英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

accomplice [accomplice 词源字典]: accomplice: [15] This word was borrowed into English (from French) as complice (and complice stayed in common usage until late in the 19th century). It comes from Latin complex, which is related to English complicated, and originally meant simply ‘an associate’, without any pejorative associations. The form accomplice first appears on the scene in the late 15th century (the first record of it is in William Caxton’s Charles the Great), and it probably arose through a misanalysis of complice preceded by the indefinite article (a complice) as acomplice. It may also have been influenced by accomplish or accompany.
=> complicated[accomplice etymology, accomplice origin, 英语词源]
acolyte: acolyte: [14] Acolyte comes, via Old French and/or medieval Latin, from Greek akólouthos ‘following’. This was formed from the prefix a- (which is related to homos ‘same’) and the noun keleuthos ‘path’, and it appears again in English in anacolouthon [18] (literally ‘not following’), a technical term for lack of grammatical sequence. The original use of acolyte in English was as a minor church functionary, and it did not acquire its more general meaning of ‘follower’ until the 19th century.
=> anacolouthon
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.
adolescent: adolescent: [15] The original notion lying behind both adolescent and adult is of ‘nourishment’. The Latin verb alere meant ‘nourish’ (alimentary and alimony come from it, and it is related to old). A derivative of this, denoting the beginning of an action, was alēscere ‘be nourished’, hence ‘grow’. The addition of the prefix ad- produced adolēscere.

Its present participial stem, adolēscent- ‘growing’, passed into English as the noun adolescent ‘a youth’ (the adjective appears not to have occurred before the end of the 18th century). Its past participle, adultus ‘grown’, was adopted into English as adult in the 16th century.
=> adult, alimentary, alimony, coalesce, coalition, proletarian, prolific
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
advice: advice: [13] Like modern French avis, advice originally meant ‘opinion’, literally ‘what seems to one to be the case’. In Latin, ‘seem’ was usually expressed by the passive of the verb vidēre ‘see’; thus, vīsum est, ‘it seems’ (literally ‘it is seen’). With the addition of the dative first person pronoun, one could express the notion of opinion: mihi vīsum est, ‘it seems to me’.

It appears either that this was partially translated into Old French as ce m’est a vis, or that the past participle vīsum was nominalized in Latin, making possible such phrases as ad (meum) vīsum ‘in (my) view’; but either way it is certain that a(d)- became prefixed to vīs(um), producing a new word, a(d)vis, for ‘opinion’.

It was originally borrowed into English without the d, but learned influence had restored the Latin spelling by the end of the 15th century. As to its meaning, ‘opinion’ was obsolete by the mid 17th century, but already by the late 14th century the present sense of ‘counsel’ was developing. The verb advise [14] probably comes from Old French aviser, based on avis.
=> vision, visit
akimbo: akimbo: [15] Akimbo was borrowed from Old Norse. Its original English spelling (which occurs only once, in the Tale of Beryn 1400) was in kenebowe, which suggests a probable Old Norse precursor *i keng boginn (never actually discovered), meaning literally ‘bent in a curve’ (Old Norse bogi is related to English bow); hence the notion of the arms sticking out at the side, elbows bent. When the word next appears in English, in the early 17th century, it has become on kenbow or a kenbo, and by the 18th century akimbo has arrived.
=> bow
alopecia: alopecia: [14] This word appears to derive from the resemblance observed by the Greeks between baldness in human beings and mange in foxes. The Greek for ‘fox’ was alōpēx, hence alōpekía, borrowed into Latin as alopēcia. Alōpēx is related to Latin vulpēs ‘fox’, from which English gets vulpine ‘foxlike’ [17].
=> vulpine
altar: altar: [OE] The etymological notion underlying the word altar is that of sacrificial burning. Latin altar, which was borrowed directly into Old English, was a derivative of the plural noun altāria, ‘burnt offerings’, which probably came from the verb adolēre ‘burn up’. Adolēre in turn appears to be a derivative of olēre ‘smell’ (the connection being the smell made by combustion), which is related to English odour, olfactory, and redolent. (The traditional view that altar derives from Latin altus ‘high’ is no longer generally accepted, although no doubt it played a part, by association, in its development.) In Middle English, the Old French form auter replaced altar, but in the 16th century the Latin form re-established itself.
=> odour, olfactory, redolent
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
anaconda: anaconda: [18] The term anaconda has a confused history. It appears to come from Sinhalese henakandayā, literally ‘lightningstem’, which referred to a type of slender green snake. This was anglicized as anaconda by the British naturalist John Ray, who in a List of Indian serpents 1693 described it as a snake which ‘crushed the limbs of buffaloes and yoke beasts’.

