英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

a [a 词源字典]: a: [OE] The indefinite article in English is ultimately identical with the word one (as is the case, even more obviously, in other European languages – French un, German ein, and so on). The ancestor of both a(n) and one was ān, with a long vowel, but in the Old English period it was chiefly used for the numeral; where we would use a(n), the Anglo-Saxons tended not to use an article at all. Ān begins to emerge as the indefinite article in the middle of the 12th century, and it was not long before, in that relatively unemphatic linguistic environment, its vowel became weakened and shortened, giving an.

And at about the same time the distinction between an and a began to develop, although this was a slow process; until 1300 an was still often used before consonants, and right up to 1600 and beyond it was common before all words beginning with h, such as house.
=> one[a etymology, a origin, 英语词源]
an: an: [OE] The indefinite article in English is ultimately identical with the word one (as is the case, even more obviously, in other European languages – French un, German ein, and so on). The ancestor of both a(n) and one was ān, with a long vowel, but in the Old English period it was chiefly used for the numeral; where we would use a(n), the Anglo-Saxons tended not to use an article at all. Ān begins to emerge as the indefinite article in the middle of the 12th century, and it was not long before, in that relatively unemphatic linguistic environment, its vowel became weakened and shortened, giving an.

And at about the same time the distinction between an and a began to develop, although this was a slow process; until 1300 an was still often used before consonants, and right up to 1600 and beyond it was common before all words beginning with h, such as house.
=> one
accord: accord: [12] In its original source, Vulgar Latin *accordāre, accord meant literally ‘heart-toheart’ (from Latin ad ‘to’ and cord-, the stem of cor ‘heart’). It passed into Old French as acorder, and was borrowed comparatively early into English, turning up in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1123. Its general sense of ‘being in agreement’ has been narrowed down in English and other languages to the notion of ‘being in harmony musically’, and either Italian accordare or French accorder provided the basis for German akkordion (from which English got accordion), the musical instrument invented by Buschmann in Berlin in 1822.
=> cordial
accuse: accuse: [13] Accuse comes via Old French acuser from the Latin verb accūsāre, which was based on the noun causa ‘cause’ – but cause in the sense not of ‘something that produces a result’, but of ‘legal action’ (a meaning preserved in English cause list, for instance). Hence accūsāre was to ‘call someone to account for their actions’.

The grammatical term accusative [15] (denoting the case of the object of a verb in Latin and other languages) is derived ultimately from accūsāre, but it arose originally owing to a mistranslation. The Greek term for this case was ptósis aitiātiké ‘case denoting causation’ – a reasonable description of the function of the accusative. Unfortunately the Greek verb aitiásthai also meant ‘accuse’, and it was this sense that Latin grammarians chose to render when adopting the term.
=> cause, excuse
ache: ache: [OE] Of the noun ache and the verb ache, the verb came first. In Old English it was acan. From it was formed the noun, æce or ece. For many centuries, the distinction between the two was preserved in their pronunciation: in the verb, the ch was pronounced as it is now, with a /k/ sound, but the noun was pronounced similarly to the letter H, with a /ch/ sound.

It was not until the early 19th century that the noun came regularly to be pronounced the same way as the verb. It is not clear what the ultimate origins of ache are, but related forms do exist in other Germanic languages (Low German āken, for instance, and Middle Dutch akel), and it has been conjectured that there may be some connection with the Old High German exclamation (of pain) ah.
acorn: acorn: [OE] Acorn has no etymological connection with oak; its nearest linguistic relative in English is probably acre. The Old English word was æcern, which may well have derived from æcer ‘open land’ (the related Middle High German ackeran referred to beech mast as well as acorns, and Gothic akran developed more widely still, to mean simply ‘fruit’).

