp ‘mannered, effeminate’ [20] is presumably a different word, but its origins are obscure. Latin campus itself was adopted in English in the 18th century for the ‘grounds of a college’. It was originally applied to Princeton university in the USA.
=> campaign, champion, decamp, scamp
carpet: carpet: [14] Originally, carpet was simply a sort of rough cloth, and medieval Latin carpīta, for example, was sometimes used for a garment made from it. In earliest English use it was a ‘table-cloth’ or ‘bed-spread’, and it was not until the 15th century that the specialized ‘floorcovering’ began to establish itself. The word itself entered English via either Old French carpite or medieval Latin carpīta, which was derived from carpīre, an alteration of Latin carpere ‘pluck’ (related to English harvest).

The underlying notion seems to be that such cloth was originally made from ‘plucked’ fabric, that is, fabric which had been unravelled or shredded.
carriage: carriage: [14] Carriage is literally ‘carrying’. It is an Old Northern French derivative of the verb carier, in the sense ‘transport in a vehicle’. At first it meant simply ‘conveyance’ in the abstract sense, but in the 15th century more concrete meaning began to emerge: ‘load, luggage’ (now obsolete) and ‘means of conveyance, vehicle’. By the 18th century the latter had become further specialized to ‘horse-drawn wheeled vehicle for carrying people’ (as opposed to goods).
=> carry
carve: carve: [OE] Originally, carve meant simply ‘cut’. That sense died out in the 16th century, leaving the more specialized ‘cut or incise decoratively’ and later ‘cut up meat at table’. Related words in other Germanic languages, such as Dutch kerven, point to a prehistoric West Germanic *kerfan, which is probably ultimately linked to Greek gráphein ‘write’ (source of English graphic), whose original notion was ‘scratch or incise on a surface’.
=> graphic
century: century: [16] Latin centuria meant ‘group of one hundred’ (it was a derivative of centum ‘hundred’). Among the specialized applications of this general sense, the most familiar to us today is that of a division of the Roman army consisting originally of a hundred soldiers (the title of its commander, centurion [14] – Latin centuriō – derives from centuria). When English took the word over, however, it put it to other uses: it was first applied to ‘period of 100 years’ in the early 17th century, while ‘score of 100 or more in cricket’ comes from the mid 19th century.
=> cent, centurion
chip: chip: [OE] Old English cipp meant ‘share-beam of a plough’ (a sense paralleled in related forms in other Germanic languages, such as Dutch kip ‘plough-beam’ and Old Norse keppr ‘stick’). This seems a far cry from the modern use of chip, for which there is no evidence before the 14th century, and in fact our noun chip may be a new formation based on the verb chip, which goes back to Old English -cippian ‘cut’ (found only in compounds).

Here again, though, the record is incomplete; for the post-Old English verb does not turn up until the late 15th century, and then in the very specialized sense ‘cut the crust off bread’. The more general meaning ‘cut’ appears in the 17th century, but the modern ‘break off a small fragment’ is as late as the 18th century. All in all, a picture confused by lack of evidence. But probably the basic etymological sense that underlies all later usage is ‘cut off’ or ‘piece cut off’ (the early noun senses representing ‘branch or bough cut off a tree’). ‘Small piece of fried potato’ dates from the 1860s. (Old French borrowed the word as chipe, and a variant of this, chiffe ‘rag’, is the ultimate source of English chiffon [18].)
=> chiffon
cling: cling: [OE] The basic underlying sense of cling seems to be ‘stick, adhere’, but surviving records of the word in Old English reveal it only in the more specialized senses ‘congeal’ or ‘shrivel’ (the notion being that loss of moisture causes something to contract upon itself or adhere more closely to a surface). It is not really until the late 13th century that the more familiar ‘adhere’ (as in ‘a wet shirt clinging to someone’s back’) begins to show itself, and no hint that ‘clinging’ is something a human being can do with his or her arms emerges before the early 17th century.