And the 1797 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica notes it as a ‘very large and terrible snake [from Ceylon] which often devours the unfortunate traveller alive’. However, in the early 19th century the French zoologist François Marie Daudin for no known reason transferred the name to a large South American snake of the boa family, and that application has since stuck.
anemone: 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
angle: angle: There have been two distinct words angle in English. The older is now encountered virtually only in its derivatives, angler and angling, but until the early 19th century an angle was a ‘fishing hook’ (or, by extension, ‘fishing tackle’). It entered the language in the Old English period, and was based on Germanic *angg- (source also of German angel ‘fishing tackle’).

An earlier form of the word appears to have been applied by its former inhabitants to a fishhook-shaped area of Schleswig, in the Jutland peninsula; now Angeln, they called it Angul, and so they themselves came to be referred to as Angles. They brought their words with them to England, of course, and so both the country and the language, English, now contain a reminiscence of their fishhooks. Angle in the sense of a ‘figure formed by two intersecting lines’ entered the language in the 14th century (Chaucer is its first recorded user).

It came from Latin angulus ‘corner’, either directly or via French angle. The Latin word was originally a diminutive of *angus, which is related to other words that contain the notion of ‘bending’, such as Greek ágkūra (ultimate source of English anchor) and English ankle. They all go back to Indo-European *angg- ‘bent’, and it has been speculated that the fishhook angle, with its temptingly bent shape, may derive from the same source.
=> english; anchor, ankle
annual: annual: [14] Annual comes, via Old French annuel, from annuālis, a late Latin adjective based on annus ‘year’ (perhaps as a blend of two earlier, classical Latin adjectives, annuus and annālis – ultimate source of English annals [16]). Annus itself may go back to an earlier, unrecorded *atnos, probably borrowed from an ancient Indo-European language of the Italian peninsula, such as Oscan or Umbrian.

It appears to be related to Gothic athnam ‘years’ and Sanskrit átati ‘go, wander’. The medieval Latin noun annuitās, formed from the adjective annuus, produced French annuité, which was borrowed into English as annuity in the 15th century.
=> annals, anniversary, annuity
anode: anode: [19] The term anode, meaning ‘positive electrode’, appears to have been introduced by the English philosopher William Whewell around 1834. It was based on Greek ánodos ‘way up’, a compound noun formed from aná- ‘up’ and hodós ‘way’ (also represented in exodus ‘way out’ and odometer ‘instrument for measuring distance travelled’, and possibly related to Latin cēdere, source of English cede and a host of derived words). It specifically contrasts with cathode, which means literally ‘way down’.
=> exodus, odometer
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.
antimony: antimony: [15] Antimony, from medieval Latin antimōnium, was used by alchemists of the Middle Ages for ‘stibnite’, the mineral from which antimony is obtained, and for ‘stibium’, or ‘black antimony’, a heated and powdered version of the mineral used for eye make-up. The element antimony itself was first described in the late 18th century, when it was called regulus of antimony; the British chemist Humphry Davy appears to have been the first to apply the simple term antimony to it, in 1812.

The ultimate origins of the word antimony are obscure, but attempts have been made to link it with Latin stibium (source of Somebody, the chemical symbol for antimony). It has been speculated that Latin antimōnium may have been a modification of Arabic ithmid, which was perhaps borrowed from Greek stimmi or stíbi (source of Latin stibium).