There are cognate words in other, non- Germanic, Indo-European languages, such as Russian yagoda ‘berry’ and Welsh aeron ‘fruits’. Left to develop on its own, æcern would have become modern English achern, but the accidental similarity of oak and corn have combined to reroute its pronunciation.
=> acre
acre: 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
adder: adder: [OE] In Old English, the term for a snake (any snake, not just an adder) was nǣddre; there are or were related forms in many other European languages, such as Latin natrix, Welsh neidr, and German natter (but there does not seem to be any connection with the natterjack toad). Around the 14th century, however, the word began to lose its initial consonant. The noun phrase including the indefinite article, a nadder, became misanalysed as an adder, and by the 17th century nadder had disappeared from the mainstream language (though it survived much longer in northern dialects).
address: address: [14] Address originally meant ‘straighten’. William Caxton, for example, here uses it for ‘stand up straight’: ‘The first day that he was washed and bathed he addressed him[self] right up in the basin’ Golden Legend 1483. This gives a clue to its ultimate source, Latin dīrectum ‘straight, direct’. The first two syllables of this seem gradually to have merged together to produce *drictum, which with the addition of the prefix ad- was used to produce the verb *addrictiāre.

Of its descendants in modern Romance languages, Italian addirizzare most clearly reveals its source. Old French changed it fairly radically, to adresser, and it was this form which English borrowed. The central current sense of ‘where somebody lives’ developed in the 17th and 18th centuries from the notion of directing something, such as a letter, to somebody.
=> direct
admiral: admiral: [13] Admirals originally had nothing specifically to do with the sea. The word comes ultimately from Arabic ’amīr ‘commander’ (from which English later also acquired emir [17]). This entered into various titles followed by the particle -al- ‘of’ (’amīr-al-bahr ‘commander of the sea’, ’amīr-al-mūminīn ‘commander of the faithful’), and when it was borrowed into European languages, ’amīr-al- became misconstrued as an independent, free-standing word.

Moreover, the Romans, when they adopted it, smuggled in their own Latin prefix ad-, producing admiral. When this reached English (via Old French) it still meant simply ‘commander’, and it was not until the time of Edward III that a strong naval link began to emerge. The Arabic title ’amīr-al-bahr had had considerable linguistic influence in the wake of Arabic conquests around the Mediterranean seaboard (Spanish almirante de la mar, for instance), and specific application of the term to a naval commander spread via Spain, Italy, and France to England.

Thus in the 15th century England had its Admiral of the Sea or Admiral of the Navy, who was in charge of the national fleet. By 1500 the maritime connection was firmly established, and admiral came to be used on its own for ‘supreme naval commander’.
=> emir
adobe: adobe: [18] Adobe is of Egyptian origin, from the time of the pharaohs. It comes from Coptic tōbe ‘brick’ (the form t.b appears in hieroglyphs). This was borrowed into Arabic, where the addition of the definite article al produced attob ‘the brick’. From Arabic it passed into Spanish (the corridor through which so many Arabic words reached other European languages), and its use by the Spanish-speaking population of North America (for a sun-dried brick) led to its adoption into English in the mid 18th century.
adventure: adventure: [13] Adventure derives ultimately from a Latin verb meaning ‘arrive’. It originally meant ‘what comes or happens by chance’, hence ‘luck’, but it took a rather pessimistic downturn via ‘risk, danger’ to (in the 14th century) ‘hazardous undertaking’. Its Latin source was advenīre, formed from the prefix adand venīre ‘come’. Its past participle stem, advent-, produced English advent [12] and adventitious [17], but it was its future participle, adventura ‘about to arrive’, which produced adventure.

In the Romance languages in which it subsequently developed (Italian avventura, Spanish aventura, and French aventure, the source of Middle English aventure) the d disappeared, but it was revived in 15th – 16thcentury French in imitation of Latin. The reduced form venture first appears in the 15th century.
=> adventitious, avent, venture
after: after: [OE] In the first millennium AD many Germanic languages had forms cognate with Old English æfter (Gothic aftra, for example, and Old Norse aptr), but, with the exception of Dutch achter, none survive. It is not clear what their ultimate origin is, but the suffix they share may well be a comparative one, and it is possible that they derive from a Germanic base *af- (represented in Old English æftan ‘from behind’).

It has been suggested that this goes back to Indo-European *ap- (source of Latin ab ‘away, from’ and English of(f)), in which case after would mean literally ‘more off’ – that is, ‘further away’. Nautical aft is probably a shortening of abaft, formed, with the prefixes a- ‘on’ and be- ‘by’, from Old English æftan.
=> of, off
again: again: [OE] The underlying etymological sense of again is ‘in a direct line with, facing’, hence ‘opposite’ and ‘in the opposite direction, back’ (its original meaning in Old English). It comes from a probable Germanic *gagin ‘straight’, which was the source of many compounds formed with on or in in various Germanic languages, such as Old Saxon angegin and Old Norse íg gegn.

