quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- cove
- cove: [OE] Old English cofa meant ‘small room’, as used for sleeping in or as a storeroom. It was descended from Germanic *kubon, which was probably also the ultimate ancestor of cubbyhole [19] (the superficially similar cubicle is not related). In the late Old English period this seems to have developed in northern and Scottish dialects to ‘small hollow place in coastal rocks, cave’, and hence (although not, apparently, until as late as the 16th century) to ‘small bay’. (The other cove [16], a dated slang term for ‘chap’, may come from Romany kova ‘thing, person’.)
=> cubbyhole - cube
- cube: [16] Greek kúbos meant literally ‘six-sided solid figure’, a sense handed down to English via Latin cubus. Apart from more obvious metaphorical applications, such as ‘dice’, the Greek word was used for the internal cavity of the pelvis, a semantic feature which links it with its possible relative, English hip. The fine-art term cubism was introduced to English in 1911 from French, where it seems to have been coined in 1908 by an anonymous member of the Hanging Committee of the Salon des Independents. The story goes that when a painting by Georges Braque was being shown to the committee, he exclaimed ‘Encore des Cubes! Assez de cubisme!’.
- hip
- hip: English has two hips. The anatomical hip [OE] comes from a prehistoric Germanic *khupiz, whose formal and semantic similarity to Greek kúbos ‘six-sided figure’, hence ‘pelvic cavity’ (source of English cube) suggests that the two may be related. The rose-hip [OE] goes back to a West Germanic *kheup-, which survives also in Dutch joop ‘rose-hip’.
=> cube - cove (n.1)
- early 14c., "den, cave," from Old English cofa "small chamber, cell," from Proto-Germanic *kubon (compare Old High German kubisi "tent, hut," German Koben "pigsty," Old Norse kofi "hut, shed"). Extension of meaning to "small bay" is 1580s, apparently via Scottish dialectal meaning "small hollow place in coastal rocks" (a survival of an Old English secondary sense).