This in turn has been conjecturally traced back to an Egyptian word stm, which was used for a sort of powder applied to the eyelids as make-up.
appraise: appraise: [15] Originally, appraise meant simply ‘fix the price of’. It came from the Old French verb aprisier ‘value’, which is ultimately a parallel formation with appreciate; it is not clear whether it came directly from late Latin appretiāre, or whether it was a newly formed compound in Old French, based on pris ‘price’. Its earliest spellings in English were thus apprize and apprise, and these continued in use down to the 19th century, with the more metaphorical meaning ‘estimate the worth of’ gradually coming to the fore.

From the 16th century onwards, however, it seems that association with the word praise (which is quite closely related etymologically) has been at work, and by the 19th century the form appraise was firmly established. Apprise ‘inform’, with which appraise is often confused (and which appears superficially to be far closer to the source pris or pretium ‘price’), in fact has no etymological connection with it.

It comes from appris, the past participle of French apprendre ‘teach’ (closely related to English apprehend).
=> appreciate, price
arse: arse: [OE] Arse is a word of considerable antiquity, and its relatives are found practically from end to end of the geographical range of the Indo-European language family, from Old Irish err ‘tail’ in the west to Armenian or ‘rump’. Its Indo-European source was *órsos, which produced the Germanic form *arsaz: hence German arsch, Dutch aars, and, via Old English ærs, English arse.

The euphemistic American spelling ass appears to be as recent as the 1930s, although there is one isolated (British) record of it from 1860. The term wheatear, for a thrushlike European bird, is an alteration over time of a Middle English epithet ‘white arse’, after its white rump feathers.
arsenic: arsenic: [14] The term arsenic was originally applied to the lemon-yellow mineral arsenic trisulphide, and its history reveals the reason: for its appears to be based ultimately on Persian zar ‘gold’ (related forms include Sanskrit hari ‘yellowish’, Greek khlōros ‘greenish-yellow’, and English yellow itself). The derivative zarnīk was borrowed into Arabic as zernīkh, which, as usual with Arabic words, was perceived by foreign listeners as constituting an indivisible unit with its definite article al ‘the’ – hence azzernīkh, literally ‘the arsenic trisulphide’.

This was borrowed into Greek, where the substance’s supposed beneficial effects on virility led, through association with Greek árrēn ‘male, virile’, to the new forms arrenikón and arsenikón, source of Latin arsenicum and, through Old French, of English arsenic. The original English application was still to arsenic trisulphide (orpiment was its other current name), and it is not until the early 17th century that we find the term used for white arsenic or arsenic trioxide.

The element arsenic itself was isolated and so named at the start of the 19th century.
=> chlorine, yellow
artery: artery: [14] Artery is a direct borrowing from Latin artēria, which in turn came from Greek artēria. This appears to have been based on the root *ar- ‘lift’. A parallel formation is thus aorta ‘main coronary artery’ [16], which comes from Greek aortē, a derivative of aeírein ‘lift’ – again ultimately from the root *ar-.

The notion underlying aortē seems to be that the heart was thought of by the ancients as in some sense suspended from it, as if from a strap (Greek aortés ‘strap’), so that it was ‘held up’ or ‘raised’ by the aortē (the aorta emerges from the top of the heart). The Greeks, of course, did not know about the circulation of the blood, and since arteries contain no blood after death it was supposed that their function was conveying air.

Hence Hippocrates’ application of the term aorta to branches of the windpipe, and the use of artery for ‘windpipe’ in English up until as late as the mid 17th century: ‘[The lungs] expel the air: which through the artery, throat and mouth, makes the voice’, Francis Bacon, Sylva sylvarum 1626.
=> aorta
attach: attach: [14] When English first acquired it, attach meant ‘seize’ or ‘arrest’. It is Germanic in origin, but reached us via Old French atachier. This was an alteration of earlier Old French estachier ‘fasten (with a stake)’, which was based on a hypothetical Germanic *stakōn. The metaphorical meaning ‘arrest’ appears to have arisen in Anglo-Norman, the route by which the word reached English from Old French; the original, literal sense ‘fasten, join’ did not arrive in English until as late as the 18th century, as a reborrowing from modern French attacher.

