英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

anemone [anemone 词源字典]: anemone: [16] The wild wood anemone is sometimes called the wind flower, and this idea may be reflected in its standard name too. For it comes from Greek anemónē, which appears to be a derivative of ánemos ‘wind’ (also the source of English animal and animate). However, it has also been speculated that the Greek word may be an alteration of Hebrew Na’ amān, which was an epithet applied to Adonis, the beautiful youth beloved of Aphrodite from whose blood, according to Greek legend, the anemone sprang after he was killed while boar hunting.

According to this view, anemónē arose from a folk-etymological reformulation of the Hebrew word to make it approximate more closely to the Greek for ‘wind’. The application to sea anemone began in the late 18th century.
=> animal, animate[anemone etymology, anemone origin, 英语词源]
aplomb: aplomb: [18] Originally, aplomb meant literally ‘quality of being perpendicular’. It was borrowed from French, where it was a lexicalization of the phrase à plomb ‘according to the plumb line’ (plomb came from Latin plumbum ‘lead’, also the ultimate source of English plumb, plumber, plumbago, and plummet). The notion of ‘uprightness’ gave rise in the 19th century to the metaphorical sense ‘composure’.
=> plumb, plumber, plummet
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
bain-marie: bain-marie: [19] In its origins, the bain-marie was far from today’s innocuous domestic utensil for heating food over boiling water. It takes its name from Mary, or Miriam, the sister of Moses, who according to medieval legend was an adept alchemist – so much so that she had a piece of alchemical equipment named after her, ‘Mary’s furnace’ (medieval Greek kaminos Marias). This was mistranslated into medieval Latin as balneum Mariae ‘Mary’s bath’, from which it passed into French as bain-marie.

English originally borrowed the word in the 15th century, in semi-anglicized form, as balneo of Mary. At this time it still retained its original alchemical meaning, but by the early 19th century, when English adopted the French term, it had developed its present-day use.
barnacle: barnacle: [12] The term barnacle was originally applied to a type of goose, Branta leucopsis, which according to medieval legend grew on trees or on logs of wood. Various fanciful versions of its reproductive cycle existed, among them that it emerged from a fruit or that it grew attached to a tree by its beak, but the most tenacious was that it developed inside small shellfish attached to wood, rocks, etc by the seashore.

Hence by the end of the 16th century the term had come to be applied to these shellfish, and today that is its main sense. The word was originally bernak (it gained its -le ending in the 15th century) and came from medieval Latin bernaca, but its ultimate source is unknown.
bean: bean: [OE] The word bean (Old English bēan) has relatives in several Germanic languages (German bohne, Dutch boon, Swedish böna), pointing to a common West and North Germanic source *baunō, but that is as far back in history as we can pursue it. Beanfeast [19] apparently derived from the practice of serving bacon and beans (or, according to some, bean geese, a species of goose) at the annual dinners given by firms to their employees in the 19th century. Beano, originally a printers’ abbreviation, appears towards the end of the 19th century.
bigot: bigot: [16] According to the 12th-century Anglo- Norman chronicler Wace, bigot was a contemptuous term applied by the French to the Normans, but it is far from clear where this came from, whether it is the same word as present-day bigot, and, if it is, how it came to mean ‘narrowminded person’. All that can be said for certain is that the word first turned up in its modern form in the 15th century as French bigot, from which English borrowed it.
blaze: blaze: There are three distinct words blaze in English. The commonest, meaning ‘fire, flame’ [OE], comes from a prehistoric Germanic *blasōn. Its original signification was ‘torch’ (in the sense, of course, of a burning piece of wood or bunch of sticks), but by the year 1000 the main current meaning was established. The precise source of blaze ‘light-coloured mark or spot’ [17] is not known for certain, but there are several cognate forms in other Germanic languages, including Old Norse blesi and German blässe; perhaps the likeliest candidate as far as blaze is concerned is Middle Low German bles.

