英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

account [account 词源字典]: account: [14] Account is of Old French origin. It was formed from compter, conter ‘count’ (which derived from Latin computāre) and the prefix a-. Its original meaning in English, too, was ‘count’ or ‘count up’; this had disappeared by the end of the 18th century, but its specialized reference to the keeping of financial records is of equal antiquity. Account for, meaning ‘explain’, arose in the mid 18th century.
=> count[account etymology, account origin, 英语词源]
acoustic: acoustic: [17] Appropriately enough, acoustic may be distantly related to hear. It first appeared in English in Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning 1605, borrowed from Greek akoustikós. This in turn was derived from the Greek verb for ‘hear’, akoúein, which, it has been speculated, may have some connection with *khauzjan, the original Germanic source of English hear, not to mention German hören and Dutch horen (as well as with Latin cavēre ‘be on one’s guard’, and hence with English caution and caveat).
=> caution, caveat, hear
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).
adjacent: adjacent: [15] Adjacent and adjective come from the same source, the Latin verb jacere ‘throw’. The intransitive form of this, jacēre, literally ‘be thrown down’, was used for ‘lie’. With the addition of the prefix ad-, here in the sense ‘near to’, was created adjacēre, ‘lie near’. Its present participial stem, adjacent-, passed, perhaps via French, into English.

The ordinary Latin transitive verb jacere, meanwhile, was transformed into adjicere by the addition of the prefix ad-; it meant literally ‘throw to’, and hence ‘add’ or ‘attribute’, and from its past participial stem, adject-, was formed the adjective adjectīvus. This was used in the phrase nomen adjectīvus ‘attributive noun’, which was a direct translation of Greek ónoma épithetos.

And when it first appeared in English (in the 14th century, via Old French adjectif) it was in noun adjective, which remained the technical term for ‘adjective’ into the 19th century. Adjective was not used as a noun in its own right until the early 16th century.
=> adjective, easy, reject
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
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.
agenda: agenda: [17] Agenda is the plural of Latin agendum, which is the gerundive form of the verb agere ‘do’ (see AGENT); it thus means literally ‘things to be done’. When the word first entered the language it was given an anglicized singular form, agend, with the plural agends, but this seems to have disappeared by the 18th century. The formal plurality of agenda is still often insisted on by purists, but it has been used as a singular noun since the mid 18th century.
=> act, agent
alimony: alimony: [17] Alimony is an anglicization of Latin alimōnia, which is based on the verb alere ‘nourish’ (source of alma ‘bounteous’, as in alma mater, and of alumnus). This in turn goes back to a hypothetical root *al-, which is also the basis of English adolescent, adult, altitude (from Latin altus ‘high’), and old.

The original sense ‘nourishment, sustenance’ has now died out, but the specialized ‘support for a former wife’ is of equal antiquity in English. The -mony element in the word represents Latin -mōnia, a fairly meaning-free suffix used for forming nouns from verbs (it is related to -ment, which coincidentally was also combined with alere, to form alimentary), but in the later 20th century it took on a newly productive role in the sense ‘provision of maintenance for a former partner’. Palimony ‘provision for a former non-married partner’ was coined around 1979, and in the 1980s appeared dallymony ‘provision for somebody one has jilted’.
=> adult, altitude, alumnus, old
ally: ally: [13] The verb ally was borrowed into English from Old French alier, an alteration of aleier (a different development of the Old French word was aloier, which English acquired as alloy). This came from Latin alligāre ‘bind one thing to another’, a derivative of ligāre ‘tie’; hence the idea etymologically contained in being ‘allied’ is of having a bond with somebody else.

The noun ally seems originally to have been independently borrowed from Old French allié in the 14th century, with the meaning ‘relative’. The more common modern sense, ‘allied person or country’, appeared in the 15th century, and is probably a direct derivative of the English verb.
=> alloy, ligament
analysis: analysis: [16] The underlying etymological notion contained in analysis is of ‘undoing’ or ‘loosening’, so that the component parts are separated and revealed. The word comes ultimately from Greek análusis, a derivative of the compound verb analúein ‘undo’, which was formed from the prefix ana- ‘up, back’ and the verb lúein ‘loosen, free’ (related to English less, loose, lose, and loss).