A similar borrowing of Germanic *stakōn into Italian produced the ancestor of English attack.
=> attack, stake
aunt: aunt: [13] Aunt appears to come ultimately from *amma, a hypothetical non-Indo-European word for ‘mother’ (parallel to Indo-European *mammā, and like it reproducing syllables perceived to be uttered by babies), which at some point was borrowed into Latin. It first appears in the derived form amita ‘paternal aunt’, which passed into English via Old French ante (of which modern French tante is an alternation) and Anglo-Norman aunte.
backgammon: backgammon: [17] Backgammon appears to mean literally ‘back game’, although the reason for the name is far from clear (gammon had been used since at least the early 18th century for a particular type of victory in the game, but it is hard to say whether the term for the victory came from the term for the game, or vice versa). Either way, gammon represents Old English gamen, the ancestor of modern English game. The game backgammon goes back far further than the 17th century, of course, but before that it was called tables in English.
=> game
badminton: badminton: [19] The game of ‘battledore and shuttlecock’ has been around for some time (it appears to go back to the 16th century; the word battledore, which may come ultimately from Portuguese batedor ‘beater’, first turns up in the 15th century, meaning ‘implement for beating clothes when washing them’, but by the 16th century is being used for a ‘small racket’; while shuttlecock, so named because it is hit back and forth, first appears in the early 16th century, in a poem of John Skelton’s).

This was usually a fairly informal, improvised affair, however, and latterly played mainly by children; the modern, codified game of badminton did not begin until the 1860s or 1870s, and takes its name from the place where it was apparently first played, Badminton House, Avon, country seat of the dukes of Beaufort. (A slightly earlier application of the word badminton had been to a cooling summer drink, a species of claret cup.)
balk: balk: [OE] There are two separate strands of meaning in balk, or baulk, as it is also spelled. When it first entered English in the 9th century, from Old Norse bálkr, it meant a ‘ridge of land, especially one between ploughed furrows’, from which the modern sense ‘stumbling block, obstruction’ developed. It is not until about 1300 that the meaning ‘beam of timber’ appears in English, although it was an established sense of the Old Norse word’s Germanic ancestor *balkon (source also of English balcony).

The common element of meaning in these two strands is something like ‘bar’, which may have been present in the word’s ultimate Indo- European base *bhalg- (possible source of Greek phálagx ‘log, phalanx’).
=> balcony, phalanx
ballast: ballast: [16] Originally, ballast appears to have meant literally ‘bare load’ – that is, a load carried by a ship simply for the sake of its weight, and without any commercial value. English probably acquired it, via Low German, from a Scandinavian language; Old Swedish and Old Danish had not only ballast but also barlast, which appears to betray the word’s component parts: bar, related to English bare, and last ‘burden’ (Old English had hlæst ‘burden’, related to lade, which survived into the 20th century as a measure of weight for various commodities).
=> bare, lade
bamboo: bamboo: [16] Bamboo appears to come from a Malay word mambu. This was brought back to Europe by the Portuguese explorers, and enjoyed a brief currency in English from the 17th to the 18th century. However, for reasons no one can explain, the initial m of this word became changed to b, and it acquired an s at the end, producing a form found in Latin texts of the time as bambusa. This appears to have passed into English via Dutch bamboes, so the earliest English version of the word was bambos. As so often happens in such cases, the final s was misinterpreted as a plural ending, so it dropped off to give the new ‘singular’ bamboo.
bamboozle: bamboozle: [18] Bamboozle is a mystery word. It first appears in 1703, in the writings of the dramatist Colly Cibber, and seven years later it was one of a list of the latest buzzwords cited by Jonathan Swift in the Tatler (others included bully, mob, and sham). It is probably a ‘cant’ term (a sort of low-life argot), and may perhaps be of Scottish origin; there was a 17th-century Scottish verb bombaze ‘perplex’, which may be the same word as bombace, literally ‘padding, stuffing’, but metaphorically ‘inflated language’ (the variant form bombast has survived into modern English).
=> bombast
banjo: banjo: [18] The origins of banjo are uncertain, but its likeliest source seems to be bandore, the name of a 16th-century stringed instrument similar to the lute. It has been argued that in the speech of Southern US blacks, amongst whom the banjo originated, bandore became banjo, perhaps under the influence of mbanza, a term for a similar instrument in the Kimbundu language of Northern Angola (although it might be more plausible to suggest that mbanza is the immediate source, altered by English-speakers more familiar with bandore). Bandore itself appears to be a variant of pandore or pandora, which comes from Greek pandoura ‘three-stringed lute’.

