英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

camera: camera: [18] Latin camera originally meant ‘vaulted room’ (a sense preserved in the Radcliffe Camera, an 18th-century building housing part of Oxford University library, which has a vaulted roof). It came from Greek kamárā ‘vault, arch’, which is ultimately related to English chimney. In due course the meaning ‘vaulted room’ became weakened to simply ‘room’, which reached English, via Old French chambre, as chamber, and is preserved in the legal Latin phrase in camera ‘privately, in judge’s chambers’.

In the 17th century, an optical instrument was invented consisting of a small closed box with a lens fixed in one side which produced an image of external objects on the inside of the box. The same effect could be got in a small darkened room, and so the device was called a camera obscura ‘dark chamber’. When the new science of photography developed in the 19th century, using the basic principle of the camera obscura, camera was applied to the picture-forming box.
=> chamber, chimney
conundrum: conundrum: [16] Conundrum originally appeared in all manner of weird and wonderful guises – conimbrum, conuncrum, quonundrum, connunder, etc – before settling down to conundrum in the late 18th century. It bears all the marks of one of the rather heavy-handed quasi-Latin joke words beloved of scholars in the 16th and 17th centuries, and a mid-17thcentury commentator attributed it to Oxford university. At first it meant ‘whim’ and then ‘pun’; the current sense ‘puzzling problem’ did not develop until the end of the 18th century.
toff: toff: [19] Toff probably originated as an alteration of tuft [14], which was used from the 18th century as an Oxford University slang term for a ‘titled undergraduate’ (students who came from noble families wore a gold tassel or ‘tuft’ on their caps). Tuft itself was adapted from Old French tofe or toffe ‘tuft’, a word of Germanic origin.
=> tuft
Bodleian: from Sir Thomas Bodley (1545-1613), who in 1597 refounded the library at Oxford University.
clarendon (n.): a thickened Roman type face, 1845, evidently named for the Clarendon press at Oxford University, which was set up 1713 in the Clarendon Building, named for university Chancellor Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon.
coach (n.): 1550s, "large kind of carriage," from Middle French coche (16c.), from German kotsche, from Hungarian kocsi (szekér) "(carriage) of Kocs," village where it was first made. In Hungary, the thing and the name for it date from 15c., and forms are found in most European languages (Spanish and Portuguese coche, Italian cocchino, Dutch koets). Applied to railway cars 1866, American English. Sense of "economy or tourist class" is from 1949. Meaning "instructor/trainer" is c. 1830 Oxford University slang for a tutor who "carries" a student through an exam; athletic sense is 1861.
conundrum (n.): 1590s, Oxford University slang for "pedant," also "whim," etc., later (1790) "riddle, puzzle." Also spelled quonundrum. The sort of ponderous pseudo-Latin word that was once the height of humor in learned circles.
-er (3): suffix used to make jocular or familiar formations from common or proper names (soccer being one), first attested 1860s, English schoolboy slang, "Introduced from Rugby School into Oxford University slang, orig. at University College, in Michaelmas Term, 1875" [OED, with unusual precision].
Methodist (n.): "One of a new kind of puritans lately arisen, so called from their profession to live by rules and in constant method" [Johnson]. Protestant religious sect founded 1729 at Oxford University by John and Charles Wesley, took that name almost from inception, but it had been used since at least 1686 for various new methods of worship. Related: Methodism.
Oxonian (adj.): "pertaining to Oxford or to Oxford University," 1640s, from Medieval Latin oxonia, Latinized form of Middle English Oxforde (see Oxford). Earlier as a noun (1540s).
threshold (n.): Old English þrescold, þærscwold, þerxold, etc., "door-sill, point of entering," of uncertain origin and probably much altered by folk-etymology. The first element probably is related to Old English þrescan (see thresh), either in its current sense of "thresh" or with its original sense of "tread, trample." Second element has been much transformed in all the Germanic languages, suggesting its literal sense was lost even in ancient times. In English it probably has been altered to conform to hold. Liberman (Oxford University Press blog, Feb. 11, 2015) revives an old theory that the second element is the Proto-Germanic instrumental suffix *-thlo and the original sense of threshold was a threshing area adjacent to the living area of a house. Cognates include Old Norse þreskjoldr, Swedish tröskel, Old High German driscufli, German dialectal drischaufel. Figurative use was in Old English.
toff (n.): lower-class London slang for "stylish dresser, man of the smart set," 1851, said by OED to be probably an alteration of tuft, formerly an Oxford University term for a nobleman or gentleman-commoner (1755), in reference to the gold ornamental tassel worn on the caps of undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge whose fathers were peers with votes in the House of Lords.
battels: "(At Oxford University) a college account for food and accommodation expenses", Late 16th century: perhaps from dialect battle 'nourish', from the earlier adjective battle 'nutritious'; probably related to batten².