英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

acre [acre 词源字典]: acre: [OE] Acre is a word of ancient ancestry, going back probably to the Indo-European base *ag-, source of words such as agent and act. This base had a range of meanings covering ‘do’ and ‘drive’, and it is possible that the notion of driving contributed to the concept of driving animals on to land for pasture. However that may be, it gave rise to a group of words in Indo- European languages, including Latin ager (whence English agriculture), Greek agros, Sanskrit ájras, and a hypothetical Germanic *akraz.

By this time, people’s agricultural activities had moved on from herding animals in open country to tilling the soil in enclosed areas, and all of this group of words meant specifically ‘field’. From the Germanic form developed Old English æcer, which as early as 1000 AD had come to be used for referring to a particular measured area of agricultural land (as much as a pair of oxen could plough in one day).
=> act, agent, agriculture, eyrie, onager, peregrine, pilgrim[acre etymology, acre origin, 英语词源]
algorithm: algorithm: [13] Algorithm comes from the name of an Arab mathematician, in full Abu Ja far Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi (c. 780–c. 850), who lived and taught in Baghdad and whose works in translation introduced Arabic numerals to the West. The last part of his name means literally ‘man from Khwarizm’, a town on the borders of Turkmenistan, now called Khiva. The Arabic system of numeration and calculation, based on 10, of which he was the chief exponent, became known in Arabic by his name – al-khwarizmi.

This was borrowed into medieval Latin as algorismus (with the Arabic -izmi transformed into the Latin suffix -ismus ‘-ism’). In Old French algorismus became augorime, which was the basis of the earliest English form of the word, augrim. From the 14th century onwards, Latin influence gradually led to the adoption of the spelling algorism in English.

This remains the standard form of the word when referring to the Arabic number system; but in the late 17th century an alternative version, algorithm, arose owing to association with Greek árithmos ‘number’ (source of arithmetic [13]), and this became established from the 1930s onwards as the term for a stepby- step mathematical procedure, as used in computing. Algol, the name of a computer programming language, was coined in the late 1950s from ‘algorithmic language’.
=> allegory, allergy, arithmetic
along: along: [OE] The a- in along is related to the prefix anti-, and the original notion contained in the word is of ‘extending a long way in the opposite direction’. This was the force of Old English andlang, a compound formed from and- ‘against, facing’ (whose original source was Greek anti- ‘against’) and lang ‘long’. The meaning gradually changed via simply ‘extending a long way’, through ‘continuous’ and ‘the whole length of something’ to ‘lengthwise’.

At the same time the and- prefix was gradually losing its identity: by the 10th century the forms anlong and onlong were becoming established, and the 14th century saw the beginnings of modern English along. But there is another along entirely, nowadays dialectal. Used in the phrase along of ‘with’ (as in ‘Come along o’me!’), it derives from Old English gelong ‘pertaining, dependent’.

This was a compound formed from the prefix ge-, suggesting suitability, and long, of which the notions of ‘pertaining’ and ‘appropriateness’ are preserved in modern English belong.
=> long
arsenal: arsenal: [16] The word arsenal has a complicated history, stretching back through Italian to Arabic. The Arabic original was dāras- sinā‘ah, literally ‘house of the manufacture’. This seems to have been borrowed into Venetian Italian, somehow losing its initial d, as arzaná, and been applied specifically to the large naval dockyard in Venice (which in the 15th century was the leading naval power in the Mediterranean).

The dockyard is known to this day as the Arzenale, showing the subsequent addition of the -al ending. English acquired the word either from Italian or from French arsenal, and at first used it only for dockyards (‘making the Arsenal at Athens, able to receive 1000 ships’, Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Natural history 1601); but by the end of the 16th century it was coming into more general use as a ‘military storehouse’.

The English soccer club Arsenal gets its name from its original home in Woolwich, south London, where there used to be a British government arsenal.
asparagus: asparagus: [15] Asparagus comes ultimately from Greek aspáragos (a word related to the Greek verb spargan ‘swell’, to the Latin verb spargere ‘scatter’ – ultimate source of English sparse, disperse, and aspersions – and also to English spark), and has over the past 150 years or so returned to the full Latin form, asparagus, in which it was originally borrowed by English.