The word goes back to a prehistoric Germanic base *klingg-, whose variant *klengk- is the source of English clench [13] and clinch [16].
=> clench, clinch
clinic: clinic: [17] Etymologically, a clinic is a place with ‘beds’. It comes ultimately from Greek klínē ‘bed’, which goes back to the Indo-European base *kli- ‘lean, slope’ (source also of English lean) and hence was originally ‘something on which one reclines’. The adjective derived from this, klīnkós, reached English via Latin clīnicus, having become specialized in meaning from ‘bed’ in general to ‘sick-bed’. Clinic was replaced as an adjective by clinical in the 18th century, but it continued on as a noun, originally in the sense ‘sick or bedridden person’.

This survived into the 19th century (‘You are free to roam at large over the bodies of my clinics’, E Berdoe, St Bernard’s 1887), and the modern sense ‘hospital’ did not arrive until the late 19th century, borrowed from French clinique or German klinik.
=> decline, lean
coil: coil: [16] Ultimately, coil, cull, and collect are the same word. All come from Latin colligere ‘gather together’. Its past participial stem produced collect, but the infinitive form passed into Old French as coillir, culler, etc, and thence into English. In the case of coil, its original general sense ‘gather, collect’ (of which there is no trace in English) was specialized, no doubt originally in nautical use, to the gathering up of ropes into tidy shapes (concentric rings) for stowage.
=> collect, cull
collect: collect: [16] Collect comes via French collecter or medieval Latin collēctāre from collēct-, the past participial stem of Latin colligere ‘gather together’, a compound verb formed from com- ‘together’ and legere ‘gather’ (source also of English elect, neglect, and select and, from its secondary meaning ‘read’, lecture and legible).

The specialized noun use of collect, ‘short prayer’, pronounced with its main stress on the first syllable, antedates the verb in English, having arrived via Old French in the 13th century. It comes from late Latin collēcta ‘assembly’, a nominalization of the past participle of colligere, which was used in medieval times in the phrase ōrātiō ad collēctam ‘prayer to the congregation’. Collect comes from the past participle of Latin colligere, but its infinitive form is the source of English coil and cull.
=> coil, cull, elect, lecture, legible, ligneous, neglect, select
convent: convent: [13] Latin conventus meant ‘assembly’ (it was the past participle of convenire ‘come together’, source of English convenient), but as it passed via Anglo-Norman covent into English it acquired the specialized sense ‘religious community’ (in early use it was applied to communities of either sex, but since the end of the 18th century it has come to be used exclusively for a ‘house of nuns’).

Until the mid- 15th century the Anglo-Norman spelling covent was retained in English (it survives in Covent Garden, which was formerly a vegetable garden belonging to the monks of Westminster Abbey, and may also the the source of coven [16]).
=> convenient, coven, venue
conversation: conversation: [14] Latin convertere meant ‘turn round, transform’. It was a compound verb formed from the intensive prefix com- and vertere ‘turn’ (source of English verse, version, and vertigo). It has spawned a variety of English words, its most direct descendant being convert [13]. Its past participle conversus produced the noun converse ‘opposite’ [16], but this should not be confused with the verb converse ‘talk’ [14], which came via quite a different route.

Latin vertere had a specialized form, vertāre, denoting repeated action. From it came versārī ‘live, occupy oneself’, which, with the addition of the com- prefix, produced conversārī ‘live, dwell, associate or communicate with others’. This passed via Old French converser into English, but at first both it and its derivative conversation were limited semantically to the notion of ‘dwelling’ and ‘social life’; the specific modern sense ‘talk’ was not brought into play until the late 16th century.
=> convert, verse, version
court: court: [12] Latin cohors designated an ‘enclosed yard’ (it was formed from the prefix com- ‘with’ and an element hort- which also appears in English horticulture). By extension it came to stand for those assembled in such a yard – a crowd of attendants or company of soldiers; hence the meaning of cohort familiar today. But both in its original sense and as ‘retinue’ the word took another and rather more disguised path into English.

