英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

begin [begin 词源字典]: begin: [OE] Begin comes from a prehistoric West Germanic compound verb *biginnan, which also produced German and Dutch beginnen; the origin of the second element, *ginnan, is not known for certain. The form gin was common in the Middle Ages and up until about 1600; this was a shortening, perhaps not so much of begin as of the now obsolete ongin ‘begin’, which was far more widespread than begin in Old English.
[begin etymology, begin origin, 英语词源]
behalf: behalf: [14] Behalf was compounded from the prefix be- ‘by’ and the noun half, in the sense ‘side’. The latter had been used in such phrases as on my half, that is, ‘on my side, for my part’, since late Old English times, and the new compound began to replace it in the 14th century. (That particular use of half had died out by the end of the 16th century.) The modern sense of ‘representing or in the interests of someone’ was present from the beginning.
=> half
behave: behave: [15] To ‘behave oneself’ originally meant literally to ‘have oneself in a particular way’ – have being used here in the sense ‘hold’ or ‘comport’. The be- is an intensive prefix. Of particular interest is the way in which the word preserves in aspic the 15th-century pronunciation of have in stressed contexts. For much of its history behave has been used with reference to a person’s bearing and public dignity (‘He was some years a Captain, and behaved himself with great gallantry in several engagements’, Richard Steele, Spectator Number 2, 1711), and the modern connotations of propriety, of ‘goodness’ versus ‘naughtiness’, are a relatively recent, 19th-century development.

The noun behaviour [15] was formed on analogy with the verb from an earlier haviour, a variant of aver ‘possession’ [14], from the nominal use of the Old French verb aveir ‘have’.
=> have
behind: behind: [OE] Behind was compounded in Old English times from the prefix bi- ‘by’ and hindan ‘from behind’. This second element, and the related Old English hinder ‘below’, have relatives in other Germanic languages (German hinten and hinter ‘behind’, for example), and are connected with the English verb hinder, but their ultimate history is unclear. Modern English hind ‘rear’ may come mainly from behind.
=> hind, hinder
behold: behold: see hold
belch: belch: [OE] Belch first appears in recognizable form in the 15th century, but it can scarcely not be related to belk ‘eructate’, which goes back to Old English bealcan and survived dialectally into the modern English period. Belch itself may derive either from an unrecorded variant of bealcan, *belcan (with the c here representing a /ch/ sound), or from a related Old English verb belcettan ‘eructate’.

But whichever route it took, its ultimate source was probably a Germanic base *balk-or *belk-, from which German got bölken ‘bleat, low, belch’. Belch was originally a perfectly inoffensive word; it does not seem to have been until the 17th century that its associations began to drag it down towards vulgarity.
beleaguer: beleaguer: see lair
belfry: 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
believe: believe: [OE] Believing and loving are closely allied. Late Old English belēfan took the place of an earlier gelēfan ‘believe’ (with the associative prefix ge-), which can be traced back to a prehistoric West and North Germanic *galaubjan (source also of German glauben ‘believe’). This meant ‘hold dear, love’, and hence ‘trust in, believe’, and it was formed on a base, *laub-, which also produced, by various routes, English love, lief ‘dear’, leave ‘permission’, and the second element of furlough.
=> furlough, leave, lief, love
bell: bell: [OE] The Old English word was belle. Apart from Dutch bel it has no relatives in the other main European languages (many of them use words related to English clock for ‘bell’: French cloche, for instance, and German glocke). It has been speculated that it may be connected with the verb bell, used of the baying call made by a hound or stag, which itself is perhaps related to bellow, a descendant of a hypothetical Old English *belgan. The ultimate source may possibly be the same as for bellows.
=> bellow
belle: belle: see beauty
bellicose: bellicose: see rebel
belligerent: belligerent: see rebel
bellows: bellows: [OE] Bellows and belly were originally the same word, Old English belig, which meant ‘bag’. This was used in the compound blǣstbelig, literally ‘blowing bag’, a device for blowing a fire, which was replaced in the late Old English period by the plural form of the noun, belga or belgum, from which we get bellows. Meanwhile the meaning of belly developed from ‘bag’ to, in the 13th century, ‘body’ and, in the 14th century, ‘abdomen’.

Ultimately the word goes back to Germanic *balgiz ‘bag’, from the base *balg- or *belg- (itself a descendant of Indo-European *bhel- ‘swell’), which also lies behind billow [16], bolster, and possibly bellow and bell.
=> bell, bellow, belly, billow, bold, bolster
belong: belong: [14] Old English had a verb langian, meaning ‘pertain to’. It had no immediate connection with the other Old English verb langian, modern English long, ‘desire’, but came from the Old English adjective gelang ‘pertaining, belonging’ (although ultimately this gelang and the modern English adjective and verb long come from the same Germanic source, *langgaz). The intensive prefix be- was added in the 14th century.
=> long
below: below: [14] Below is a lexicalization of the phrase by low, replacing an earlier on low, the opposite of on high. It was perhaps modelled on beneath.
=> low
belt: belt: [OE] Old English belt and related Germanic forms such as Swedish bälte point to a source in Germanic *baltjaz, which was borrowed from Latin balteus, possibly a word of Etruscan origin. The verbal idiom belt up ‘be quiet’ appears to date from just before World War II.
bench: bench: [OE] Old English benc goes back to Germanic *bangk-, also the source of English bank (the related German bank means ‘bench’). The Northern and Scottish English versions of the word were benk and bink. The specific application to the seat on which a judge sits arose in the 13th century.
=> bank
bend: bend: [OE] English band, bind, bond, and bundle are closely allied: all go back to a prehistoric Germanic base *band-. The relationship in meaning was, in the case of bend, more obvious in Old English times, when bendan meant ‘tie up’ as well as ‘curve’ (a sense preserved in the modern English noun bend ‘knot’, as in carrick bend).

The rather strange-seeming meaning development appears to have come about as follows: bend in the sense ‘tie, constrain’ was used for the pulling of bow-strings, with reference to the strain or tension thereby applied to the bow; the natural consequence of this was of course that the bow curved, and hence (although not until the late 13th century) bend came to be used for ‘curve’.
=> band, bind, bond, bundle
beneath: beneath: [OE] Beneath is a compound adverb and preposition, formed in Old English from bi ‘by’ and nithan or neothan ‘below’. This came originally from Germanic *nith- (also the source of nether [OE]), a derivative of the base *ni- ‘down’.
=> nether