The verbal usage, as in ‘blaze a trail’ (that is, by making conspicuous marks on trees) originated in the mid 18th century. The related German adjective blass ‘pale’, which originally meant ‘shining’, points up the fact that ultimately these two words blaze are related, the primeval sense ‘shining’ having diverged on the one hand through ‘pale’, on the other through ‘glowing, burning’.

The third blaze, ‘proclaim’ [14], as in ‘blaze abroad’, is now seldom encountered. It originally meant ‘blow a trumpet’, and comes ultimately from the Indo-European base *bhlā- (source of blow). Its immediate source in English was Middle Dutch blāsen. Despite its formal and semantic similarity, it does not appear to have any connection with blazon [13], which comes from Old French blason ‘shield’, a word of unknown origin.

A blazer [19] got its name from being a brightly coloured jacket (from blaze meaning ‘fire, flame’). It originated among English university students in the late 19th century. According to a correspondent in the Daily News 22 August 1889, the word was originally applied specifically to the red jackets worn by members of the ‘Lady Margaret, St John’s College, Cambridge, Boat Club’.

But by the 1880s its more general application had become widely established: in the Durham University Journal of 21 February 1885 we read that ‘the latest novelty … for the river is flannels, a blazer, and spats’.
=> blow
boy: boy: [13] The etymology of boy has long been problematical, but the now most generally accepted view is that it is probably a reduced form of an unrecorded Anglo-Norman *abuie or *embuie ‘fettered’, from the Old French verb embuier ‘fetter’. This came from Vulgar Latin *imboiāre, a compound verb based on Latin boiae ‘leather collar, fetter’, which was adapted from Greek boeiai doraí ‘ox-hides’ (hence ‘oxleather thongs’), from bous ‘ox’ (related to English bovine and cow).

The apparently implausible semantic connection is elucidated by the early meaning of boy in English, which was ‘male servant’; according to this view, a boy was etymologically someone kept in leather fetters, and hence a ‘slave’ or ‘servant’. The current main sense, ‘young male’, developed in the 14th century.
=> cow
bustard: bustard: [15] Bustard (the name of a large game bird now extinct in Britain) is something of a mystery word. Old French had two terms for the bird, bistarde and oustarde, both of which come from Latin avis tarda, literally ‘slow bird’ (Latin tardus gave English tardy [15]). This, according to the Roman writer Pliny, was what the bird was called in Spain.

It has been objected that the bustard can run quite fast, and that the name avis tarda must be some sort of folk-etymological alteration of a non-Latin word; but in fact the bird’s normal gait is a fairly slow and stately walk, so the term is not so far-fetched. The English word is presumably a blend of the two Old French ones, perhaps via an Anglo-Norman *bustarde.
=> tardy
cancan: cancan: [19] The English word was borrowed from French, where it originally, in the 16th century, meant ‘noise, uproar’. Its ultimate source is unknown, although it has traditionally been associated with Latin quanquam ‘although’, taken to be the prelude to a noisy scholastic argument. Its application to the uproarious dance began in the 19th century, in French as well as English; however, its presentday association with high-kicking chorus girls (with, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘extravagant and indecent gestures’) seems to be a slightly later development, since the earliest examples of its use quoted by the OED apparently refer to men: ‘He usually compromises by dancing the Can-can’, A E Sweet, Texas Siftings 1882.
cancer: cancer: [14] Cancer comes from Latin cancer, which meant literally ‘crab’. It was a translation of Greek karkínos ‘crab’, which, together with its derivative karkínōma (source of English carcinoma [18]) was, according to the ancient Greek physician Galen, applied to tumours on account of the crablike pattern formed by the distended blood vessels around the affected part.

Until the 17th century, the term generally used for the condition in English was canker, which arose from an earlier borrowing of Latin cancer in Old English times; before then, cancer had been used exclusively in the astrological sense. The French derivative of Latin cancer, chancre, was borrowed into English in the 16th century for ‘syphilitic ulcer’.
=> canker, carcinoma
canon: canon: There are today two distinct words canon in English, although ultimately they are related. The older, ‘(ecclesiastical) rule’ [OE], comes via Latin canōn from Greek kanón ‘rule’, which some have speculated may be related to Greek kánnā ‘reed’, source of English cane (the semantic link is said to be ‘reed’ – ‘rod’ – ‘measuring rod’ – ‘rule’).

