英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

log [log 词源字典]: log: [14] Log is a mystery word. It first turns up (in the sense ‘felled timber’) towards the end of the 14th century, but it has no ascertainable relatives in any other language. Nor is it altogether clear how the sense ‘ship’s record’ came about. It was inspired by the use of log for a thin piece of wood floated in the water from a line to determine the speed of a ship, but some etymologists have speculated that this is not the same word as log ‘piece of timber’, but was adapted from Arabic lauh ‘tablet’.
[log etymology, log origin, 英语词源]
logarithm: logarithm: [17] Greek lógos had a remarkably wide spread of meanings, ranging from ‘speech, saying’ to ‘reason, reckoning, calculation’, and ‘ratio’. The more ‘verbal’ end of its spectrum has given English the suffixes -logue and -logy (as in dialogue, tautology, etc), while the ‘reasoning’ component has contributed logic [14] (from the Greek derivative logiké), logistic [17] (from the Greek derivative logistikós ‘of calculation’), and logarithm, coined in the early 17th century by the English mathematician John Napier from Greek logós ‘ratio’ and arithmós ‘number’ (source of English arithmetic [13]).
=> arithmetic, logic, logistic
loggerhead: loggerhead: [16] Loggerhead originally meant much the same as blockhead – a stupid person with a block of wood for a head (in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1588), Berowne calls Costard a ‘whoreson loggerhead’). The first part of it probably represents logger ‘block for hobbling a horse’, which in turn was based on log, but how it came to be used in the phrase at loggerheads, meaning ‘in conflict’ and first recorded in 1831, is unclear.

Perhaps the underlying image is of two stupid people having an in-your-face argument, but loggerhead was also used over the centuries for various bulbous-ended objects, including a long-handled tool for melting pitch, and it could be that a fight is being invoked in which these fearsome articles are being used as weapons.
loin: loin: [14] Loin has had a circuitous history. Its distant ancestor was probably Germanic, but it was borrowed early on into Latin as lumbus ‘loin’ (source of English lumbar [17], lumbago [17], and the numbles or umbles which became the humble of humble pie). Lumbus passed via Vulgar Latin *lumbia into Old French as longe. This had an eastern dialectal form loigne, which English acquired as loin.
=> humble pie, lumbago, lumbar
lonely: lonely: [16] Lonely is a derivative of lone [14], itself a truncated form of alone. Another coinage based on lone is lonesome [17].
long: long: [OE] Long goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *langgaz, which also produced German, Dutch, and Danish lang and Swedish lång. It is presumably related to Latin longus ‘long’ (source of French long, Italian lungo, and Romanian lung) but quite how has not been established. The derived verb long is of equal antiquity, and originally meant simply ‘grow long’; the current sense ‘yearn’ developed via ‘seem long’. Derived forms, more or less heavily disguised, include belong, Lent, linger, lunge, and purloin [15], etymologically ‘take a long way away’, hence ‘remove’.
=> belong, length, lent, linger, lunge, purloin
longitude: longitude: see latitude
loo: loo: [20] Loo presents one of the more celebrated puzzles of English etymology. Not the least of its problematical points is that there is no reliable evidence of its existence before the 1920s, whereas most of its suggested sources have a more dated air than that. Amongst them, the most widely touted is of course gardy loo!, a shout of warning (based on French gardez l’eau ‘beware of the water’) supposedly used when emptying chamber pots from upper-storey windows in the days before modern plumbing; but that is chronologically most unlikely.

Other possibilities are that it is short for Waterloo, which was a trade name for cast-iron lavatory cisterns in the early part of the 20th century (‘O yes, mon loup. How much cost? Waterloo. Watercloset’, James Joyce, Ulysses 1922), and that it comes from louvre, from the use of slatted screens for a makeshift lavatory. But perhaps the likeliest explanation is that it derives from French lieux d’aisances, literally ‘places of ease’, hence ‘lavatory’ (perhaps picked up by British servicemen in France during World War I).
look: look: [OE] For such a common word, look is surprisingly isolated. It goes back to prehistoric West Germanic *lōkōjan, which has no other descendants in the modern Germanic languages, and its only distant relative is the German verb lugen ‘show, be visible’.
loose: loose: [13] Loose is one of a large family of words that go back ultimately to Indo-European *lau-, *leu-, *lu-, which denoted ‘undoing’. It includes (via Greek) analyse and paralyse, (via Latin) dissolve and solution, and (via Germanic) lose and the suffix -less. Loose itself was borrowed from Old Norse laus, which was descended from a prehistoric Germanic *lausaz.
=> analyse, dissolve, lose, paralyse, solution
lope: lope: see leap
loquacious: loquacious: see ventriloquist
lord: lord: [OE] It is a measure of the centrality of bread to human society that the word lord denotes etymologically ‘guardian of the loaf’. It goes back to a primitive Old English *khlaibward, a compound formed from *khlaib ‘loaf’ and *ward ‘guardian, keeper’ (ancestor of modern English ward). This gradually developed in Old English via hlāfweard to hlāford, and in the 14th century it lost its middle /v/ to become the single-syllable word we know today. Lady was likewise originally based on the word loaf.
=> guard, loaf, ward
lore: lore: see learn
lorry: lorry: [19] The first record we have of the word lorry is from the northwest of England in the early 1830s, when it denoted a ‘low wagon’ (it was often used for railway wagons). The modern application to a motor vehicle emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. It is not clear where it came from, although it has been speculated that it was based on the personal name Laurie (perhaps someone called Laurie invented the vehicle). Another possibility is some connection with the Northern dialect verb lurry ‘pull’.
lose: lose: [OE] The verb lose originated as a derivative of the Old English noun los ‘loss’, which went back ultimately to the same Indo-European source (*lau-, *leu-, lu-) as produced English loose and the suffix -less. In Old English it was losian, which eventually ousted the original lēosan to become the only verb for ‘lose’. The noun los died out before the Middle English period, and was replaced by loss [14], probably a derivative of the past participle lost. The past participle of lēosan ‘lose’ was loren, which survives in forlorn and love-lorn.
=> loose
lot: lot: [OE] Lot goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *khlut-, which appears to have denoted the use of objects to make decisions by chance (Old English hlot was used for such an object). The first inklings of the modern range of senses did not emerge until the 18th century, when lot began to be used for a ‘set of things’. ‘Large number, many’ followed in the 19th century. The Germanic word was borrowed into the Romance languages, and of its descendants English has acquired allot [16] (from Old French) and lotto [18] (from Italian). Lottery [16] comes from the Dutch derivative loterij.
=> allot, lottery, lotto
loth: loth: see loathe
loud: loud: [OE] The underlying meaning of loud is ‘heard, audible’ – for it goes back ultimately to an Indo-European *klu- ‘hear’ (source also of English listen). The past participial form based on this, *klūtós, passed into prehistoric West Germanic as *khluthaz, which has since differentiated into German laut, Dutch luid, and English loud.
=> listen
lounge: lounge: [16] It is the verb lounge (originally ‘move indolently’) which came first; its application as a noun to a ‘room where one can sit and take one’s ease’ came later, in the 18th century. It is not at all clear where the word came from, but some have linked it with the long obsolete noun lungis, which denoted both a ‘gangling foolish fellow’ and ‘someone who is slow or dilatory at doing things’. This was borrowed in the 16th century from French longis, which was apparently a generic application of Longīnus, the name of the Roman centurion who pierced Christ’s side with a spear as he was hanging on the cross.