In late Latin the accusative form cohortem had already become cortem, and this passed into English via Old French cort and Anglo-Norman curt. It retains the underlying notion of ‘area enclosed by walls or buildings’ (now reinforced in the tautological compound courtyard [16]), but it seems that an early association of Old French cort with Latin curia ‘sovereign’s assembly’ and ‘legal tribunal’ has contributed two of the word’s commonest meanings in modern English.

The Italian version of the word is corte. From this was derived the verb corteggiare ‘attend court, pay honour’, which produced the noun corteggio, borrowed into English via French as cortège [17]. Other derivatives include courtesy [13], from Old French cortesie (of which curtsey [16] is a specialized use) and courtesan [16], via French courtisane from Italian cortigiana.
=> cohort, courtesy, curtsey, horticulture
deaf: deaf: [OE] Ultimately, deaf and dumb come from the same source, and moreover they are related to a Greek word for ‘blind’. The common denominator ‘sensory or mental impairment’ goes back to an Indo-European base *dheubh-, which denoted ‘confusion, stupefaction, dizziness’. It produced Greek tuphlós ‘blind’; English dumb; and a prehistoric Germanic adjective *daubaz ‘dull, stupefied, slow’.

Many of the modern descendants of *daubaz retain this general sense – Danish doven means ‘lazy’ – but English has specialized it to ‘dull in hearing’. Duffer may ultimately be derived from Old Norse daufr ‘deaf’ in which the sense ‘dull, stupid’ is preserved.
=> duffer, dumb
decimate: decimate: [17] Decimate is a cause célèbre amongst those who apparently believe that words should never change their meanings. The original general signification of its Latin source, the verb decimāre, was the removal or destruction of one tenth (it was derived from Latin decem ‘ten’), and it may perhaps strike the 20th century as odd to have a particular word for such an apparently abstruse operation.

It does, however, arise out of two very specific procedures in the ancient world: the exaction of a tax of one tenth (for which indeed English has the ultimately related word tithe), and the practice in the Roman army of punishing a body of soldiers guilty of some crime such as mutiny by choosing one in ten of them by lot to be put to death. Modern English does not perhaps have much use for a verb with such specialized senses, but the general notion of impassive and indiscriminate slaughter implied in the Roman military use led, apparently as early as the mid- 17th century, to the modern sense ‘kill or destroy most of’.
=> decimal, ten
decline: decline: [14] The notion underlying decline is of ‘bending away’. It comes via Old French decliner from Latin dēclināre ‘turn aside, go down’, a compound verb formed from the prefix dē-, ‘away, aside’ and clināre ‘bend’, which also produced English incline and recline and is related to lean. Its Latin nominal derivative dēclinātiō has bifurcated in English, to produce declination [14] and, via Old French declinaison, declension [15].

The latter is used only in the specialized grammatical sense ‘set of inflectional endings of a noun’, already present in Latin, which derives from the concept that every inflected form of a word represents a ‘falling away’ from its uninflected base form (the same underlying notion appears in the term oblique case ‘any grammatical sense other than the nominative or vocative’, and indeed the word case itself, whose etymological meaning is ‘fall’; and there are perhaps traces of it in inflection, literally ‘bending’).
=> declension, incline, lean, recline
desk: desk: [14] Desk, disc, dish, and dais – strange bedfellows semantically – form a little gang of words going back ultimately, via Latin discus, to Greek dískos ‘quoit’. Desk seems perhaps the least likely descendant of ‘quoit’, but it came about like this: Latin discus was used metaphorically, on the basis of its circular shape, for a ‘tray’ or ‘platter, dish’; and when such a tray was set on legs, it became a table. (German tisch ‘table’ comes directly from Vulgar Latin in this sense.) By the time English acquired it from medieval Latin it seems already to have developed the specialized meaning ‘table for writing or reading on’.
=> dais, disc, dish
distemper: distemper: English has two distinct words distemper, although ultimately they come from the same source, Latin temperāre ‘mingle’ (source of English temper, temperate, and temperature). This formed the basis of two separate medieval Latin verbs, both compounded from the prefix dis- but using it in quite different ways. Dis- in the sense ‘reversal of a current state’ joined with temperāre in the specialized meaning ‘mingle in proper proportion’ to produce distemperāre ‘upset the proper balance of bodily humours’, hence ‘vex, make ill’.