The Old English form was ongēan, which would have produced ayen in modern English; however, Norse-influenced forms with a hard g had spread over the whole country from northern areas by the 16th century. The meaning ‘once more, anew’ did not develop until the late 14th century. From Old English times until the late 16th century a prefix-less form gain was used in forming compounds.

It carried a range of meanings, from ‘against’ to ‘in return’, but today survives only in gainsay. The notion of ‘opposition’ is carried through in against, which was formed in the 12th century from again and what was originally the genitive suffix -es, as in always and nowadays. The parasitic -t first appeared in the 14th century.
ail: ail: [OE] Now virtually obsolete except in the metaphorical use of its present participial adjective ailing, ail is of long but uncertain history. The Old English verb egl(i)an came from the adjective egle ‘troublesome’, which had related forms in other Germanic languages, such as Middle Low German egelen ‘annoy’ and Gothic agls ‘disgraceful’, aglo ‘oppression’. The derivative ailment did not appear until as late as the 18th century.
aim: aim: [14] Etymologically, aim is a contraction of estimate (see ESTEEM). The Latin verb aestimāre became considerably shortened as it developed in the various Romance languages (Italian has stimare, for instance, and Provençal esmar). In Old French its descendant was esmer, to which was added the prefix a- (from Latin ad- ‘to’), producing aesmer; and from one or both of these English acquired aim. The notion of estimating or calculating was carried over into the English verb, but died out after about a hundred years. However, the derived sense of calculating, and hence directing, one’s course is of equal antiquity in the language.
=> esteem, estimate
air: air: [13] Modern English air is a blend of three strands of meaning from, ultimately, two completely separate sources. In the sense of the gas we breathe it goes back via Old French air and Latin āēr to Greek áēr ‘air’ (whence the aero-compounds of English; see AEROPLANE). Related words in Greek were áērni ‘I blow’ and aúrā ‘breeze’ (from which English acquired aura in the 18th century), and cognates in other Indo-European languages include Latin ventus ‘wind’, English wind, and nirvana ‘extinction of existence’, which in Sanskrit meant literally ‘blown out’.

In the 16th century a completely new set of meanings of air arrived in English: ‘appearance’ or ‘demeanour’. The first known instance comes in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, IV, i: ‘The quality and air of our attempt brooks no division’ (1596). This air was borrowed from French, where it probably represents an earlier, Old French, aire ‘nature, quality’, whose original literal meaning ‘place of origin’ (reflected in another derivative, eyrie) takes it back to Latin ager ‘place, field’, source of English agriculture and related to acre. (The final syllable of English debonair [13] came from Old French aire, incidentally; the phrase de bon aire meant ‘of good disposition’.) The final strand in modern English air comes via the Italian descendant of Latin āēr, aria.

This had absorbed the ‘nature, quality’ meanings of Old French aire, and developed them further to ‘melody’ (perhaps on the model of German weise, which means both ‘way, manner’ and ‘tune’ – its English cognate wise, as in ‘in no wise’, meant ‘song’ from the 11th to the 13th centuries). It seems likely that English air in the sense ‘tune’ is a direct translation of the Italian.

Here again, Shakespeare got in with it first – in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I, i: ‘Your tongue’s sweet air more tunable than lark to shepherd’s ear’ (1590). (Aria itself became an English word in the 18th century.)
=> acre, aeroplane, agriculture, aria, aura, eyrie, malaria, wind
alder: alder: [OE] Alder is an ancient tree-name, represented in several other Indo-European languages, including German erle, Dutch els, Polish olcha, Russian ol’khá, and Latin alnus (which is the genus name of the alder in scientific classification). Alder is clearly the odd man out amongst all these forms in having a d, but it was not always so; the Old English word was alor, and the intrusive d does not begin to appear until the 14th century (it acts as a sort of connecting or glide consonant between the l and the following vowel, in much the same way as Old English thunor adopted a d to become thunder). The place-name Aldershot is based on the tree alder.
ale: ale: [OE] Old English ealu ‘ale’ goes back to a Germanic root *aluth-, which also produced Old Norse öl (Scandinavian languages still use alerelated words, whereas other Germanic languages now only use beer-related words; English is the only one to retain both). Going beyond Germanic in time takes us back to the word’s ultimate Indo-European source, a base meaning ‘bitter’ which is also represented in alum and aluminium. Ale and beer seem to have been virtually synonymous to the Anglo- Saxons; various distinctions in usage have developed over the centuries, such as that ale is made without hops, and is heavier (or some would say lighter) than beer, but most of the differences have depended on local usage.