It entered English via medieval Latin, and in the 17th century was anglicized to analyse: ‘The Analyse I gave of the contents of this Verse’, Daniel Rogers, Naaman the Syrian 1642. This did not last long, but it may have provided the impetus for the introduction of the verb analyse, which first appeared around 1600; its later development was supported by French analyser.
=> dialysis, less, loose, lose, loss
annihilate: annihilate: [16] Annihilate comes from the past participle of the late Latin verb annihilāre, meaning literally ‘reduce to nothing’ (a formation based on the noun nihil ‘nothing’, source of English nihilism and nil). There was actually an earlier English verb, annihil, based on French annihiler, which appeared at the end of the 15th century, but it did not long survive the introduction of annihilate.
=> nihilism, nil
aristocracy: aristocracy: [16] Greek áristos meant ‘best’; hence aristocracy signifies, etymologically, ‘rule by the best’ (the suffix -cracy derives ultimately from Greek krátos ‘strength, power’, a relative of English hard). The term aristokratíā was used by Aristotle and Plato in their political writings, denoting ‘government of a state by those best fitted for the task’, and English writers perpetuated the usage when the word was borrowed from French aristocratie: Thomas Hobbes, for instance, wrote ‘Aristocracy is that, wherein the highest magistrate is chosen out of those that have had the best education’, Art of Rhetoric 1679.

But from the first the term was also used in English for ‘rule by a privileged class’, and by the mid 17th century this had begun to pass into ‘the privileged class’ itself, ‘the nobility’. The derived aristocrat appeared at the end of the 18th century; it was a direct borrowing of French aristocrate, a coinage inspired by the French Revolution.
=> hard
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.
axle: axle: [17] The word axle emerges surprisingly late considering the antiquity of axles, but related terms had existed in the language for perhaps a thousand years. Old English had eax, which came from a hypothetical Germanic *akhsō, related to Latin axis. This survived in the compound ax-tree until the 17th century (later in Scotland); tree in this context meant ‘beam’.

But from the early 14th century the native ax-tree began to be ousted by Old Norse öxultré (or as it became in English axle-tree); the element öxull came from a prehistoric Germanic *akhsulaz, a derivative of *akhsō. Axle first appeared on its own in the last decade of the 16th century (meaning ‘axis’, a sense it has since lost), and became firmly established in the early 17th century.
bicycle: bicycle: [19] The word bicycle, literally ‘twowheeled’ (from Greek kúklos ‘circle, wheel’), was originally coined in French, and first appeared in English in 1868, in the 7 September edition of the Daily News: ‘bysicles and trysicles which we saw in the Champs Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne this summer’. This reflects the fact that it was in the 1860s that the bicycle first assumed the form we know it in today, with pedals and cranks driving the front wheel. (Slightly earlier was the now obsolete velocipede, literally ‘swift foot’, first applied to pedal bicycles and tricycles around 1850.

Until the introduction of pneumatic tyres in the 1880s, the new cycles were known as bone-shakers – a term first encountered in 1874.)
=> cycle, wheel
bikini: bikini: [20] For Frenchmen, the sight of the first minimal two-piece swimming costumes for women produced by fashion designers in 1947 was as explosive as the test detonation of an atom bomb by the USA at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, in the western Pacific Ocean, in July 1946. Hence their naming it the ‘Bikini’, the first record of which is in the August 1947 issue of Le Monde Illustré. English acquired the word in 1948. The monokini, essentially a braless bikini, first appeared in 1964, the inspiration for its name being the accidental resemblance of the element bi- in bikini to the prefix bi- ‘two’.
bittern: bittern: [14] The Latin word for ‘bittern’ (a marsh bird) was būtiō, but by the time it reached Old French it had become butor. The discrepancy has been accounted for by proposing a Vulgar Latin intermediate *būtitaurus, literally ‘bittern-bull’ (Latin taurus is ‘bull’), coined on the basis of the bittern’s loud booming call, supposedly reminiscent of a bull’s. The original English forms, as borrowed from Old French, were botor and bitoure; the final -n first appeared in the 16th century, perhaps on the analogy of heron.
blight: blight: [17] Blight appeared out of the blue in the early 17th century in agricultural and horticultural texts, and its origins are far from clear. It has, however, been speculated that it may be connected with the Old English words blǣce and blǣcthu, both terms for some sort of itchy skin condition such as scabies. These in turn are probably related to Old English blǣcan ‘bleach’, the link being the flaky whiteness of the infected skin.