In the intervening centuries, however, it went through several metamorphoses: in the 16th century, the truncated medieval Latin variant sparagus was current (it also occurs in one isolated example from a book of Anglo-Saxon remedies of around 1000 AD); from then until the 18th century an anglicized version, sperage, was used; and in the 17th century folk etymology (the process by which an unfamiliar word is assimilated to one more familiar) turned asparagus into sparrowgrass.

This gradually died out during the 19th century, but the abbreviation grass remains current in the jargon of the grocery trade.
=> aspersion, spark
beam: beam: [OE] In Old English times the word bēam (like modern German baum) meant ‘tree’ – a signification preserved in tree-names such as hornbeam and whitebeam. But already before the year 1000 the extended meanings we are familiar with today – ‘piece of timber’ and ‘ray of light’ – had started to develop. Related forms in other Germanic languages (which include, as well as German baum, Dutch boom, from which English gets boom ‘spar’ [16]) suggest a West Germanic ancestor *bauma, but beyond that all is obscure.
=> boom
bequeath: bequeath: [OE] Etymologically, what you bequeath is what you ‘say’ you will leave someone in your will. The word comes from Old English becwethan, a derivative of cwethan ‘say’, whose past tense cwæth gives us quoth (it is no relation to quote, by the way). The original sense ‘say, utter’ died out in the 13th century, leaving the legal sense of ‘transferring by will’ (first recorded in 1066).

The noun derivative of Old English cwethan in compounds was -cwiss. Hence we can assume there was an Old English noun *becwiss, although none is recorded. The first we hear of it is at the beginning of the 14th century, when it had unaccountably had a t added to it, producing what we now know as bequest.
=> bequest, quoth
berry: berry: [OE] Berry is a strictly Germanic word, not found in other branches of Indo-European (German has beere, Dutch bes, and Danish bær). Its earliest application seems to have been specifically to grapes; the only record of it in Old Saxon and Gothic is in the compound ‘wineberry’, and around 1000 Aelfric translated Deuteronomy 23:24 into Old English as ‘If you go into your friend’s vineyard, eat the berries’.

But by the Middle Ages the term had broadened out to encompass the sorts of fruit we would recognize today as berries. The word goes back ultimately to a prehistoric Germanic *basj-, which it has been speculated may be related to Old English basu ‘red’.
beverage: beverage: [13] Beverage goes back to Latin bibere ‘drink’, from which English also gets imbibe [14], bibulous [17], beer, and probably bibber. From the verb was formed the Vulgar Latin noun *biberāticum ‘something to drink’, and hence, via Old French bevrage, English beverage. The colloquial abbreviation bevvy is at least 100 years old (it has been speculated, but never proved, that bevy ‘large group’ [15] comes from the same source).
=> beer, bevy, bib, bibulous, imbibe
bier: bier: [OE] Etymologically, a bier is ‘something used for carrying’. It comes from West Germanic *bērō, a derivative of the same base (*ber-) as produced the verb bear. Its Old English form was bēr, and it was not spelled with an i until the 16th century. The original general sense ‘framework for carrying something’ (which it shares with the etymologically related barrow) died out around 1600, but already by about 1000 the modern specific meaning ‘stand for a coffin’ had developed.
=> barrow, bear
bimbo: bimbo: [20] Bimbo most recently made its mark on the English language in the 1980s, when it was in heavy use among journalists to denigrate buxom young women of limited IQ who sold the secrets of their affairs with the rich and famous to the press. It was by no means a newcomer, though. It first crossed the Atlantic to America, from Italy, in the late 1910s. In Italian it means ‘baby’, and US slang took it up in the colloquial sense of baby, for referring to a usually hapless fellow.

By the 1920s it was being applied equally to young women, especially promiscuous or empty-headed ones (the latter feature probably reinforced by the appearance of dumbo ‘fool’ in the early 1930s).
blaze: blaze: There are three distinct words blaze in English. The commonest, meaning ‘fire, flame’ [OE], comes from a prehistoric Germanic *blasōn. Its original signification was ‘torch’ (in the sense, of course, of a burning piece of wood or bunch of sticks), but by the year 1000 the main current meaning was established. The precise source of blaze ‘light-coloured mark or spot’ [17] is not known for certain, but there are several cognate forms in other Germanic languages, including Old Norse blesi and German blässe; perhaps the likeliest candidate as far as blaze is concerned is Middle Low German bles.