This passed directly into English as distemper [14], and survives today mainly as the term for an infectious disease of dogs. Disjoined with temperāre in its intensive function produced medieval Latin distemperāre ‘mix thoroughly, soak’, which entered English via Old French destemprer in the 14th century. The meaning ‘soak, steep, infuse’ survived until the 17th century: ‘Give the Horse thereof every morning … the quantity of a Hasel-nut distempered in a quart of Wine’, Edward Topsell, History of Four-footed Beasts 1607.

The word’s modern application, to a water-based decorator’s paint, comes from the fact that the pigment is mixed with or infused in water (the same notion lies behind tempera [19], borrowed from Italian).
=> temper, temperate, temperature
forge: forge: Forge ‘make’ [13] and forge ahead [17] are two quite distinct and unrelated words in English. The former’s now common connotation of ‘faking’ is in fact a purely English development (dating from the late 14th century) in a word whose relatives in other languages (such as French forger) mean simply ‘make – especially by working heated metal’. It comes via Old French forger from Latin fabricāre ‘make’ (source also of English fabricate, which has similarly dubious connotations).

The related noun forge goes back to Latin fabrica (whence also English fabric), amongst whose specialized senses was ‘blacksmith’s workshop’. Forge ‘move powerfully’, as in forge ahead, may be an alteration of force.
=> fabric
franchise: franchise: [13] Originally, franchise meant ‘freedom’ (as it still does in French today): ‘We will for our franchise fight and for our land’, Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle 1297. Gradually, though, it became more specialized in sense, narrowing down via ‘particular legal privilege’ to (in the 18th century) ‘right to vote’. It comes from Old French franchise, a derivative of franc ‘free’ (whence English frank).
=> frank
grand: grand: [16] The original Latin word for ‘big’ was magnus (as in magnify, magnitude, etc). However, it also had grandis. This not only denoted great physical size; it also had connotations of moral greatness or sublimity, and in addition often carried the specialized meaning ‘full-grown’. This last, together with a possibly etymologically connected Greek brénthos ‘pride’ and Old Church Slavonic gradi ‘breast’ suggest that its underlying meaning may be ‘swelling’.

French (grand) and Italian and Spanish (grande) have taken it over as their main adjective for ‘big’, but in English it remains a more specialized word, for things or people that are ‘great’ or ‘imposing’. Its use for denoting family relationships separated by two generations, as in grandmother, was adopted from Old French, and goes back, in the case of grandame and grandsire, to the 13th century, well before the independent adjective grand itself was borrowed.

But the underlying notion is as old as the Greeks and Romans, who used mégas and magnus in the same way.
gullet: gullet: [14] Latin gula meant ‘throat’. It was a descendant of Indo-European *gel- ‘swallow’, which also produced German kehle ‘throat’ and English glut and glutton. Gula passed into Old French as gole or goule (whence modern French gueule ‘mouth’), where it formed the basis of a diminutive form goulet, acquired by English as gullet (and later, in the 16th century, as gully, which originally meant ‘gullet’). The English heraldic term gules ‘red’ [14] also comes from Old French gole, goule, in the specialized sense ‘red fur neckpiece’.
=> glut, glutton, gules, gully
hair: hair: [OE] No general Indo-European term for ‘hair’ has come down to us. All the ‘hair’-words in modern European languages are descended from terms for particular types of hair – hair on the head, hair on other parts of the body, animal hair – or for single hairs or hair collectively, and indeed many retain these specialized meanings: French cheveu, for instance, means ‘hair of the head’, whereas poil denotes ‘body hair’ or ‘animal hair’.