The derived adjective, kanonikós, passed into ecclesiastical Latin as canonicus, which was used as a noun, ‘clergyman’; in Old French this became canonie or chanonie, and as it crossed into English its last syllable dropped off (owing to the influence of canon ‘rule’). The underlying sense of canon ‘clergyman’ [13] is thus ‘one living according to the rules of religious life’.
champagne: champagne: [17] Champagne comes (as does campaign) from late Latin campānia, a derivative of Latin campus ‘open field’ (source of English camp). This passed into Old French as champagne ‘open country’, a word borrowed into English in the 14th century as champaign (now archaic). It came to be applied specifically to a province of northeastern France (an area largely of open rolling countryside) and hence to the wine produced in that area.

There are references to ‘brisk Champagne’ and ‘sparkling Champagne’ in English from the 1660s and 1670s, but it was not until about two hundred years ago that modern champagne, produced by secondary fermentation in bottle, was invented (according to legend, by the monk Dom Perignon).
=> camp, campaign, champion
climate: climate: [14] The notion underlying climate is of ‘sloping’ or ‘leaning’. It comes, via Old French climat or late Latin clīma (whence English clime [16]), from Greek klīma ‘sloping surface of the earth’, which came ultimately from the same source (the Indo-European base *kli-) as produced English lean. Greek geographers assigned the earth’s surface to various zones according to the angle which their ‘slope’ made with the rays of the sun (originally there were seven of these, ranging from 17 degrees of latitude North to 48 degrees, but later the system was elaborated so that each hemisphere was divided into 24 bands or ‘climates’ of latitude).

This was the sense in which the word passed into Latin, where it broadened out into simply ‘region’, and hence ‘weather associated with a particular area’.
=> ladder, lean
corduroy: corduroy: [18] Popular etymology usually associates corduroy with a supposed French corde du roy ‘cord of the king’ or even couleur du roy ‘king’s colour’ (the original corduroy having according to this theory been purple), but in fact there is no concrete evidence to substantiate this. A more likely explanation is that the word’s first syllable represents cord in the sense ‘ribbed fabric’, and that the second element is the now obsolete noun duroy ‘coarse woollen fabric’ [17], of unknown origin.
cry: cry: [13] Cry comes via Old French crier from Latin quirītāre, which, according to the Roman etymologist Marcus Terentius Varo, meant originally ‘call for the help of the Quirites’. This was a term for those who held the rank of Roman citizen; it is of uncertain origin, variously explained as coming from an Italic word for ‘lance’ and as denoting those who lived in the Sabine town of Cures. The more banal truth, however, is that the Latin verb was probably of imitative origin.
dinner: dinner: [13] The etymological meaning of dinner is ‘breakfast’. The word comes ultimately from an unrecorded Vulgar Latin verb *disjūnāre, a compound formed from the prefix dis- ‘un-’ and jējūnus ‘fasting, hungry’ (source of English jejune [17]): hence, ‘break one’s fast’. Old French adopted it in two phases: as desiuner, which became modern French déjeuner (originally ‘breakfast’ but later ‘lunch’), borrowed by English in the 18th century; and as disner.

