英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

fortnight: fortnight: [13] The ancient Germanic peoples recorded the passing of time in units of ‘nights’ rather than, as we do, in units of ‘days’: hence a period of two weeks was in Old English fēowertīene niht, or ‘fourteen nights’. By early Middle English times this was starting to be contracted to the single word fortnight. (The parallel sennight ‘week’ [15] – literally ‘seven nights’ – survived dialectally into the 20th century.)
=> fourteen
lightning: lightning: [14] Etymologically, lightning is simply something that illuminates, or ‘lightens’, the sky. The word is a contraction of an earlier lightening, a derivative of lighten ‘make light’. The Old English word for ‘lightning’ was lēget, which is related to light. In Middle English it became leit, and later leiting, but in the 14th century lightning took over as the main form.
=> light
sputnik: sputnik: [20] Russian sputnik means literally ‘travelling companion’ (it is formed from s ‘with’ and put ‘way, journey’, with the agent suffix -nik). The Soviets gave the name to the series of Earth-orbiting satellites that they launched between 1957 and 1961. The first bleeps from space in October 1957 came as a severe shock to the West, which had not thought Soviet science capable of such a thing, and immediately propelled sputnik into the English language (the politically charged English version ‘fellow traveller’, which is more strictly a translation of Russian popútchik, was tried for a time, but never caught on).

It became one of the ‘in’ words of the late 1950s, and did much to popularize the suffix -nik in English (as in beatnik and peacenik).
beatnik (n.): coined 1958 by San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen during the heyday of -nik suffixes in the wake of Sputnik. From Beat generation (1952), associated with beat (n.) in its meaning "rhythm (especially in jazz)" as well as beat (past participle adjective) "worn out, exhausted," but originator Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) in 1958 connected it with beatitude.
The origins of the word beat are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than the feeling of weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of the mind. ["New York Times Magazine," Oct. 2, 1952]

"Beat" is old carny slang. According to Beat Movement legend (and it is a movement with a deep inventory of legend), Ginsberg and Kerouac picked it up from a character named Herbert Huncke, a gay street hustler and drug addict from Chicago who began hanging around Times Square in 1939 (and who introduced William Burroughs to heroin, an important cultural moment). The term has nothing to do with music; it names the condition of being beaten down, poor, exhausted, at the bottom of the world. [Louis Menand, "New Yorker," Oct. 1, 2007]
catnip (n.): 1712, American English, from cat (n.) + nip, from Old English nepte "catnip," from Latin nepta, name of an aromatic herb. The older name is Middle English catmint (mid-13c.).
chetnik (n.): "member of a Balkan guerrilla force," 1904, from Serbian četnik, from četa "band, troop."
fortnight (n.): "period of two weeks," 17c. contraction of Middle English fourteniht, from Old English feowertyne niht, literally "fourteen nights," preserving the ancient Germanic custom of reckoning by nights (mentioned by Tacitus in "Germania" xi). Related: Fortnightly.
lightning (n.): late 13c., present participle of lightnen "make bright," extended form of Old English lihting, from leht (see light (n.)). Meaning "cheap, raw whiskey" is attested from 1781, also sometimes "gin." Lightning bug is attested from 1778. Lightning rod from 1790.
neatnik (n.): "excessively tidy person," 1959, from neat (adj.) with a punning play on beatnik.
sputnik (n.): "artificial satellite," extended from the name of the one launched by the Soviet Union Oct. 4, 1957, from Russian sputnik "satellite," literally "traveling companion" (in this use short for sputnik zemlyi, "traveling companion of the Earth") from Old Church Slavonic supotiniku, from Russian so-, s- "with, together" + put' "path, way," from Old Church Slavonic poti, from PIE *pent- "to tread, go" (see find (v.)) + agent suffix -nik.

The electrifying impact of the launch on the West can be gauged by the number of new formations in -nik around this time (the suffix had been present in a Yiddish context for at least a decade before); Laika, the stray dog launched aboard Sputnik 2 (Nov. 2, 1957), which was dubbed muttnik in the "Detroit Free Press," etc. The rival U.S. satellite which failed to reach orbit in 1957 (because the Vanguard rocket blew up on the launch pad) derided as a kaputnik (in the "Daytona Beach Morning Journal"), a dudnik ("Christian Science Monitor"), a flopnik ("Youngstown Vindicator," "New York Times"), a pffftnik ("National Review"), and a stayputnik ("Vancouver Sun").