In Middle English, blǣcthu would have become *bleht, which could plausibly have been the source of blight. A related piece in the jigsaw is blichening ‘blight or rust in corn’, found once in Middle English, which may have come ultimately from Old Norse blikna ‘become pale’.
=> bleach
bloat: bloat: [13] Bloat has a confused and uncertain history. It seems first to have appeared on the scene in the 13th century as an adjective, blout, meaning ‘soft, flabby’, a probable borrowing from Old Norse blautr ‘soft from being cooked with liquid’. This occurs only once, and does not resurface until the early 17th century, in Hamlet as it happens, as blowt: ‘Let the blowt king tempt you again to bed’.

This appears to be the same word as turns up slightly later in the century as bloat, its meaning showing signs of changing from ‘flabby’ to ‘puffed up’. Then in the 1660s we encounter bloated ‘puffed up, swollen’, which paved the way for the verb bloat, first recorded in the 1670s. It is not clear whether bloater [19] comes from the same source. Its linguistic ancestor is the bloat herring [16], which may perhaps have been given its name on the grounds that herrings preserved by light smoking are plumper than those fully dried.
blubber: blubber: [14] The original notion underlying blubber is of ‘bubbling’ or ‘foaming’, particularly in relation to the sea, and it may, like bubble itself, be an onomatopoeic creation, imitative of the sound of spluttering or popping water. This sense died out in the mainstream language in the 16th century (though it survived longer dialectally), but it lies behind the verbal sense ‘cry copiously’. The development of the noun to its present meaning ‘whale fat’ is not altogether clear, but it may have been via an intermediate 15th-century application to ‘fish’s entrails’, which perhaps bubbled or appeared pustular when ripped open by the fishermen.
bogey: bogey: [19] Bogey is one of a set of words relating to alarming or annoying manifestations of the supernatural (others are bogle, bug, bugbear, and possibly boggle and bugaboo) whose interconnections are difficult to sort out. A strand common to most of them is a northern origin, which has led some to suggest an ultimate source in Scandinavia – perhaps an ancestor of Norwegian dialect bugge ‘important man’ (which has also been linked with English big) might lie behind Middle English bugge, originally ‘scarecrow’ but later used for more spectral objects of terror.

Others, however, noting Welsh bwg, bwgan ‘ghost’, have gone with a Celtic origin. Of more recent uses of bogey, ‘policeman’ and ‘nasal mucus’ seem to have appeared between the two World Wars, while ‘golf score of one stroke over par’ is said to have originated at the Great Yarmouth Golf Club in the 1890s, when a certain Major Wellman exclaimed, during the course of a particularly trying round, that he must be playing against the ‘bogey-man’ (a figure in a popular song of the time). Bogie ‘undercarriage’ [19] is a different word (of if anything obscurer origin than bogey).
bound: bound: English has no fewer than four separate words bound. The only one which goes back to Old English is the adjective, meaning ‘obliged’ or ‘destined’, which comes from the past participle of bind (in Old English this was bunden, which survives partially in ‘bounden duty’). Next oldest is the adjective meaning ‘going or intending to go’ [13]. Originally meaning ‘ready’, this was borrowed from Old Norse búinn, the past participle of búa ‘prepare’, which derived from the same ultimate source (the Germanic base *bū- ‘dwell, cultivate’) as be, boor, booth, bower, build, burly, bye-law, and byre.