The verbal usage, as in ‘blaze a trail’ (that is, by making conspicuous marks on trees) originated in the mid 18th century. The related German adjective blass ‘pale’, which originally meant ‘shining’, points up the fact that ultimately these two words blaze are related, the primeval sense ‘shining’ having diverged on the one hand through ‘pale’, on the other through ‘glowing, burning’.

The third blaze, ‘proclaim’ [14], as in ‘blaze abroad’, is now seldom encountered. It originally meant ‘blow a trumpet’, and comes ultimately from the Indo-European base *bhlā- (source of blow). Its immediate source in English was Middle Dutch blāsen. Despite its formal and semantic similarity, it does not appear to have any connection with blazon [13], which comes from Old French blason ‘shield’, a word of unknown origin.

A blazer [19] got its name from being a brightly coloured jacket (from blaze meaning ‘fire, flame’). It originated among English university students in the late 19th century. According to a correspondent in the Daily News 22 August 1889, the word was originally applied specifically to the red jackets worn by members of the ‘Lady Margaret, St John’s College, Cambridge, Boat Club’.

But by the 1880s its more general application had become widely established: in the Durham University Journal of 21 February 1885 we read that ‘the latest novelty … for the river is flannels, a blazer, and spats’.
=> blow
bless: bless: [OE] Bless occurs in no other language than English, and originally meant ‘mark with blood’, from some sort of religious rite in which such marking conferred sanctity. It probably goes back to a prehistoric Germanic formation *blōthisōjan, a derivative of *blōtham ‘blood’, which was taken up by no Germanic language other than Old English. Here it produced blētsian, which by the 13th century had become blesse. The word’s connotations of ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’, which go back at least to the year 1000, were probably influenced by the etymologically unrelated bliss.
=> blood
borough: borough: [OE] Borough (Old English burg or burh) comes from Germanic *burgs ‘fortress’ (whence also German burg ‘castle, stronghold’). It was a derivative of the base *burg- ‘protect’ (whence also bury), a variant of *berg- (source of English barrow ‘mound’ and German berg ‘mountain’) and *borg- (source of English borrow).

