英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

belfry [belfry 词源字典]: belfry: [13] Etymologically, belfry has nothing to do with bells; it was a chance similarity between the two words that led to belfry being used from the 15th century onwards for ‘bell-tower’. The original English form was berfrey, and it meant ‘movable seige-tower’. It came from Old French berfrei, which in turn was borrowed from a hypothetical Frankish *bergfrith, a compound whose two elements mean respectively ‘protect’ (English gets bargain, borough, borrow, and bury from the same root) and ‘peace, shelter’ (hence German friede ‘peace’); the underlying sense of the word is thus the rather tautological ‘protective shelter’.

A tendency to break down the symmetry between the two rs in the word led in the 15th century to the formation of belfrey in both English and French (l is phonetically close to r), and at around the same time we find the first reference to it meaning ‘bell-tower’, in Promptorium parvulorum 1440, an early English-Latin dictionary: ‘Bellfray, campanarium’.
=> affray, bargain, borrow, borough, bury, neighbour[belfry etymology, belfry origin, 英语词源]
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
dismal: dismal: [13] Etymologically, dismal means ‘bad day’. It comes, via Anglo-Norman dis mal, from Latin diēs malī, literally ‘evil days’, a term used to denote the two days in each month which according to ancient superstition were supposed to be unlucky (these days, of set date, were said originally to have been computed by Egyptian astrologers, and were hence also called Egyptian days). The term dismal thus acquired connotations of ‘gloom’ and ‘calamity’. Its earliest adjectival use, somewhat tautologically, was in the phrase dismal day, but in the late 16th century it broadened out considerably in application.
elbow: elbow: [OE] Logically enough, elbow means etymologically ‘arm bend’. It comes from a prehistoric West and North Germanīc *alinobogan (which also produced German ellenbogen, Dutch elleboog, and Danish albue). This was a compound formed from *alinā ‘forearm’ and *bogan (source of English bow). However, there is a further twist.

For *alinā (source also of English ell [OE], a measure of length equal to that of the forearm) itself goes back ultimately to an Indo-European base *el-, *ele- which itself meant ‘bend’, and produced not just words for ‘forearm’ (such as Latin ulna), but also words for ‘elbow’ (such as Welsh elin). So at this deepest level of all, elbow means tautologically ‘bend bend’.
=> bow, ell, ulna
tautology (n.): 1570s, from Late Latin tautologia "representation of the same thing in other words," from Greek tautologia, from tautologos "repeating what has been said," from tauto "the same" (contraction of to auto, with to "the" + auto, see auto-) + -logos "saying," related to legein "to say" (see lecture (n.)). Related: Tautological.