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bond: bond: English has two distinct words bond, which started life very differently but have gradually grown together. Bond ‘something that binds’ [13] was originally the same word as band (from Old Norse band), and only gradually diverged from it in pronunciation, spelling, and meaning. The key modern legal and financial senses began to develop in the 16th century, the underlying notion being of something one is ‘bound’ or ‘tied’ to by a promise. Bond ‘bound in slavery’ [14], as in bondservant, is an adjectival use of the late Old English noun bonda ‘householder’, which came from Old Norse bóndi (the second element of húsbóndi, from which English gets husband).

This represented an earlier bóandi, which was originally the present participle of east Norse bóa ‘dwell’, a derivative of the Germanic base *bū- ‘dwell’, (from which English also gets be, boor, booth, bower, build, burly, byelaw, and byre). The semantic association of ‘tying up’ and ‘servitude’ has led to the merging of the two words, as shown in the derivative bondage.
=> band; be, boor, booth, build, byelaw, neighbour
daft: daft: [13] Daft was not always a term of reproach. It originally meant ‘mild, gentle’, and only in late Middle English slid to ‘stupid’ (in a semantic decline perhaps paralleling that of silly, which started off as ‘happy, blessed’). Middle English dafte corresponds directly to an Old English gedæfte, whose underlying sense seems to have been ‘fit, suitable’ (the sense connection was apparently that mild unassuming people were considered as behaving suitably).

There is no direct evidence of its use with this meaning, but Old English had a verb gedæftan ‘make fit or ready, prepare’ which, together with the Gothic verb gedaban ‘be suitable’, points to its origin in a Germanic base *dab- ‘fit, suitable’. This ties in with the semantic development of deft, a variant of daft, which has moved from a prehistoric ‘fit, suitable’ to ‘skilful’.
=> deft
fraught: fraught: [14] Fraught and freight [15] are related, and share the underlying meaning ‘load’. But whereas freight has stayed close to its semantic roots, fraught, which started out as ‘laden’, has moved on via ‘supplied or filled with something’ to specifically ‘filled with anxiety or tension’. It was originally the past participle of a now obsolete verb fraught ‘load a ship’, which was borrowed from Middle Dutch vrachten.

This in turn was a derivative of the noun vracht ‘load, cargo’, a variant of vrecht (from which English gets freight). Both vracht and vrecht probably go back to a prehistoric Germanic noun *fraaikhtiz, whose second element *-aikhtiz is related to English owe and own.
=> freight
grin: grin: [OE] Modern English grin and groan are scarcely semantic neighbours, but a possible common ancestor may provide the link: prehistoric Indo-European *ghrei-, which seems to have meant something like ‘be open’. It has been suggested as the source of a range of verbs which started off denoting simply ‘open the mouth’, but have since differentiated along the lines ‘make noise’ and ‘grimace’. Grin has taken the latter course, but close relatives, such as Old High German grennan ‘mutter’ and Old Norse grenja ‘howl’, show that the parting of the semantic ways was not so distant in time.

Old English grennian actually meant ‘draw back the lips and bare the teeth in pain or anger’. Traces of this survive in such distinctly unfunny expressions as ‘grinning skull’, but the modern sense ‘draw back the lips in amusement’ did not begin to emerge until the 15th century. Groan [OE], on the other hand, is firmly in the ‘make noise’ camp.
=> groan
moult: moult: [14] The etymological meaning of moult is simply ‘change’. It comes (via an assumed but never recorded Old English *mūtian) from a prehistoric Germanic verb borrowed from Latin mūtāre ‘change’ (source of English mutate). The extreme semantic narrowing down from ‘change’ to ‘change a coat of feathers’ is shown too in the related mews, which originally denoted ‘cages for moulting hawks’. The spelling with l, which started to appear in the 16th century, is due to association with words such as fault, whose l at that time was generally not pronounced. When it began to be, moult followed suit.
=> mews, mutate
poem: poem: [16] A poem is etymologically ‘something created’. The word comes via Old French poeme and Latin poēma from Greek póēma, a derivative of poeín ‘make, create’. The original sense ‘something created’ developed metaphorically via ‘literary work’ to ‘poem’. From the same Greek verb was derived poētés ‘maker’, hence ‘poet’, which produced Latin poēta and in due course English poet [13] (the Old English word for ‘poet’ had been scop, a relative of modern English scoff). Poetry [14] originated as a medieval Latin derivative of poēta. Poesy ‘poetry, poems’ [14], like poem originally a derivative Greek poeín, now has an archaic air, but it has a living descendant in posy [16], which started life as a contraction of poesy.
=> poesy, poet, poetry, posy
Cepheid (n.): type of variable star, 1904, from Delta Cephi, the name of the first such star identified, which is in the dim northern constellation Cephus, named for Greek Kepheus, a mythical king. With -id.
fagus (n.): botanical genus of beech trees, from Latin fagus "beech," from PIE root *bhagos "beech tree" (cognates: Greek phegos "oak," Latin fagus "beech," Russian buzina "elder," Old English bece, Old Norse bok, German Buche "beech"), perhaps with a ground sense of "edible" (and connected with the root of Greek phagein "to eat;" see -phagous). Beech mast was an ancient food source for agricultural animals across a wide stretch of Europe.
The restriction to western IE languages and the reference to different trees have suggested to some scholars that this word was not PIE, but a later loanword. In the Balkans, from which the beech started to spread after 6000 BC, the [Greek] word means 'oak,' not 'beech.' Yet 'oak' and 'beech' are both 'fruit-bearing trees,' so that a semantic shift from 'oak' to 'beech' appears quite conceivable. The word itself may then have been PIE after all. [de Vaan]
Aquila: "A small northern constellation (the Eagle), said to represent the eagle that carried Ganymede to Olympus. It contains the bright star Altair, and some rich star fields of the Milky Way", Latin.