At some time during the prehistoric Germanic period a progression in meaning began to take place from ‘fortress’ (which had largely died out in English by 1000), through ‘fortified town’, to simply ‘town’. Romance languages borrowed the word, giving for instance French bourg, from which English gets burgess [13] and bourgeois [16]. Burrow [13] is probably a variant form.
=> bourgeois, burgess, burrow, bury
bra: bra: [20] The word bra made its first appearance in English in the mid 1930s. It is of course an abbreviation of brassiere (an early alternative abbreviated form was bras), which was borrowed from French around 1910. The French term originated in the 17th century, when it meant simply ‘bodice’; it appears to have been an alteration of an earlier, Old French braciere ‘piece of armour for the arm or wrist’ (borrowed into English as bracer in the 14th century), a derivative of bras ‘arm’.
caesarian: caesarian: [17] The application of the adjective caesarian to the delivery of a baby by surgical incision through the abdomen and womb arises from the legend that Julius Caesar (c. 100–44 BC) himself or an earlier ancestor of his was born in this way. The name Caesar comes from the Latin phrase a caeso mātrisūtere, literally ‘from the mother’s cut womb’ (caesus was the past participle of the Latin verb caedere ‘cut’, from which English gets concise, incise, precise, etc). The abbreviation caesar for ‘caesarian section’ is mid 20th-century.
=> concise, incise, precise
call: call: [OE] Essentially, call is a Scandinavian word, although it does occur once in an Old English text, the late 10th-century Battle of Maldon. It was borrowed from Old Norse kalla, which can be traced back via West and North Germanic *kal- to an Indo-European base *gol- (among other derivatives of this is Serbo-Croat glagól ‘word’, source of Glagolitic, a term for an early Slavic alphabet).
camel: camel: [OE] Naturally enough, camel is of Semitic origin: Hebrew has gāmāl, for example, and Arabic jamal. It was a relative of these that was the source of Greek kámēlos, which passed via Latin camēlus into English as early as the mid 10th century. (It replaced a previous Old English olfend, a word – shared by other early Germanic languages – apparently based on the misconception that a camel was an elephant.)
carry: carry: [14] For such a basic and common word, carry has a surprisingly brief history. It does not go back to some prehistoric Indo-European root, but was formed less than 1000 years ago in Anglo-Norman or Old Northern French, on the basis of carre or car (immediate source of English car). The verb carier thus meant literally ‘transport in a wheeled vehicle’. This sense was carried over into English, and though it has since largely given way to the more general ‘convey’, it is preserved in the derivative carriage, in such expressions as ‘carriage paid’.
=> car, carriage
cat: cat: [OE] The word cat seems to have appeared on the European scene, in the form of Latin catta or cattus, around 1000 AD (the previous Latin word was fēlēs, source of English feline). No one is completely sure where it came from (although given the domestic cat’s origins in Egypt, it is likely to have been an Egyptian word), but it soon spread north and west through Europe. The Latin word reached English via Germanic *kattuz, later backed up by Anglo-Norman cat, a variant of Old French chat.
Celsius: Celsius: [19] The notion of a temperature scale based on 100 was developed by the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius (1701–44) (he originally had water boiling at zero and freezing at 100º, but this was later reversed). His name began to be used to designate the scale in English around the middle of the 19th century. In popular parlance it has usually taken a back seat to centigrade (a French invention, first recorded in English in 1812), but it remains the preferred term in scientific usage.
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
charwoman: charwoman: [16] A charwoman is, quite literally, a woman who does ‘chores’. Chore is a variant of the now obsolete noun chare or char, which meant literally ‘turn’ (it derived from the Old English verb cerran, which may be the source of charcoal). Hence ‘doing one’s turn’, ‘one’s turn at work’ in due course advanced its meaning to ‘job’. Already by the 15th century it had connotations of menial or household jobs: ‘making the beds and such other chares’, Nicholas Love, Bonaventura’s Mirror 1410.
=> ajar, chore
chlorine: chlorine: [19] Chlorine is a greenish-yellow gas, and was named for its colour. The term was coined by the British chemist Sir Humphry Davy in 1810, from the Greek khlōrós ‘greenishyellow’. Of other words containing this element, chlorophyll [19] too was based on the notion of colour (in reference to the green colouring matter of leaves: the Greek elements literally mean ‘green leaf’), but chloroform [19], originally French, is a secondary formation based ultimately on chlorine (since it was originally regarded as a trichloride of formyl).
=> yellow
comely: comely: [13] Old English had an adjective cymlic ‘beautiful’ (no relation at all to come), but this seems to have died out around the year 1000, and it is likely that comely, which first appears in the early 13th century, represents a reduced version of becomely, an adjective long since defunct of which there are a few records towards the end of the 12th century. This meant ‘suitable, becoming’ (it was formed, of course, from the verb become), an early meaning of comely; its other semantic strand, ‘beautiful’, is probably a memory of Old English cymlic.
=> become
cymbal: cymbal: [14] The notion underlying cymbal is of a ‘hollow vessel’. Greek kúmbē meant ‘cup, bowl’. From it was derived kúmbalon, which passed via Latin cymbalum into Old French as cimbal ‘metal plate struck to make a noise’. This did not survive much beyond the 10th century (although it may have given rise before its demise to chime), but the word was reborrowed via Old French symbale in the 14th century.
=> chime
down: down: Effectively, English now has three distinct words down, but two of them are intimately related: for down ‘to or at a lower place’ [11] originally meant ‘from the hill’ – and the Old English word for hill in this instance was dūn. This may have been borrowed from an unrecorded Celtic word which some have viewed as the ultimate source also of dune [18] (borrowed by English from Middle Dutch dūne) and even of town.

Its usage is now largely restricted to the plural form, used as a geographical term for various ranges of hills (the application to the North and South Downs in southern England dates from at least the 15th century). The Old English phrase of dūne ‘from the hill’ had by the 10th century become merged into a single word, adūne, and broadened out semantically to ‘to a lower place, down’, and in the 11th century it started to lose its first syllable – hence down.