A more farreaching modification produced mandore, likewise a term for a lutelike instrument. The Italian version of the word, mandola, is familiar in English from its diminutive form, which has given us mandolin [18].
=> mandolin
bard: bard: [14] Bard is of Celtic origin. A prehistoric Old Celtic *bardos produced Scottish and Irish Gaelic bárd and Welsh bardd, which meant ‘poet-singer’. It appears to have been the Scottish form which introduced the word into English, in the sense ‘strolling minstrel’. The modern, more elevated meaning ‘poet’ is 17thcentury.
bargain: bargain: [14] Bargain appears to be distantly related to borrow. Its immediate source was Old French bargaignier ‘haggle’, but this was probably borrowed from Germanic *borganjan, a derivative of *borgun (from which ultimately we get borrow). The sense development may have been as follows: originally ‘look after, protect’ (the related Germanic *burg- produced English borough, which to begin with meant ‘fortress’, and bury); then ‘take on loan, borrow’; then ‘take or give’; and hence ‘trade, haggle, bargain’.
=> belfrey, borough, borrow, bury
bastard: bastard: [13] The idea underlying the word bastard appears to be that of a child born of an impromptu sexual encounter on an improvised bed, for it seems to echo Old French fils de bast, literally ‘packsaddle son’, that is, one conceived on a packsaddle pillow. If this is the case, the word goes back to medieval Latin bastum ‘packsaddle’, whose ultimate source was Greek bastázein ‘carry’; this passed via Old French bast, later bat, into late Middle English as bat, which now survives only in batman [18].

The derived form is first found in medieval Latin as bastardus, and this reached English via Old French bastard. Its modern usage as a general term of abuse dates from the early 19th century.
=> batman
bat: bat: Bat as in ‘cricket bat’ [OE] and bat the animal [16] come from entirely different sources. Bat the wooden implement first appears in late Old English as batt ‘cudgel’, but it is not clear where it ultimately came from. Some have postulated a Celtic source, citing Gaulish andabata ‘gladiator’, which may be related to English battle and Russian bat ‘cudgel’, but whatever the word’s origins, it seems likely that at some point it was influenced by Old French batte, from battre ‘beat’.

The flying bat is an alteration of Middle English backe, which was borrowed from a Scandinavian language. The word is represented in Old Swedish natbakka ‘night bat’, and appears to be an alteration of an earlier -blaka, as in Old Norse lethrblaka, literally ‘leatherflapper’. If this is so, bat would mean etymologically ‘flapper’, which would be of a piece with other names for the animal, particularly German fledermaus ‘fluttermouse’ and English flittermouse, which remained a dialectal word for ‘bat’ into the 20th century.