In the case of English hair, unfortunately, it is not clear which of these categories originally applied, although some have suggested a connection with Lithuanian serys ‘brush’, which might indicate that the prehistoric ancestor of hair was a ‘bristly’ word. The furthest back in time we can trace it is to West and North Germanic *khǣram, source also of German, Dutch, and Danish haar and Swedish hår.

The slang use of hairy for ‘difficult’ is first recorded in the mid 19th century, in an erudite context that suggests that it may have been inspired by Latin horridus (source of English horrid), which originally meant (of hair) ‘standing on end’. Its current use, in which ‘difficult’ passes into ‘dangerous’, seems to have emerged in the 1960s, and was presumably based on hair-raising, which dates from around 1900.

It is fascinatingly foreshadowed by harsh, which is a derivative of hair and originally meant ‘hairy’.
hall: hall: [OE] Etymologically, a hall is a ‘roofed or covered place’. Its ultimate ancestor was prehistoric West and North Germanic *khallō, a derivative of *khal-, *khel- ‘cover, hide’ (a slightly different derivative produced English hell, and cell, clandestine, conceal, hull ‘pod’, and possibly colour and holster are all relatives, close or distant).

It retained much of its original meaning in Old English heall, which denoted simply a ‘large place covered by a roof’. This gradually became specialized to, on the one hand, ‘large residence’, and on the other, ‘large public room’. The main current sense, ‘entrance corridor’, dates from the 17th century (it derives from the fact that in former times the principal room of a house usually opened directly off the front door).
=> cell, clandestine, conceal, hell, hull
idea: idea: [16] Etymologically, an idea is the ‘look’ of something – it comes ultimately from the same source as produced the Greek verb ídein ‘see’. Greek idéā itself was used by Plato in the specialized sense ‘archetypal form of something’, which survives in the derived adjective ideal [17], but as far as the modern English noun is concerned, its sense ‘notion, mental conception’ developed (in Greek) via ‘look, appearance’, ‘image’, and ‘mental image’. Ideology [18] is a derivative, coined originally in French at the end of the 18th century.
=> ideology, idol
idiot: idiot: [13] The etymological idea underlying idiot is of a ‘private individual’. That is what Greek idiótēs (a derivative of ídios ‘personal, private’) originally meant. It was extended to the ordinary ‘common man’, particularly a lay person without any specialized knowledge, and so came to be used rather patronizingly for an ‘ignorant person’. It is this derogatory sense that has come down to English via Latin idiōta and Old French idiot.
=> idiosyncracy
infect: infect: [14] Latin inficere originally meant ‘put in’ – it was a compound verb formed from the prefix in- and facere ‘put, do’ (source of English fact, fashion, etc). Its earliest specialized extension was ‘dip in’, which was applied specifically to the dipping of cloth into dye. From this it moved on to ‘stain’, and then it was a short step to ‘taint, spoil’. ‘Affect with disease’ was a post-Latin development. English acquired the word via the Latin past participial stem infect-.
=> fact, factory, fashion, perfect
instinct: instinct: [15] The etymological notion underlying instinct (and also the closely related instigate) is of ‘goading onwards with a pointed stick’. Its ultimate source is Latin instinguere ‘urge onwards, incite’, a compound verb formed from the prefix in- ‘on’ and stinguere ‘prick, goad’. Source also of English distinct and extinct, this goes back to the same root, *stig-, as produced English stick and Latin stīgāre ‘prick, goad’, the ancestor of English instigate [16].