In later Old French this developed into diner (source of English dine [13]), which came to be used as a noun – from which English acquired dinner. In English it has always denoted the main meal of the day, although the timing of this has varied over the centuries, and continues to do so, according to region, social class, etc.
=> jejune
dismal: dismal: [13] Etymologically, dismal means ‘bad day’. It comes, via Anglo-Norman dis mal, from Latin diēs malī, literally ‘evil days’, a term used to denote the two days in each month which according to ancient superstition were supposed to be unlucky (these days, of set date, were said originally to have been computed by Egyptian astrologers, and were hence also called Egyptian days). The term dismal thus acquired connotations of ‘gloom’ and ‘calamity’. Its earliest adjectival use, somewhat tautologically, was in the phrase dismal day, but in the late 16th century it broadened out considerably in application.
eddy: eddy: [15] The ultimate source of eddy appears to be a prehistoric Germanic particle meaning ‘back, again’, represented in Old English by ed-, in Old High German by et-, and in Old Norse by ith- (it is related to Latin et ‘and’ and its various Romance descendants, such as French et and Italian ed). According to this theory, an eddy would thus be ‘water that flows back’.

What is not altogether clear, however, is precisely how that prehistoric particle became eddy. Perhaps the most likely candidate as the missing link is Old Norse itha ‘whirlpool’, but it has also been suggested that Old English may have had a word *edwǣg, whose second element, ‘wave’, would be related to English way and vogue.
elixir: elixir: [14] Although nowadays we think of an elixir as liquid, it probably originated in the Greek word for ‘dry’, xērós (whence English xerox). From this was derived a term for a ‘dry’ powder for treating wounds, xérion, and it has been speculated that this was borrowed by Arabic as (with the definite article al) aliksīr. Medieval alchemists used this as a word for a substance which could change base metals into gold, and also for a substance (according to some the same substance) which could confer immortality (known more fully as the elixir of life).
=> xerox
equerry: equerry: [16] Nowadays in Britain simply royal attendants, equerries’ long and traditional association with the royal stables has led to association of the word equerry with Latin equus ‘horse’, but in fact the two are quite unrelated. Equerry originally meant ‘stable’, and was borrowed from the obsolete French escuirie (now écurie). It is not clear where this came from: some etymologists have linked it with Old High German scūr ‘barn, shed’, while others have derived it from Old French escuier ‘groom’ (source of English esquire and squire), according to which view it would mean ‘place where a groom stayed or worked’. (Escuier itself came ultimately from Latin scūtārius ‘shieldbearer’.) Forms such as escurie remained current in English up until the 18th century, but already by the 17th century equus-influenced spellings had begun to appear.

The person in charge of such a stable was formerly termed in French escuier d’escuirie ‘squire of the stable’, and in English groom of the equerry, and there are records from quite early in the 16th century indicating that equerry was being used on its own as the term for such a groom.
=> esquire, squire
eureka: eureka: [16] The Greek mathematician Archimedes (c. 287–212 BC) was commissioned by King Hiero II of Syracuse to find out whether the goldsmith who had made a new crown for him had fraudulently mixed some silver in with the gold. In order to do so, Archimedes needed to ascertain the metal’s specific gravity. But how to do this? According to Plutarch, he decided to take a bath to ponder the problem.

He filled the bath too full, and some of the water overflowed – and it suddenly occurred to Archimedes that a pure-gold crown would displace more water if immersed than one made from an alloy. Elated at this piece of lateral thinking, Archimedes is said to have leapt out of the bath shouting heúrēka! ‘I have found!’, the perfect indicative of Greek heurískein ‘find’ (source of English heuristic [19]).

The earliest occurrence of the word in an English text as an exclamation of delight at discovery is in John Dee’s Preface, but there it appears in Greek characters; the first English author to fully naturalize it was probably Henry Fielding in Joseph Andrews 1742; ‘Adams returned overjoyed cring out “Eureka!”’ (The goldsmith, incidentally, had adulterated the gold.)
=> heuristic
gamut: gamut: [15] Gamut began life as a medieval musical term. The 11th-century French-born musical theorist Guido d’Arezzo devised the ‘hexachord’, a six-note scale used for sightreading music (and forerunner of the modern tonic sol-fa). The notes were mnemonically named ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la (after, according to legend, syllables in a Latin hymn to St John: ‘Ut queant laxis resonāre fibris Mira gestorum famuli tuorum, Solve polluti labii reatum’ – ‘Absolve the crime of the polluted lip in order that the slaves may be able with relaxed chords to praise with sound your marvellous deeds’).