The word bridal is intimately connected with ale. Nowadays used as an adjective, and therefore subconsciously associated with other adjectives ending in -al, in Old English it was a noun, literally ‘bride ale’, that is, a beer-drinking session to celebrate a marriage.
all: all: [OE] Words related to all are found throughout the Germanic languages (German all, Dutch al, Old Norse allr, Gothic alls, for instance). They can probably all be traced back to a hypothetical Germanic ancestor *alnaz. Connections outside Germanic are not known, unless Lithuanian aliai ‘completely’ is a relative.
alms: alms: [OE] The word alms has become much reduced in its passage through time from its ultimate Greek source, eleēmosúnē ‘pity, alms’. This was borrowed into post-classical (Christian) Latin as eleēmosyna, which subsequently became simplified in Vulgar Latin to *alimosina (source of the word for ‘alms’ in many Romance languages, such as French aumône and Italian limosina).

At this stage Germanic borrowed it, and in due course dispersed it (German almosen, Dutch aalmoes). It entered Old English as ælmesse, which became reduced in Middle English to almes and finally by the 17th century to alms (which because of its -s had come to be regarded as a plural noun). The original Greek eleēmosúnē is itself a derivative, of the adjective eleémōn ‘compassionate’, which in turn came from the noun éleos ‘pity’.

From medieval Latin eleēmosyna was derived the adjective eleēmosynarius (borrowed into English in the 17th century as the almost unpronounceable eleemosynary ‘giving alms’). Used as a noun, this passed into Old French as a(u)lmonier, and eventually, in the 13th century, became English aumoner ‘giver of alms’. The modern sense of almoner as a hospital social worker did not develop until the end of the 19th century.
=> almoner, eleemosynary
amaze: amaze: [OE] Old English āmasian meant ‘stupefy’ or ‘stun’, with perhaps some reminiscences of an original sense ‘stun by hitting on the head’ still adhering to it. Some apparently related forms in Scandinavian languages, such as Swedish masa ‘be sluggish’ and Norwegian dialect masast ‘become unconscious’, suggest that it may originally have been borrowed from Old Norse.

The modern sense ‘astonish’ did not develop until the end of the 16th century; Shakespeare was one of its earliest exponents: ‘Crystal eyes, whose full perfection all the world amazes’, Venus and Adonis 1592. By the end of the 13th century both the verb and its related noun had developed a form without the initial a-, and in the late 14th century the word – maze – had begun to be applied to a deliberately confusing structure.
=> maze
ambassador: ambassador: [14] Appropriately enough, ambassador is a highly cosmopolitan word. It was borrowed back and forth among several European languages before arriving in English. Its ultimate source appears to be the Indo- European root *ag- ‘drive, lead’, whose other numerous offspring include English act and agent. With the addition of the prefix *amb- ‘around’ (as in ambidextrous), this produced in the Celtic languages of Gaul the noun ambactos, which was borrowed by Latin as ambactus ‘vassal’.

The Latin word then found its way into the Germanic languages – Old English had ambeht ‘servant, messenger’, Old High German ambaht (from which modern German gets amt ‘official position’) – from which it was later borrowed back into medieval Latin as ambactia. This seems to have formed the basis of a verb, *ambactiāre ‘go on a mission’ (from which English ultimately gets embassy), from which in turn was derived the noun *ambactiātor.