Its use as a preposition dates from the 16th century. (The history of down is closely paralleled in that of French à val, literally ‘to the valley’, which also came to be used for ‘down’; it is the source of French avaler ‘descend, swallow’, which played a part in the development of avalanche.) Down ‘feathers’ [14] was borrowed from Old Norse dúnn.
=> dune
drain: drain: [OE] The underlying meaning of drain seems to be ‘making dry’. It comes ultimately from *draug-, the same prehistoric Germanic base as produced English drought and dry, and in Old English it meant ‘strain through a cloth or similar porous medium’. There then follows a curious gap in the history of the word: there is no written record of its use between about 1000 AD and the end of the 14th century, and when it reemerged it began to give the first evidence of its main modern meaning ‘draw off a liquid’.
=> drought, dry
dull: dull: [13] Dull originally meant ‘slow-witted’. It was borrowed from Middle Low German dul, a descendant of the prehistoric Germanic adjective *dulaz, which also produced German toll and Old English dol ‘stupid’ (the Old English adjective does not seem to have survived beyond the 10th century). The modern meaning ‘boring’ developed in the 15th century. The now littleused dullard [15] is a derivative (reflecting the adjective’s original sense), as also is probably dolt [16].
=> dolt
egg: egg: English has two distinct words egg, but surprisingly the noun, in the form in which we now have it, has not been in the language as long as the verb. Egg ‘reproductive body’ [14] was borrowed from Old Norse egg. Old English had a related word, ǣg, which survived until the 16th century as eye (plural eyren). Although it does not begin to show up in the written records until the 14th century, the form egg was presumably introduced into English by Norse immigrants considerably earlier, but even so, as late as the end of the 15th century there was still considerable competition between the native eye and the imported egg: ‘What sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren, certaynly it is harde to playse every man’, William Caxton, Eneydos 1490.

Both the Old English and the Old Norse forms came from a prehistoric Germanic *ajjaz (source also of German and Dutch ei). This in turn was a descendant of an Indo- European *ōwo- (whence Greek ōión, Latin ōvum, French oeuf, Italian uovo, Spanish huevo, and Russian jajco), which was probably derived ultimately from a base signifying ‘bird’ (source of Sanskrit vís and Latin avis ‘bird’, the ancestor of English aviary). Egg ‘incite’ [10], as in ‘egg on’, is a Scandinavian borrowing too.

It comes from Old Norse eggja, which was a relative or derivative of egg ‘edge’ (a cousin of English edge).
=> aviary; edge
eliminate: eliminate: [16] To eliminate somebody is literally to ‘kick them out of doors’. The word comes from the past participle of Latin ēlīnāre, a compound verb formed from the prefix ex- ‘out’ and līmen ‘threshhold’ (source also of English subliminal and probably sublime). At first it was used in English with its original Latin sense (‘the secounde sorte thearfore, that eliminate Poets out of their citie gates’, Giles Fletcher, Christ’s Victorie 1610), and it was not until the early 18th century that the more general modern notion of ‘exclusion’ began to develop.
=> sublime, subliminal
ember: ember: [OE] Ember goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *aimuzjōn, although it is possible that the modern English word represents a borrowing from the related Old Norse eimyrja rather than a direct line of descent from Old English ǣmyrge. The ember of Ember days [10], incidentally, ‘days following certain Christian festivals’, is a completely different word. It comes from Old English ymbryne ‘circuit’, literally ‘running round’, a compound formed from ymb ‘round’ and ryne ‘course, running’, a relative of modern English run. It was applied to these particular days of the Christian calendar because they ‘come round’ four times a year.
false: false: [OE] False appears originally to have been borrowed directly from Latin falsus at the end of the 10th century, but without making much of an impression. It was only in the 12th century that it began being used with any frequency, probably as the result of an extra impetus given by reborrowing it via Old French fals. The word’s ultimate source was the Latin verb fallere ‘deceive’, from which English also gets fail, fallacy, fallible, and fault.
=> fail, fallacy, fallible, fault
farthing: farthing: [OE] Farthing has a long history as an English coin-name, going back to the 10th century, when it was used in translations of the Bible to render Latin quadrans, a quarter of a denarius. It was introduced into English currency (as a silver coin equal to a quarter of a penny) in the reign of Edward I; in Charles Il’s time copper was used for it, and from 1860 until its abolition in 1971 it was a bronze coin.