The note below the lowest note (ut) became known as gamma-ut (gamma, the name of the Greek equivalent of g, having been used in medieval notation for the note bottom G). And in due course gamma-ut, or by contraction in English gamut, came to be applied to the whole scale, and hence figuratively to any ‘complete range’ (an early 17th-century development).
garter: garter: [14] The ultimate source of garter was probably an unrecorded Gaulish word meaning ‘leg’ (related to Welsh gar ‘leg’). It was borrowed into Old French at some point and used as the basis of the noun garet, which (in relation to people) meant ‘place where the leg bends, knee’. From this in turn was derived Old French gartier ‘band just above or below the knee’, source of English garter.

The British Order of the Garter dates, according to the medieval French chronicler Jean Froissart, from around 1344. The story of its origin, not recorded until over 250 years later and never authenticated, is that while the Countess of Salisbury was dancing with King Edward III, her garter fell off; the king picked it up and put it on his own leg, remarking somewhat cryptically in Anglo-French ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ – ‘Shamed be he who thinks evil of it’, and named the order of knighthood which he founded after this very garter.
gorilla: gorilla: [19] The first we hear of gorilla is as a word used in a Greek translation of the 5thcentury BC Carthaginian explorer Hanno’s account of a voyage to West Africa. He reported encountering there a tribe of wild hairy people, whose females were, according to a local interpreter, called goríllas. In 1847 the American missionary and scientist Thomas Savage adopted the word as the species name of the great ape Troglodytes gorilla, and by the 1850s it had passed into general use.
hermaphrodite: hermaphrodite: [15] Biologically a combination of male and female, hermaphrodite is etymologically a blend of the names of Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods, and Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. According to Ovid Hermaphródītos, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, was beloved of the nymph Salmacis with an ardour so strong that she prayed for complete union with him – with the result that their two bodies became fused into one, with dual sexual characteristics. English acquired the term via Latin hermaphrodītus.
hound: hound: [OE] Until superseded around the 16th century by dog, hound was the main English word for ‘dog’ (and indeed its relatives in the other Germanic languages remain so – German, Swedish, and Danish hund, for instance, and Dutch hond). It goes back ultimately to Indo- European *kuntos, a derivative of the base which also produced Greek kúōn ‘dog’ (source of English cynic and, according to some etymologists, quinsy), Latin canis ‘dog’ (whence French chien and Italian cane, not to mention English canine, canary, chenille, and kennel), Welsh ci ‘dog’ (as in corgi [20], literally ‘dwarf dog’), and Russian sobaka ‘dog’.

Since the 16th century, English hound has been used largely for ‘hunting dog’.
=> canary, canine, chenille, cynic, kennel, quinsy
hour: hour: [13] Greek hórā (a distant relative of English year) was originally a rather vague term, denoting ‘period of time, season’. In due course it came to be applied more specifically to ‘one twelfth of a day (from sunrise to sunset)’, but as this varied in length according to the time of the year, hórā was still far from being a precise unit of time. Not until the Middle Ages (when hórā had passed via Latin hora and Old French hore into English as hour) did the term become fixed to a period of sixty minutes. (The same sort of vague relationship between ‘time’ in general or ‘period of time’ and ‘fixed period’ is shown in Swedish timme, which is related to English time but means ‘hour’; in German stunde, which originally meant ‘period of time’, but now means ‘hour’; and indeed in English tide, which in Old English times meant ‘hour’ but now, insofar as it survives as a temporal term, denotes ‘season’ – as in Whitsuntide.) English horoscope [16] comes ultimately from Greek hōroskópos, a compound which meant literally ‘observer of time’ – that is, of the ‘time of birth’.
=> horoscope, year
humour: humour: [14] Latin hūmēre meant ‘be moist’ (from it was derived hūmidus, source of English humid [16]). And related to it was the noun hūmor, which signified originally simply ‘liquid’. In due course it came to be applied specifically to any of the four bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, choler, and black bile) whose combinations according to medieval theories of physiology determined a person’s general health and temperament.