This became ambasciator in Old Italian, from which Old French borrowed it as ambassadeur. The word had a be wildering array of spellings in Middle English (such as ambaxadour and inbassetour) before finally settling down as ambassador in the 16th century.
=> embassy
amber: amber: [14] Amber was borrowed, via Old French, from Arabic ‘anbar, which originally meant ‘ambergris’ (and in fact until the early 18th century amber was used for ‘ambergris’ too). A perceived resemblance between the two substances had already led in Arabic to ‘amber’ ousting ‘ambergris’ as the main meaning of ‘anbar, and this was reflected as soon as English acquired it.

In Scotland until as recently as the early 19th century lamber was the usual form. This arose from borrowing the French word for ‘amber’ complete with its definite article le: l’ambre. Before the introduction of the Arabic term into European languages, the ancestor of modern English glass appears to have been the word used for ‘amber’.
=> ambergris
ambergris: ambergris: [15] The original term for ambergris (a waxy material from the stomach of the sperm whale) was amber. But as confusion began to arise between the two substances amber and ambergris, amber came to be used for both in all the languages that had borrowed it from Arabic, thus compounding the bewilderment. The French solution was to differentiate ambergris as ambre gris, literally ‘grey amber’, and this eventually became the standard English term. (Later on, the contrastive term ambre jaune ‘yellow amber’ was coined for ‘amber’ in French.) Uncertainty over the identity of the second element, -gris, has led to some fanciful reformulations of the word.

In the 17th century, many people thought ambergris came from Greece – hence spellings such as amber-degrece and amber-greece. And until comparatively recently its somewhat greasy consistency encouraged the spelling ambergrease.
=> amber
and: and: [OE] A word as ancient as the English language itself, which has persisted virtually unchanged since at least 700 AD, and has cognates in other Germanic languages (German und, Dutch en), but no convincing ultimate ancestor for it has been identified
ankle: ankle: [14] Ankle comes from a probable Old Norse word *ankula. It has several relatives in other Germanic languages (German and Dutch enkel, for instance, and Swedish and Danish ankel) and can be traced back to an Indo- European base *angg- ‘bent’ (ultimate source also of anchor and angle). Before the Old Norse form spread through the language, English had its own native version of the word: anclēow. This survived until the 15th century in mainstream English, and for much longer in local dialects.
=> anchor, angle
ant: ant: [OE] The word ant appears to carry the etymological sense ‘creature that cuts off or bites off’. Its Old English form, æmette, was derived from a hypothetical Germanic compound *aimaitjōn, formed from the prefix *ai- ‘off, away’ and the root *mait- ‘cut’ (modern German has the verb meissen ‘chisel, carve’): thus, ‘the biter’.

The Old English word later developed along two distinct strands: in one, it became emmet, which survived into the 20th century as a dialectal form; while in the other it progressed through amete and ampte to modern English ant. If the notion of ‘biting’ in the naming of the ant is restricted to the Germanic languages (German has ameise), the observation that it and its nest smell of urine has been brought into play far more widely.

The Indo-European root *meigh-, from which ultimately we get micturate ‘urinate’ [18], was also the source of several words for ‘ant’, including Greek múrmēx (origin of English myrmecology ‘study of ants’, and also perhaps of myrmidon [14] ‘faithful follower’, from the Myrmidons, a legendary Greek people who loyally followed their king Achilles in the Trojan war, and who were said originally to have been created from ants), Latin formīca (hence English formic acid [18], produced by ants, and formaldehyde [19]), and Danish myre.

It also produced Middle English mire ‘ant’, the underlying meaning of which was subsequently reinforced by the addition of piss to give pismire, which again survived dialectally into the 20th century.
ape: ape: [OE] Ape (in Old English apa) has cognates in several Germanic languages (German affe, Dutch aap, Swedish apa), and comes from a prehistoric West and North Germanic *apan (perhaps originally borrowed from Celtic). Until the early 16th century, when English acquired the word monkey, it was the only term available for any of the non-human primates, but from around 1700 it began to be restricted in use to the large primates of the family Pongidae.
apple: apple: [OE] Words related to apple are found all over Europe; not just in Germanic languages (German apfel, Dutch appel, Swedish äpple), but also in Balto-Slavonic (Lithuanian óbuolas, Polish jabtko), and Celtic (Irish ubhall, Welsh afal) languages. The Old English version was æppel, which developed to modern English apple.