The final -d of bound, which appeared in the 16th century, is probably due to association with bound ‘obliged’. Virtually contemporary is the noun bound ‘border, limit’ [13]. It originally meant ‘landmark’, and came via Anglo-Norman bounde from early Old French bodne (source also of Old French borne, from which English got bourn, as in Hamlet’s ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’).

Its ultimate source was medieval Latin bodina, perhaps from a prehistoric Gaulish *bodina. Boundary [17] seems to have been formed from the dialectal bounder, an agent noun derived from the verb bound ‘form the edge or limit of’. Finally, bound ‘leap’ [16] comes from Old French bondir. It originally meant ‘rebound’ in English (rebound [14] began as an Old French derivative of bondir), but this physical sense was a metaphorical transference from an earlier sense related to sound.

Old French bondir ‘resound’ came from Vulgar Latin *bombitīre ‘hum’, which itself was a derivative of Latin bombus ‘booming sound’ (source of English bomb).
=> band, bend, bind, bond, bundle; be, boor, booth, bower, build, burly, byre, neighbour; boundary, bourn; bomb, rebound
box: box: English has two distinct words box. The ‘receptacle’ [OE] probably comes from late Latin buxis, a variant of Latin pyxis (whence English pyx ‘container for Communion bread’ [14]). This was borrowed from Greek puxís, which originally meant not simply ‘box’, but specifically ‘box made of wood’; for it was a derivative of Greek púxos, which via Latin buxus has given English box the tree [OE]. Box ‘fight with the fists’ first appeared in English as a noun, meaning ‘blow’ [14], now preserved mainly in ‘a box round the ears’.

Its ancestry is uncertain: it may be related to Middle Dutch bōke and Danish bask ‘blow’, or it could simply be an obscure metaphorical extension of box ‘receptacle’.
=> pyx
brat: brat: [16] The origins of brat are not altogether clear, but it has plausibly been connected with the English dialect brat ‘makeshift or ragged garment’, as being the sort of apparel a rough or ill-mannered child might wear. This brat first appeared in late Old English as bratt, meaning ‘cloak’, a borrowing from Old Irish bratt ‘covering, mantle’.
broth: broth: [OE] Broth comes ultimately from the Indo-European base *bhreu- or *bhru- ‘heat, boil’, which also produced brew and fervent. Etymologically, therefore, it means ‘liquid in which something has been boiled’. The notion of ‘heating’ has now disappeared, but it seems to have survived into the modern English period, as is shown by such compounds as snow-broth ‘melted snow’, first recorded at the end of the 16th century.

The Germanic form *brotham was borrowed into Vulgar Latin as *brodo, which came via Old French broez into 13th-century English as broys or browes. This survives in Scottish English as brose ‘type of porridge’, as in Atholl brose.
=> brew, fervent, imbrue
brush: brush: [14] It is not clear whether brush for sweeping and brush as in brushwood are the same word, although both appeared in the language at about the same time, from a French source. Brush ‘broken branches’ comes from brousse, the Anglo-Norman version of Old French broce, which goes back to an unrecorded Vulgar Latin *bruscia. Brush for sweeping, on the other hand, comes from Old French broisse or brosse.

It is tempting to conclude that this is a variant of Old French broce, particularly in view of the plausible semantic link that brushwood (cut twigs, etc) bundled together and tied to a handle makes a serviceable brush (that is how broom came to mean ‘brush’). The verb brush ‘move fast or heedlessly’ comes from Old French brosser ‘dash through undergrowth’, a derivative of broce; its frequent modern connotation of ‘touching in passing’ comes from the other brush.
bunkum: bunkum: [19] Buncombe is a county of North Carolina, USA. Around 1820, during a debate in the US Congress, its representative Felix Walker rose to make a speech. He spoke on – and on – and on. Fellow congressmen pleaded with him to sit down, but he refused to be deflected, declaring that he had to make a speech ‘for Buncombe’. Most of what he said was fatuous and irrelevant, and henceforth bunkum (or buncombe, as it was at first spelled) became a term for political windbagging intended to ingratiate the speaker with the voters rather than address the real issues.