This was the sense in which English acquired the word, via Anglo-Norman humour, and it gradually developed in meaning via ‘mental disposition at a particular time, mood’ and ‘inclination, whim’ to, in the late 17th century, the main modern sense ‘funniness’.
=> humid
hyacinth: hyacinth: [16] Greek huákinthos denoted a plant with deep red flowers which according to legend sprang from the blood of Hyacinthus, a beautiful youth whom Apollo loved but accidentally killed. It probably came from some pre-Hellenic Mediterranean language, and was remodelled in Greek on the basis of Hyacinthus’s name. It is not clear what sort of plant the original hyacinth was, but by the time the word reached English (via Latin hyacinthus and French hyacinthe) it had been adopted for the bluebell and its immediate relatives.

Greek huákinthos was also used for a variety of precious stone, probably originally the sapphire. This meaning too followed the word into English, but is now little used, having been taken over by jacinth [13] – itself a descendant of Latin hyacinthus.
=> jacinth
jubilee: jubilee: [14] Despite their similarity, jubilee has no etymological connection with jubilation [14] and jubilant [17]; but they have exerted a considerable influence on it over the centuries. It was originally a Hebrew word: Hebrew yōbhēl meant ‘leading animal, ram’, and by extension ‘ram’s horn’, and since a ram’s horn was blown to announce the start of a special year (set aside once every fifty years according to ancient Hebrew law) in which slaves were freed, land left untilled, etc, the term yōbēl came to be used for the year itself.

Greek took it over as ióbēlos and formed an adjective from it, iōbēlaios. This was passed on to Latin, and it was here that jubilation took a hand. Latin jūbilāre (source of English jubilation) originally meant simply ‘call out’, but early Christian writers used it for ‘shout for joy’. Under its influence Greek iōbēlaios became Latin jūbilaeus, which was used in the expression annus jūbilaeus to denote this special Jewish year.

It soon came to be used as a noun in its own right, and in this role passed via Old French jubile into English. By this time the ideas of ‘fifty years’ and ‘joy, celebration’ had mingled to such an extent that the word was being used for a ‘fiftieth anniversary’ or its celebration, a sense which remained current until the early 20th century (in present-day English it means simply ‘anniversary’, usually of a monarch’s accession, and the period involved has to be defined by golden, silver, etc).
laudanum: laudanum: [16] Laudanum, the name of a tincture of opium, a forerunner of modern heroin and crack, was coined by the 16th-century Swiss physician Paracelsus. He used it for a medicine of his own devising which according to the prescription he gave out contained all sorts of expensive ingredients such as gold leaf and pearls. It was generally believed, however, that the reason for the medicine’s effectiveness was a generous measure of opium in the mixture, and so in due course laudanum came to have its current use.

It is not known where Paracelsus got the name from, but he could well have based it on Latin lādanum ‘resin’, which came from Greek ládanon, a derivative of ledon ‘mastic’.
marathon: marathon: [19] According to tradition, when the Greek army defeated the Persians at Marathon, on the northeast coast of Attica, in 490 BC, the runner Pheidippides was dispatched to bring the good news to Athens (in fact there is no contemporary evidence for the story, which is not recorded until 700 years after the event). When the modern Olympic Games were first held, in Athens in 1896, a long-distance race was introduced to commemorate the ancient feat, run over a course supposedly equal in distance to that from Marathon to Athens (about 35 km/22 miles).