Apparently from earliest times the word was applied not just to the fruit we now know as the apple, but to any fruit in general. For example, John de Trevisa, in his translation of De proprietatibus rerum 1398 wrote ‘All manner apples that is, “fruit” that are enclosed in a hard skin, rind, or shell, are called Nuces nuts’. The term earth-apple has been applied to several vegetables, including the cucumber and the potato (compare French pomme de terre), and pineapple (which originally meant ‘pine cone’, with particular reference to the edible pine nuts) was applied to the tropical fruit in the 17th century, because of its supposed resemblance to a pine cone.
apricot: apricot: [16] The word apricot reached English by a peculiarly circuitous route from Latin. The original term used by the Romans for the apricot, a fruit which came ultimately from China, was prūnum Arminiacum or mālum Arminiacum ‘Armenian plum or apple’ (Armenia was an early source of choice apricots). But a new term gradually replaced these: mālum praecocum ‘early-ripening apple’ (praecocus was a variant of praecox, from which English gets precocious). Praecocum was borrowed by a succession of languages, making its way via Byzantine Greek beríkokkon and Arabic al birqūq ‘the apricot’ to Spanish albaricoque and Portuguese albricoque.

This was the source of the English word, but its earliest form, abrecock, shows that it had already acquired the initial abrof French abricot, and the final -t followed almost immediately. Spellings with p instead of b are also found in the 16th century.
=> precocious
apt: apt: [14] Apt comes from Latin aptus ‘fit, suited’, the past participle of the verb apere ‘fasten’. Other English words from this source are adapt, adapt, adept, inept, and (with the Latin prefix com-) couple and copulation. Related words are found in Indo-European languages of the Indian subcontinent: for instance, Sanskrit āpta ‘fit’.
=> adapt, adept, attitude, couple, inept
arise: arise: [OE] Arise is a compound verb with cognate forms in many other Germanic languages (Gothic, for instance, had urreisan). The prefix a- originally meant ‘away, out’, and hence was used as an intensive; rise comes from an unidentified Germanic source which some etymologists have connected with Latin rīvus ‘stream’ (source of English rivulet), on the basis of the notion of a stream ‘rising’ from a particular source.

The compound arise was in fact far commoner than the simple form rise in the Old English period, and it was only in early Middle English that rise began to take its place. This happened first in northern dialects, and may have been precipitated by Old Norse rísa. Today, it is only in the sense ‘come into existence’ that arise is commoner.
=> raise, rear, rise, rivulet
arm: arm: [OE] The two distinct senses of arm, ‘limb’ and ‘weapon’, both go back ultimately to the same source, the Indo-European base *ar- ‘fit, join’ (which also produced art and article). One derivative of this was Latin arma ‘weapons, tools’, which entered English via Old French armes in the 13th century (the singular form was virtually unknown before the 19th century, but the verb arm, from Latin armāre via Old French armer, came into the language in the 13th century).

The other strand is represented in several European languages, meaning variously ‘joint’, ‘shoulder’, and ‘arm’: Latin armus ‘shoulder’, for example, and Greek harmos ‘joint’. The prehistoric Germanic form was *armaz, from which developed, among others, German, Dutch, Swedish, and English arm.
=> art, article
army: army: [14] Latin armāta ‘armed’, the past participle of the verb armāre, was used in postclassical times as a noun, meaning ‘armed force’. Descendants of armāta in the Romance languages include Spanish armada and French armée, from which English borrowed army. In early usage it could (like Spanish armada) mean a naval force as well as a land force (‘The King commanded that £21,000 should be paid to his army (for so that fleet is called everywhere in English Saxon) which rode at Greenwich’, Marchamont Needham’s translation of Selden’s Mare clausum 1652), but this had virtually died out by the end of the 18th century.
=> arm, armada
arrack: arrack: [17] Arrack is an Asian alcoholic drink distilled from rice or molasses. The word comes ultimately from Arabic ‘araq ‘sweat, juice, liquor’, which was borrowed in a variety of forms into several Asiatic languages. The immediate source of English arrack seems to have been an Indian language.
arrow: arrow: [OE] Appropriately enough, the word arrow comes from the same ultimate Indo- European source that produced the Latin word for ‘bow’ – *arkw-. The Latin descendant of this was arcus (whence English arc and arch), but in Germanic it became *arkhw-. From this basic ‘bow’ word were formed derivatives in various Germanic languages meaning literally ‘that which belongs to the bow’ – that is, ‘arrow’ (Gothic, for instance, had arhwazna).