It early passed into the more general sense ‘nonsense, claptrap’. Its abbreviated form, bunk, is 20th-century; it was popularized by Henry Ford’s remark ‘History is more or less bunk’, made in 1916. Of the other English words bunk, ‘bed’ [19] is probably short for bunker, which first appeared in 16th-century Scottish English, meaning ‘chest, box’; while bunk as in do a bunk and bunk off [19] is of unknown origin.
cab: cab: [19] Cab is short for cabriolet, a term, borrowed from French, for a light horse-drawn carriage. It comes, via the French verb cabrioler, from Italian capriolare ‘jump in the air’, a derivative of capriolo ‘roebuck’, from Latin capreolus, a diminutive form of caper ‘goat’ (source of English caper ‘leap’ and Capricorn). The reason for its application to the carriage was that the vehicle’s suspension was so springy that it appeared to jump up and down as it went along. From the same source comes the cabriole leg ‘curved furniture leg’ [18], from its resemblance to the front leg of a capering animal.
=> cabriole, cabriolet, caper, capricorn
canter: canter: [18] Canter comes from phrases such as Canterbury trot, Canterbury pace, etc, which were terms applied to the pace at which medieval pilgrims rode on their way by horse to the shrine of Thomas à Beckett at Canterbury in Kent (earliest references to it are from the 17th century, much later than the time of Chaucer’s pilgrims in the Middle Ages). The abbreviated from canter appeared in the 18th century, initially as a verb, and Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary 1755 defined Canterbury gallop as ‘the hand gallop of an ambling horse, commonly called a canter’.
cart: cart: [13] Old English had a word cræt ‘carriage’, which may, by the process known as metathesis (reversal of speech sounds), have produced the word which first appeared at the beginning of the 13th century as karte or carte. But a part must certainly also have been played by Old Norse kartr ‘cart’, and some have also detected the influence of Anglo-Norman carete, a diminutive form of car (source of English car).
=> car
cat: cat: [OE] The word cat seems to have appeared on the European scene, in the form of Latin catta or cattus, around 1000 AD (the previous Latin word was fēlēs, source of English feline). No one is completely sure where it came from (although given the domestic cat’s origins in Egypt, it is likely to have been an Egyptian word), but it soon spread north and west through Europe. The Latin word reached English via Germanic *kattuz, later backed up by Anglo-Norman cat, a variant of Old French chat.
cent: cent: [16] Centum is the Latin word for ‘hundred’ – indeed both come ultimately from the same Indo-European source, *kmtóm. It first appeared in English in the form cent in the phrase per cent (originally used apparently by the financier Sir Thomas Gresham in a letter of 1568: ‘the interest of xij per cent by the year’); this was probably borrowed from Italian per cento (it is not a genuine Latin phrase). The use of cent for a unit of currency dates from the 1780s, when it was adopted by the newly founded USA; its status as one hundredth of a dollar was officially ordained by the Continental Congress on 8 August 1786.
=> century
cesspool: cesspool: [17] Cesspool has no direct etymological connection with pool. It comes from Old French suspirail ‘ventilator, breathing hole’, a derivative of souspirer ‘breathe’ (this goes back to Latin suspīrāre, source of the archaic English suspire ‘sigh’). This was borrowed into English in the early 15th century as suspiral ‘drainpipe’, which in the subsequent two hundred years appeared in a variety of spellings, including cesperalle.

By the early 16th century we find evidence of its being used not just for a pipe to drain matter away, but also for a well or tank to receive matter thus drained (originally any effluent, not just sewage). The way was thus open for a ‘reinterpretation’ of the word’s final element as pool (by the process known as folk etymology), and in the late 17th century the form cesspool emerged.