The present distance (42.195 km/26 miles 385 yards) was established at the 1908 London Olympics (the odd yards were added to bring the finishing line in front of the royal box).
maudlin: maudlin: [16] Maudlin represents a gradual erosion of the pronunciation of Magdalen (exhibited also in the case of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges that have taken that name). The word originated as the name given to a woman called Mary who came from Magdala on the Sea of Galilee, and who according to the Bible was present at Christ’s crucifixion and was the first to meet him after he had risen from the dead. In the Middle Ages she was generally represented in paintings as crying, and so maudlin came to be used for ‘oversentimental’.
melancholy: melancholy: [14] Etymologically, melancholy means ‘black gall’. The word comes via Old French melancolie and late Latin melancholia from Greek melagkholíā, a compound formed from mélās ‘black’ (source also of English melanin [19] and melanoma [19]) and kholé ‘bile’ (a relative of English gall). This ‘black bile’ was one of the four bodily substances or ‘humours’ whose relative preponderance, according to medieval medical theory, determined a person’s physical and mental state. Excess of black bile was thought to cause depression – hence the modern meaning of melancholy.
=> gall, melanoma
moral: moral: [14] Latin mōs ‘custom’ is the starting point of the English family of ‘morality’-words (and its plural mōres was acquired by English as mores in the 20th century). Its derived adjective mōrālis was coined, according to some by Cicero, as a direct translation of Greek ēthikós ‘ethical’, to denote the ‘typical or proper behaviour of human beings in society’, and was borrowed directly into English in the 14th century. Morale [18] was borrowed from French, where it is the feminine form of the adjective moral.

At first it was used in English for ‘morality, moral principles’; its modern sense ‘condition with regard to optimism, cheerfulness, etc’ is not recorded until the early 19th century.
=> morale, mores
nasturtium: nasturtium: [17] The nasturtium plant has a peppery taste (its immature flower buds are often used as an alternative to capers), and tradition has it that the Romans named it nasturtium because its pungency made them pucker up their noses. According to this theory, the word is an alteration of an earlier *nāsitortium, which would have been a compound formed from nāsus ‘nose’ and tort-, the past participle stem of torquēre ‘twist’ (source of English torture).
onion: onion: [14] The usual Old English word for ‘onion’ was cīpe (a borrowing from Latin cēpa, source also of English chives and chipolata), but it also had ynne. This came from Latin ūniō, a word of uncertain origin but possibly identical with ūniō (a derivative of ūnus ‘one’) which denoted a ‘single large pearl’ (according to Julius Moderatus Columella, ūniō was a farmer’s term, and one can well imagine a proud onion-grower comparing his products with pearls).

An alternative explanation, also based on a derivation from ūnus, is that the word is an allusion to the ‘unity’ formed by the layers of the onion. Ynne had died out by the Middle English period, and onion represents a reacquisition of the word via Anglo-Norman union.
=> one
pheasant: pheasant: [13] Etymologically, the pheasant is a bird from the ‘Phasis’. This was a river in the Caucusus, where the pheasant is supposed according to legend to have originated. The Greeks therefore called it phāsiānós, the ‘Phasian bird’, and the word passed into English via Latin phāsiānus and Anglo-Norman fesaunt.
rate: rate: English has two words rate. The commoner, ‘relative quantity’ [15], comes via Old French rate from medieval Latin rata ‘calculated, fixed’, as used in the expression pro rata parte ‘according to a fixed part, proportionally’. This was the feminine form of ratus, the past participle of rērī ‘think, calculate’, from which English also gets ratio, ration, reason, etc.