The noun derived from it, instinctus, originally meant ‘incitement, instigation’, but it eventually moved on to ‘impulse’, the sense it had when English acquired it. The more specialized ‘innate impulse’ developed in the mid 16th century.
=> distinct, extinct, instigate, stick
knuckle: knuckle: [14] Knuckle originally denoted the rounded end of a bone at a joint, which sticks out when you bend the joint. This could be at any joint, including the elbow, the knee and even the joints of the vertebrae; only gradually did it become specialized to the finger joints. The word probably came from Middle Low German knökel (or a relative of it), which appears to have meant etymologically ‘little bone’. Knuckle down, in the sense ‘begin to work hard and conscientiously’, comes from the game of marbles, where players have to put their knuckles on the ground when shooting a marble with the thumb.
labour: labour: [13] Labour comes via Old French labour from Latin labor. This has been linked with the verb labāre ‘slip’, and if the two were related it would mean that the underlying etymological meaning of labour was something like ‘stumble under a burden’. Most of the modern European descendants of Latin labor have progressed from the broad sense ‘work, exertion’ to more specialized meanings – French labourer denotes ‘plough’, for instance, and Spanish labrar ‘plough, carve, embroider’, etc. English has retained it as a formal alternative to work, although the additional obstetric sense developed in the 16th century.
minister: minister: [13] Etymologically, a minister is a person of ‘lower’ status, a ‘servant’. The word goes back via Old French ministre to Latin minister ‘servant, attendant’, which was derived from minus ‘less’. It retained this meaning when it arrived in English, and indeed it still survives in the verb minister. But already by the Middle Ages a specialized application to a ‘church functionary’ had developed, and in the 16th century this hardened into the present-day ‘clergyman’.

The political sense of the word developed in the 17th century, from the notion of a ‘servant’ of the crown. Derivatives from other languages to have established themselves in English include métier [18], which came via French from Vulgar Latin *misterium, an alteration of Latin ministerium ‘service’ (source of English ministry [14]), and minstrel.

And etymologically, minister is the antonym of master, whose Latin ancestor was based on magis ‘more’.
=> métier, minstrel, minus
moat: moat: [14] The word moat originally meant a ‘mound’ or ‘embankment’ (this has since been hived off into the specialized form motte). The word was borrowed from Old French mote or motte ‘hill, mound’, whose ultimate source was probably a Gaulish mutt or mutta. The use of the word for the mound on which a castle keep was built led in Old French or Anglo-Norman to its reapplication to the ditch surrounding such a mound.
neuter: neuter: [14] From a formal point of view, Latin neuter is virtually identical to English neither. Both originated as compounds formed from a negative particle and an element meaning ‘which of two’. In the case of neuter these were ne and uter, which in combination denoted etymologically ‘neither one thing nor the other’. The specialized application to grammatical gender soon emerged, and it was in this sense that neuter was first adopted into English. The derivative neutral [16] goes back to Latin neutrālis.
paradise: paradise: [12] Paradise comes from an ancient Persian word meaning ‘enclosed place’. In Avestan, the Indo-European language in which the Zoroastrian religious texts were written, pairidaēza was a compound formed from pairi ‘around’ (a relative of Greek péri, from which English gets the prefix peri-) and diz ‘make, form’ (which comes from the same Indo- European source as produced English dairy, dough, and the second syllable of lady).