By analogy, as if there were really a word cess ‘sewage’, the term cesspit was coined in the mid-19th century.
=> suspire
chagrin: chagrin: [17] The word chagrin first appeared in French in the 14th century as an adjective, meaning ‘sad, vexed’, a usage at first adopted into English: ‘My wife in a chagrin humour, she not being pleased with my kindness to either of them’, Samuel Pepys’s Diary 6 August 1666. It died out in English in the early 18th century, but the subsequently developed noun and verb have persisted. Etymologists now discount any connection with French chagrin ‘untanned leather’ (source of English shagreen [17]), which came from Turkish sagri.
chauvinism: chauvinism: [19] Chauvinism in its original sense of ‘blind patriotism’ was coined in French from the name of one Nicholas Chauvin of Rochefort, a (possibly legendary) French soldier and veteran of Napoleon’s campaigns noted for his patriotic zeal. He was taken up and ridiculed as the type of the old soldier forever harking back to the glories of Napoleon’s times, and became widely known particularly through the play La cocarde tricolore 1831 by the brothers Cogniard, in which there occurs the line ‘Je suis français, je suis Chauvin’.

Hence French chauvinisme, which first appeared in English in 1870. The word’s more general application to an unreasoning belief in the superiority of one’s own group (particularly in the context male chauvinism) arose around 1970.
clumsy: clumsy: [16] When clumsy first appeared on the scene around 1600, both it and the presumably related but now obsolete clumse were used not only for ‘awkward’ but also for ‘numb with cold’. This, and the fact that the word’s nearest apparent relatives are Scandinavian (such as Swedish dialect klumsig ‘numb, clumsy’), suggests that the notion originally contained in them was of being torpid from cold – so cold that one is sluggish and cannot coordinate one’s actions.
coat: coat: [13] Coat seems originally to have signified a sort of short close-fitting cloth tunic with sleeves, worn by men. Over the centuries fashion has lengthened the garment, and its male exclusivity has disappeared (originally, as a woman’s garment a coat was a skirt, a sense preserved in petticoat). The word is of Germanic origin (it has been traced back to Frankish *kotta), but it reached English via Old French cote.
cocktail: cocktail: [19] The origins of the word cocktail are mysterious. It first appeared (in America) in the first decade of the 19th century, roughly contemporary with cocktail meaning ‘horse with a cocked tail’ – that is, one cut short and so made to stick up like a cock’s tail – but whether the two words are connected, and if so, how the drink came to be named after such a horse, are not at all clear.
connect: connect: [17] Etymologically, connect means ‘tie together’. It comes from Latin connectere, a compound verb formed from the prefix com- ‘together’ and nectere ‘bind, tie’ (whose past participial stem, nex-, is the ultimate source of English nexus [17]). The derived noun connection first appeared, in the spelling connexion, in the 14th century.
=> nexus
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.
correct: correct: [14] Correct is etymologically related to rectitude and rightness. It comes from the past participle of Latin corrigere ‘make straight, put right’, a compound verb formed from the intensive prefix com- and regere ‘lead straight, rule’. This regere (source of English regent, régime, regiment, and region) goes back to an Indo-European base *reg- ‘move in a straight line’, which also produced English right, rectitude, regal, royal, and rule. In English the verb correct by a long time predates the adjective, which first appeared (via French) in the 17th century.
=> escort, regal, region, right, royal, rule
cosset: cosset: [17] Cosset may originally have meant ‘someone who lives in a cottage’. Old English had a word cotsǣta ‘cottager’, which was formed from cot ‘cottage’ and *sǣt-, an element related to the verb sit. This disappeared from the language after the Old English period, but not before it was adopted into Anglo-Norman as cozet or coscet (forms which appear in Domesday Book).

It has been suggested that this is the same word as turns up in local dialects from the 16th century meaning ‘lamb reared by hand, pet lamb’ (that is, a lamb kept by a cottager rather than at liberty with the flock), and further that the notion of pampering a pet lamb gave rise to the verb cosset.
crank: crank: [OE] There appears to be a link between the words crank, cringe, and crinkle. They share the meaning element ‘bending’ or ‘curling up’ (which later developed metaphorically into ‘becoming weak or sick’, as in the related German krank ‘ill’), and probably all came from a prehistoric Germanic base *krank-. In Old English the word crank appeared only in the compound crancstoef, the name for a type of implement used by weavers; it is not recorded in isolation until the mid-15th century, when it appears in a Latin-English dictionary as a translation of Latin haustrum ‘winch’.