The other rate, ‘scold’ [14], is now seldom encountered except in its derivative berate [16]. It is not certain where it comes from, although a possible source is Old French reter ‘accuse, blame’, which comes from Latin reputāre (ancestor of English reputation).
=> ratio, ration, reason; berate
regular: regular: [14] Regular ‘according to a rule’ is the most instantly recognizable English descendant of Latin rēgula ‘rule’ (others include rail ‘bar’ and rule). It goes back ultimately to the same Indo-European base as produced Latin regere ‘rule’ (source of English rector, regent, etc) and rēx ‘king’ (source of English regal, royal, etc). From it was derived the late Latin verb rēgulāre, which has given English regulate [17], and may also lie behind rile ‘annoy’ [19], a variant of an earlier roil which was possibly imported via Old French ruiler ‘mix mortar’.
=> rector, regent, regulate, rile, rule
sabbath: sabbath: [OE] The sabbath is etymologically the day of ‘rest’. The word comes ultimately from Hebrew shabbāth, a derivative of shābath ‘rest’. English acquired it via Greek sábbaton and Latin sabbatum. The modern use of the derived sabbatical [16] for a ‘period away from normal duties’, first recorded in the 19th century, evolved from its original application to the one year in seven when, according to ancient Jewish law, land had to be left fallow. French samedi ‘Saturday’ comes from the same source.
=> sabbatical
self: self: [OE] Self is a general Germanic word, closely related to German selbe, Dutch zelf, Swedish sjelv, and Danish selv. These all point back to a prehistoric Germanic *selba-. Where this came from is not known for certain, although it seems likely to be related in some way to various pronouns denoting ‘oneself’, such as German sich and French se. According to John Hacket in his Scrinia reserata 1693, the word selfish was coined in the early 1640s by the Presbyterians.
shibboleth: shibboleth: [14] Hebrew shibbōleth meant ‘stream’. According to the Bible, the Gileadites used it as a password, for they knew their enemies the Ephraimites could not pronounce the sh properly (‘And it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay, then they said unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right’, Judges 12:5–6).

In 17th-century English it came to be applied generically to any word used as a test of pronunciation, particularly as a sign of belonging to a group, and hence by extension to any catchword or slogan adopted by a group, and this eventually evolved into the modern sense ‘outmoded slogan, practice, etc still adhered to’.
simony: simony: [13] Simony, a term which denotes the ‘selling of ecclesiastical offices’, perpetuates the name of Simon Magus. He was a Samaritan who according to Acts 8:18–20 tried to buy the power of conferring the Holy Ghost on people: ‘And when Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money, saying, Give me also this power, that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost. But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money’.
siren: siren: [14] The Seirēnes were sea nymphs who, according to Greek mythology, sat on rocks luring impressionable sailors to their doom with the sweetness of their singing. Latin took the word over as sīrēna, and it passed into English via Old French sereine. The term was applied to an acoustical instrument invented in 1819 by Cagniard de la Tour, that produced musical sounds and was used for measuring the frequency of sound waves, and it was this that formed the basis of its later use (in the 1870s) for a device for giving loud warning signals.
soccer: soccer: [19] Soccer was coined from Association football, a term introduced around 1870 for football played according to the rules of the Football Association (as opposed to Rugby football). The suffix -er was commonly used as a more-or-less meaningless addition to nouns in British public-school and university slang of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (footer ‘football’ was formed in the same way). Originally, in the 1890s, socker vied with soccer as the word’s spelling.
sodomy: sodomy: [13] The term sodomy commemorates the ancient Palestinian city of Sodom, which according to the Bible was a hotbed of unnatural vice (‘But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both old and young, all the people from every quarter. And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? Bring them out unto us, that we may know them.

And Lot went out at the door unto them, and shut the door after him. And said, I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof’, Genesis 19:4–8). Anal intercourse and allied practices were known in late Latin as peccātum Sodomīticum ‘sin of Sodom’, and from this was coined the medieval Latin term sodomia – whence English sodomy.

The abusive sod [19] is short for the related sodomite [14].
sphinx: sphinx: [16] The original Sphinx was a monster, half woman and half lion, which terrorized the country around Thebes in ancient Greece. According to legend, it would waylay travellers and ask them a riddle; and if they could not solve it, it killed them. One of its favoured methods was strangulation, and its name supposedly means ‘the strangler’ – as if it were derived from Greek sphíggein ‘bind tight’ (source of English sphincter [16]).

However, this account of its name sounds as mythological as the account of its existence, and a more likely explanation is perhaps that the word was derived from the name of Mount Phikion, not far from ancient Thebes. One of the first yachts to carry a spinnaker sail, in the mid-1860s, was the Sphinx, and it has been conjectured that its name (or rather a mispronunciation /spingks/) formed the basis of the term spinnaker [19], perhaps as a partial blend with spanker, the name of another type of sail.
=> spinnaker