Appropriately, the term means literally ‘quarter’; it was originally a derivative of Old English fēortha ‘fourth’, formed with the suffix -ing denoting ‘fractional part’ (found also in riding [11], former name of the administrative areas of Yorkshire, which etymologically means ‘third part’).
=> four
gannet: gannet: [OE] The gannet used to be known dialectally as the solan goose (solan was a compound formed in the 15th century from Old Norse súla ‘gannet’ and önd ‘duck’), and in fact the name gannet too reveals a perceived similarity between the gannet and the goose. For it comes ultimately from a prehistoric Germanic *ganitaz or *ganoton, a word formed from the same base as produced English gander [10].
=> gander
gesture: gesture: [15] Originally, a person’s gesture was their ‘bearing’, the way they ‘carried’ themselves: ‘He was a knight of yours full true, and comely of gesture’, Sir Cleges 1410. But by the 16th century it was well on its way via ‘bodily movement’ to ‘bodily movement conveying a particular message’. The word came from medieval Latin gestūra, a derivative of Latin gerere ‘carry, conduct oneself, act’. A parallel derivative was gestus ‘action’ (ultimate source of English jest and jester), whose diminutive gesticulus produced English gesticulate [17].
=> gestation, gesticulate, jest, jester
his: his: [OE] His originated as the standard genitive form of the masculine personal pronoun he, with the genitive ending -s – what in modern English would be expressed as of him. But comparatively early in the Old English period it began to replace the ancestral third person possessive adjective sīn (a relative of modern German sein ‘his’), and by the year 1000 it was also being used as a possessive pronoun, as in ‘It’s his’.
=> he
hundred: hundred: [OE] The main Old English word for ‘hundred’ was hund, whose history can be traced back via a prehistoric Germanic *khundam to Indo-European *kmtóm; this was also the source of Latin centum, Greek hekatón, and Sanskrit çatám, all meaning ‘hundred’. The form hundred did not appear until the 10th century. Its -red ending (represented also in German hundert, Dutch honderd, and Swedish hundrade) comes from a prehistoric Germanic *rath ‘number’.
=> cent, rate, thousand
joy: joy: [13] Latin gaudēre meant ‘rejoice’ (it came from a prehistoric base *gāu-, which also produced Greek gēthein ‘rejoice’). From it was derived the noun gaudium ‘joy’, which passed into English via Old French joye. From the same source come English enjoy and rejoice. The use of joystick for the ‘control stick of an aircraft’ (perhaps inspired by an earlier slang sense ‘penis’) dates from around 1910.
=> enjoy, rejoice
keep: keep: [OE] For all that it is one of the commonest verbs in the language, remarkably little is known about the history of keep. It first appears in texts around the year 1000. It is assumed to have existed before then, but not to have belonged to a sufficiently ‘literary’ level of the language to have been written down. Nor has a link been established for certain with any words in other Germanic languages, although suggestions that have been put forward include Old High German kuofa ‘barrel’ (a relative of English coop), from the notion of its being something for ‘keeping’ things in, and also (since in the late Old English period keep was used for ‘watch’) Old Norse kópa ‘stare’.
kipper: kipper: [OE] There is a single Old English instance, in a text of around the year 1000, of a fish called cypera. The context suggests that this was a ‘salmon’, which would tie in with the later use of the word kipper, from the 16th to the 20th centuries, for ‘male salmon during the spawning season’. What is not clear, however, despite the obvious semantic link ‘fish’, is whether this is the same word as kipper ‘cured herring or other fish’, first recorded in the 14th century.

Nor is it altogether clear where the term originally came from, although it is usually held to be a derivative of Old English copor ‘copper’, in allusion to the colour of the fish.
knight: knight: [OE] The word knight has come up in the world over the centuries. In the Old English period it simply meant ‘boy’ or ‘young man’. By the 10th century it had broadened out to ‘male servant’, and within a hundred years of that we find it being used for ‘military servant, soldier’. This is the general level or ‘rank’ at which the word’s continental relatives, German and Dutch knecht, have remained.