The Old English version of this was earh, but it is recorded only once, and the commonest words for ‘arrow’ in Old English were strǣl (still apparently in use in Sussex in the 19th century, and related to German strahl ‘ray’) and fiān (which remained in Scottish English until around 1500). Modern English arrow seems to be a 9th-century reborrowing from Old Norse *arw-.
=> arc, arch
artichoke: artichoke: [16] The word artichoke is of Arabic origin; it comes from al kharshōf ‘the artichoke’, which was the Arabic term for a plant of the thistle family with edible flower-parts. This was borrowed into Spanish as alcarchofa, and passed from there into Italian as arcicioffo. In northern dialects this became articiocco, the form in which the word was borrowed into other European languages, including English.

The term was first applied to the Jerusalem artichoke, a plant with edible tuberous roots, early in the 17th century. The epithet Jerusalem has no connection with the holy city; it arose by folk etymology, that is, the adaptation of an unfamiliar foreign word to the lexical system of one’s own language. In this case the word was girasole, Italian for ‘sunflower’ (the Jerusalem artichoke is of the sunflower family).
ash: ash: [OE] There are two distinct words ash in English: ash the tree and ash ‘burnt material’. The tree (Old English æsc) comes from a prehistoric Germanic *askiz, which in turn derived from the Indo-European base *os-; this was the source of several tree-names in other Indo-European languages, not all of them by any means corresponding to the ash: Latin ornus, for instance, meant ‘elm’, and Albanian ah is ‘beech’. Ash as in ‘cigarette ash’ is a descendant of Old English æsce.

It has cognate forms in other Germanic languages (German asche, Dutch asch, Swedish aska), pointing to a prehistoric Germanic *azgon, which may be related to the Latin verbs ārēre ‘be dry’ (source of English arid) and ārdēre ‘burn’ (source of English ardent, ardour, and arson).
=> ardent, arid, arson
ask: ask: [OE] The Old English ancestor of ask existed in two main forms: āscian and ācsian. The first produced descendants such as asshe, which died out in the 16th century; the second resulted in axe (still extant in some dialects), which by metathesis – the reversal of the consonant sounds k and s – became modern English ask. Ultimately the word comes from a prehistoric West Germanic verb *aiskōjan (source of German heischen, a poetical term for ‘ask’); cognates in other, non-Germanic, Indo- European languages include Latin aeruscāre ‘beg’ and Sanskrit iccháti ‘seek’.
ass: ass: [OE] Ass comes ultimately from Latin asinus ‘donkey’ (whence English asinine [16]), and English probably acquired it via a Celtic route, from a prehistoric Old Celtic *as(s)in (source of Welsh asyn). As borrowed directly into the Germanic languages, by contrast, the n of Latin asinus changed to l; from this branch of the word’s travels Old English had esol, long defunct, and Dutch has ezel, which English has appropriated as easel. Further back in time the word’s antecedents are unclear, but some would trace it to Sumerian ansu, which could also be the source of Greek ónos (whence English onager ‘wild ass’ [14]) and Armenian eš.
=> easel, onager
at: at: [OE] The preposition at was originally found throughout the Germanic languages: Old English had æt, Old High German az, Gothic and Old Norse at. It survives in the Scandinavian languages (Swedish att, for instance) as well as English, but has been lost from German and Dutch. Cognates in other Indo-European languages, including Latin ad ‘to, at’, suggest an ultimate common source.
axe: axe: [OE] Relatives of the word axe are widespread throughout the Indo-European languages, from German axt and Dutch aaks to Latin ascia and Greek axínē. These point back to a hypothetical Indo-European *agwesī or *akusī, which denoted some sort of cutting or hewing tool. The Old English form was æx, and there is actually no historical justification for the modern British spelling axe, which first appeared in the late 14th century; as late as 1885 the Oxford English Dictionary made ax its main form, and it remains so in the USA.
babel: babel: [14] According to Genesis 11: 1–9, the tower of Babel was built in Shinar by the descendants of Noah in an attempt to reach heaven. Angered at their presumption, God punished the builders by making them unable to understand each other’s speech: hence, according to legend, the various languages of the world. Hence, too, the metaphorical application of babel to a ‘confused medley of sounds’, which began in English in the 16th century.