Greek took the word over as parádeisos, and specialized ‘enclosed place’ to an ‘enclosed park’; and in the Greek version of the Bible it was applied to the ‘garden of Eden’. English acquired the word via Latin paradīsus and Old French paradis.
=> dairy, dough, lady
parson: parson: [13] Parson and person started off as the same word (both come from Latin persōna) but split into two. It is not altogether clear why parson came to be used for a ‘priest’. It may simply have been a specialized application of an extended post-classical sense of Latin persōna, ‘person of rank, important person, personage’ – hence ‘person of high position within the church’. But it has also been speculated that it originated in the notion of the priest as the ‘person’ who legally embodied the parish (who could for example sue or be sued on behalf of the parish).
=> person
pigeon: pigeon: [14] Pigeon comes ultimately from late Latin pīpiō. This meant originally simply ‘young bird’, and was formed from the onomatopoeic base *pīp- (source also of English pipe), which imitated the chirps of young birds. It gradually specialized in use to ‘young pigeon, squab’, and both the general and the specific senses passed via Vulgar Latin *pībiō into Old French as pijon. By the time it arrived in English, however, only the ‘young pigeon’ sense survived, and this was soon overtaken by ‘pigeon’ in general.
=> pipe
rector: rector: [14] A rector is etymologically a ‘ruler’. The word comes via Old French rectour from Latin rēctor ‘governor’, a derivative of the verb regere ‘govern, rule’ (from which English gets regent, region, etc). It carried its original meaning with it into English, with reference both to Roman governors in the ancient world and to God as ‘ruler’ of the universe (Sir Matthew Hale in 1676 referred to God as the ‘great dispenser or permitter and rector of all the events in the world’), but by the 18th century it had largely become restricted to the more specialized senses ‘clergyman in charge of a parish’ and ‘head of a college’.
=> regent, regiment, region
religion: religion: [12] Latin religiō originally meant ‘obligation, bond’. It was probably derived from the verb religāre ‘tie back, tie tight’ (source of English rely), a compound formed from the prefix re- ‘back’ and ligāre ‘tie’ (source of English liable, ligament, etc). It developed the specialized sense ‘bond between human beings and the gods’, and from the 5th century it came to be used for ‘monastic life’ – the sense in which English originally acquired it via Old French religion. ‘Religious practices’ emerged from this, but the word’s standard modern meaning did not develop until as recently as the 16th century.
=> ally, liable, ligament, ligature, rely
satisfy: satisfy: [15] Etymologically, satisfy means ‘make enough’. It comes, via Old French satisfier, from Latin satisfacere ‘satisfy, content’, a compound verb formed from satis ‘enough’ (a relative of English sad, sated, and saturate, and source of English satiate). The derived noun satisfaction reached English well over a century before the verb, in the specialized ecclesiastical sense ‘performance of penance’.
=> sad, sated, satiate, saturate
shrive: shrive: [OE] Shrive ‘hear someone’s confession’ goes back ultimately to Latin scrībere ‘write’ (source of English scribe, script, etc). This was borrowed into prehistoric West Germanic as *skrīban, whose direct descendants are German schreiben and Dutch schrijven ‘write’. But it also developed a specialized sense ‘prescribe penances’, and it is this that has given English shrive.

Today the word is best known in the form of shrove, its past tense, which is used in Shrove Tuesday [15] (an allusion to the practice of going to confession at the beginning of Lent), and the derived noun shrift ‘penance, confession’ [OE] (the expression short shrift originally referred to the short period of time allowed to someone about to be executed to say their confession).
=> scribe, script, shrift, shrove
small: small: [OE] Small comes from a prehistoric Germanic *smalaz, which in turn probably goes back ultimately to *smel-, a variant of the Indo- European base *mel- ‘grind’ (source of English meal, mill, etc). Etymologically, therefore, it could well denote ‘ground up into little bits’. Its Germanic relatives, such as German schmal and Dutch smal, have become specialized in meaning to ‘narrow’, but while English did start off down this semantic path, it has long since abandoned it.
=> meal, mill, molar
smile: smile: [13] The Old English word for ‘smile’ was smearcian, ancestor of modern English smirk. This was descended ultimately from the Indo- European base *smei-, which also produced Greek meidos ‘laugh’, Sanskrit smeras ‘smiling’, Latvian smaidīt ‘smile’, and Russian smejat’ sja ‘laugh’. Smile, which from the 13th century began to push smirk towards the more specialized sense ‘smile in a self-satisfied way’, comes from the same base, and was probably borrowed from a Scandinavian source (Swedish has smila and Danish smile).
=> smirk