But in England, in the course of the early Middle Ages, knight came to denote, in the feudal system, ‘one who bore arms in return for land’, and later ‘one raised to noble rank in return for military service’. The modern notion of knighthood as a rung in the nobility, without any necessary connotations of military prowess, dates from the 16th century.
law: law: [10] Etymologically, a law is that which has been ‘laid’ down. English borrowed the word from Old Norse *lagu (replacing the native Old English ǣ ‘law’), which was the plural of lag ‘laying, good order’. This came ultimately from the prehistoric Germanic base *lag- ‘put’, from which English gets lay. It has no etymological connection with the semantically similar legal.
=> lay
lily: lily: [OE] Lily probably originated in a pre-Indo- European language of the Mediterranean seaboard. Latin acquired it (either independently or via Greek leírion) as līlium, and passed it on to English in the 10th century. It is now common to virtually all western European languages, including German (lilie), Dutch (lelie), Swedish (lilja), Spanish (lirio), Italian (the more radically altered giglio), and French (lis, acquired by English in fleur-de-lis, literally ‘lily flower’ [19]).
linger: linger: [13] Etymologically, to linger is to remain ‘longer’ than one should. Like its relatives, German längen and Dutch lengen, it goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *langgjan ‘lengthen’. In Old Norse this became lengja, which was borrowed into English in the 10th century as leng. By now, ‘lengthen’ had progressed metaphorically via ‘prolong’ to ‘delay’, which is what it meant when linger was derived from it in the 13th century.
=> long
litre: litre: [19] Litre goes back to Greek lītrā, a term which denoted a Sicilian monetary unit. This found its way via medieval Latin litrā into French as litron, where it was used for a unit of capacity. By the 18th century it had rather fallen out of use, but in 1793 it was revived, in the form litre, as the name for the basic unit of capacity in the new metric system.

It is first recorded in English in 1810. The Greek word was descended from an earlier, unrecorded *līthrā, which was borrowed into Latin as lībra ‘pound’. This is the source of various modern terms for units of weight, and hence of currency, including Italian lira and the now disused French livre, and it also lies behind the English symbol £ for ‘pound’.
=> level, lira
Luddite: Luddite: [19] The original Luddites, in the 1810s, were members of organized bands of working men who were opposed to the new factory methods of production (foreseeing – quite correctly – that the traditional ways which gave them employment would be destroyed by the new ones) and went around the country, mainly in the Midlands and Northern England, breaking up manufacturing machinery. They were named after Ned Ludd, a possibly apocryphal Leicestershire farm worker who around 1779 supposedly rushed into a stocking-maker’s house in an insane rage and smashed up two stocking frames.

Thereafter, the story continues, whenever a stocking frame suffered damage the saying would be ‘Ludd must have been here!’. The ringleaders of the disturbances in the 1810s were commonly nicknamed ‘Captain Ludd’ or ‘King Ludd’. The modern application of the word to an opponent of technological or industrial change appears to date from the 1960s.
master: master: [OE] The Latin word for ‘master, chief’ was magister (which is generally assumed to have been based on the root of Latin magis ‘more’ and magnus ‘big’, source of English magnify, magnitude, etc). Its more obvious English descendants include magistrate and magisterial, and indeed English originally acquired magister itself in the 10th century in the form mægister, but over the years (partly under the influence of Old French maistre) this developed to master.

The feminine counterpart mistress [14] was borrowed from Old French maistresse, a form maintained in English for some time. The alteration of mais- to mis- began in the 15th century, due probably to the weakly-stressed use of the word as a title (a phenomenon also responsible for the emergence of mister [16] from master). The abbreviated miss followed in the 17th century.
=> magistrate, magnitude, magnum, miss, mister, mistress
mile: mile: [OE] Latin mille denoted ‘thousand’ (it is the source of English millennium [17], etymologically a ‘thousand years’, and, via Italian and French, of million [14]). Its plural mīllia was used in ancient Rome for a measure of length equal to a thousand paces. This was borrowed into prehistoric West Germanic as *mīlja, which has subsequently differentiated into German meile, Dutch mijl, and English mile. (The English mile is over 100 yards longer than the Roman one was.)
=> millennium, million
nuisance: nuisance: [15] Nuisance has become much less serious over the centuries. When English originally acquired it, it meant ‘harm, injury’ (‘Helpe me to weye ageyn the feend … keepe vs from his nusance’, Thomas Hoccleve, Mother of God 1410), reflecting its origins in Latin nocēre ‘injure’ (source also of English innocent and innocuous). But gradually it softened to ‘troublesomeness’, and by the early 19th century it had acquired its present-day connotations of ‘petty annoyance’.