The word has no etymological connection with ‘language’ or ‘noise’, however. The original Assyrian bāb-ilu meant ‘gate of god’, and this was borrowed into Hebrew as bābel (from which English acquired the word). The later Greek version is Babylon.
=> babylon
back: back: [OE] Back goes back to a prehistoric West and North Germanic *bakam, which was represented in several pre-medieval and medieval Germanic languages: Old High German bah, for example, and Old Norse bak. In most of them, however, it has been ousted by relatives of English ridge, originally ‘spine’ (such as German rücken and Swedish rygg), and only English retains back.
=> bacon
bad: bad: [13] For such a common word, bad has a remarkably clouded history. It does not begin to appear in English until the end of the 13th century, and has no apparent relatives in other languages (the uncanny resemblance to Persian bad is purely coincidental). The few clues we have suggest a regrettably homophobic origin. Old English had a pair of words, bǣddel and bǣdling, which appear to have been derogatory terms for homosexuals, with overtones of sodomy.

The fact that the first examples we have of bad, from the late 13th and early 14th centuries, are in the sense ‘contemptible, worthless’ as applied to people indicates that the connotations of moral depravity may have become generalized from an earlier, specifically anti-homosexual sense.
ban: ban: [OE] Ban is one of a widespread group of words in the European languages. Its ultimate source is the Indo-European base *bha-, which also gave English fame (from a derivative of Latin fārī ‘speak’) and phase (from Greek phāsis). The Germanic offshoot of the Indo- European base, and source of the English word, was *bannan, which originally probably meant simply ‘speak, proclaim’.

This gradually developed through ‘proclaim with threats’ to ‘put a curse on’, but the sense ‘prohibit’ does not seem to have arisen until as late as the 19th century. The Germanic base *bann- was borrowed into Old French as the noun ban ‘proclamation’. From there it crossed into English and probably mingled with the cognate English noun, Middle English iban (the descendant of Old English gebann).

It survives today in the plural form banns ‘proclamation of marriage’. The adjective derived from Old French ban was banal, acquired by English in the 18th century. It originally meant ‘of compulsory military service’ (from the word’s basic sense of ‘summoning by proclamation’); this was gradually generalized through ‘open to everyone’ to ‘commonplace’.
=> banal, bandit, banish, contraband, fame, phase
banner: banner: [13] Banner is of Germanic origin, but it reached English via Latin. Early forms which show its Germanic antecedents are Gothic bandwo ‘sign’ and the related Old Norse benda ‘give a sign’, but at some stage it was acquired by Latin, as bandum ‘standard’. This passed via Vulgar Latin *bandāria into various Romance languages, in some of which the influence of derivatives of Germanic *bann- (source of English ban) led to the elimination of the d. Hence Old French baniere and Anglo-Norman banere, source of English banner.
=> ban
bar: bar: [12] The history of bar cannot be traced back very far. Forms in various Romance languages, such as French barre (source of the English verb) and Italian and Spanish barra, point to a Vulgar Latin *barra, but beyond that nothing is known. The original sense of a ‘rail’ or ‘barrier’ has developed various figurative applications over the centuries: in the 14th century to the ‘rail in a court before which a prisoner was arraigned’ (as in ‘prisoner at the bar’); in the 16th century to a ‘partition separating qualified from unqualified lawyers in hall’ (as in ‘call to the bar’); and also in the 16th century to a ‘counter at which drink is served’.

Related nouns include barrage [19], originally an ‘artificial obstruction in a waterway’, and barrier [14], from Anglo- Norman barrere.
=> barrage, barrel, barrier, barrister, embargo
bare: bare: [OE] Bare is an ancient word, traceable back to an Indo-European *bhosos. Descendants of this in non-Germanic languages include Lithuanian basas ‘barefoot’, but for the most part it is the Germanic languages that have adopted the word. Germanic *bazaz produced German and Swedish bar, Dutch baar, and, via Old English bær, modern English bare.