The adjective cranky [18] is no doubt related, but quite how closely is not clear. It may derive from an obsolete thieves’ slang term crank meaning ‘person feigning sickness to gain money’, which may have connections with German krank. Modern English crank ‘cranky person’ is a backformation from the adjective, coined in American English in the 19th century.
=> cringe, crinkle
crash: crash: [14] Crash suddenly appeared from nowhere in Middle English (meaning ‘break in pieces noisily’), with apparently no relatives in other Germanic languages. Its form suggests that it originated in imitation of the sound of noisy breaking, but it has been further suggested that it may be a blend of craze and dash. The financial or business sense of the noun, ‘sudden collapse’, is first recorded in the early 19th century in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
crocodile: crocodile: [13] The crocodile gets its name from its habit of basking in the sun on sandbanks or on the shores of rivers. The word means literally ‘pebble-worm’, and it was coined in Greek from the nouns krókē ‘pebbles’ and drilos ‘worm’. The resulting Greek compound *krokódrīlos has never actually been found, for it lost its second r, giving krokódīlos, and this r reappeared and disappeared capriciously during the word’s journey through Latin and Old French to English. Middle English had it – the 13th century form was cokodrille – but in the 16th century the modern r-less form took over, based on Latin crocodīlus.
crumb: crumb: [OE] Relatives of crumb are fairly widespread in the Germanic languages – German has krume, for example, and Dutch kruim – and it is represented in some non- Germanic Indo-European languages, such as Greek grūméā and even Albanian grime. As these forms indicate, the b is not original (the Old English word was cruma); it first appeared in the 16th century, but crum remained an accepted spelling well into the 19th century. The derivative crumble appeared in the 16th century.
=> crumble
cue: cue: Cue has several meanings in English, and it is not clear whether they can all be considered to be the same word. In the case of ‘pigtail’ and ‘billiard stick’, both of which appeared in the 18th century, cue is clearly just a variant spelling of queue, but although cue ‘actor’s prompt’ [16] has been referred by some to the same source (on the grounds that it represents the ‘tail’ – from French queue ‘tail’ – of the previous actor’s speech) there is no direct evidence for this.

Another suggestion is that it represents qu, an abbreviation of Latin quando ‘when’ which was written in actor’s scripts to remind them when to come in.
=> queue
curse: curse: [OE] Curse first appeared in late Old English (in the early 11th century) as curs. It has no known linguistic relatives, and it is not clear where it comes from. Perhaps the most plausible suggestion is that it was borrowed from Old French curuz ‘anger’ (which probably came from the verb *corruptiāre, a Vulgar Latin derivative of Latin corrumpere ‘destroy’ – source of English corrupt), and that curse itself therefore originally meant ‘anger, wrath’. The colloquial alteration cuss dates from the 18th century.
=> corrupt, rupture
Dalek: Dalek: [20] The name of these pathologically destructive robots, which first appeared on BBC TV’s Dr Who in 1963, was coined by their creator, Terry Nation. The story went about that he had come up with it one day while staring in a library at the spine of an encyclopedia volume covering entries from DA to LEK, but he has subsequently denied this.
dear: dear: [OE] Dear is one of the English language’s more semantically stable words. By the 11th century it had already developed its two major present-day senses, ‘much-loved’ and ‘expensive’, which are shared by its Germanic relative, German teuer (Dutch has differentiated dier ‘much loved’ from duur ‘expensive’). All these words go back to a prehistoric West and North Germanic *deurjaz, whose ultimate origin is not known.

In the 13th century an abstract noun, dearth, was derived from the adjective. It seems likely that this originally meant ‘expensiveness’ (although instances of this sense, which has since disappeared, are not recorded before the late 15th century). This developed to ‘period when food is expensive, because scarce’, and eventually to ‘scarcity’ generally.
=> dearth