It is unusual for the name of such a common animal not to go right back to Old English; in this case the Old English word was hrēremūs, which survived dialectally into the 20th century as rearmouse.
=> battle
bawdy: bawdy: [15] The adjective bawdy appears on the scene relatively late, but it is a derivative of bawd ‘prostitute’ or ‘madam’, which entered English in the 14th century. Its origins are not altogether clear, but it appears to have come from the Old French adjective baud ‘lively, merry, bold’, which in turn was probably acquired from Germanic *bald-, source of English bold.
=> bold
beagle: beagle: [15] The likeliest source of beagle appears to be Old French becgueule ‘noisy person’ (the supposition is that the dog had the term applied to it because of its loud bark). Becgueule itself was probably a compound formed from beer ‘gape, yawn’ (source also of English abash and abeyance and, in its later form bayer, of English bay ‘recessed area’) and gueule ‘throat’ (related to English gullet).
=> abash, abeyance, bay, bullet
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.
beaver: beaver: [OE] Like bear, beaver appears to mean etymologically ‘brown animal’. Old English beofor or befor came from a prehistoric West and North Germanic *bebruz, which in turn went back to an Indo-European *bhebhrús, a derivative of the base *bhru- ‘brown’. Other words for ‘beaver’ from the same source include Czech bobr, Lithuanian bebrùs, and Latin fiber.
because: because: [14] Because originated in the phrase by cause, which was directly modelled on French par cause. At first it was always followed by of or by a subordinate clause introduced by that or why: ‘The Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified’, St John’s Gospel, 7:39, 1611. But already by the end of the 14th century that and why were beginning to be omitted, leaving because to function as a conjunction, a move which would perhaps have exercised contemporary linguistic purists as much as ‘The reason is because …’ does today. The abbreviated form ’cause first appears in print in the 16th century.
=> cause
bee: bee: [OE] Old English bēo ‘bee’ came from a prehistoric West and North Germanic *bīōn, source also of German biene, Dutch bij, and Swedish bi, which may all be traceable back to an Indo-European base *bhi- ‘quiver’. This, if it is true, means that the bee was originally named as the ‘quivering’, or perhaps ‘humming’ insect. Latin fucus ‘drone’ appears to be related.
belch: belch: [OE] Belch first appears in recognizable form in the 15th century, but it can scarcely not be related to belk ‘eructate’, which goes back to Old English bealcan and survived dialectally into the modern English period. Belch itself may derive either from an unrecorded variant of bealcan, *belcan (with the c here representing a /ch/ sound), or from a related Old English verb belcettan ‘eructate’.

But whichever route it took, its ultimate source was probably a Germanic base *balk-or *belk-, from which German got bölken ‘bleat, low, belch’. Belch was originally a perfectly inoffensive word; it does not seem to have been until the 17th century that its associations began to drag it down towards vulgarity.
belt: belt: [OE] Old English belt and related Germanic forms such as Swedish bälte point to a source in Germanic *baltjaz, which was borrowed from Latin balteus, possibly a word of Etruscan origin. The verbal idiom belt up ‘be quiet’ appears to date from just before World War II.
bend: bend: [OE] English band, bind, bond, and bundle are closely allied: all go back to a prehistoric Germanic base *band-. The relationship in meaning was, in the case of bend, more obvious in Old English times, when bendan meant ‘tie up’ as well as ‘curve’ (a sense preserved in the modern English noun bend ‘knot’, as in carrick bend).

The rather strange-seeming meaning development appears to have come about as follows: bend in the sense ‘tie, constrain’ was used for the pulling of bow-strings, with reference to the strain or tension thereby applied to the bow; the natural consequence of this was of course that the bow curved, and hence (although not until the late 13th century) bend came to be used for ‘curve’.
=> band, bind, bond, bundle
berserk: berserk: [19] Sir Walter Scott appears to be responsible for introducing this word to the English language. He mentions it in a footnote to his novel The pirate 1822, adopting it (in the form berserkar) from the Icelandic berserkr ‘frenzied Norse warrior’. Its etymology is not altogether clear. Its second syllable represents serkr ‘coat, shirt’ (a word English used to have, as sark: cutty sark meant ‘short shirt’), but the first is disputed.

Scott took it to mean ‘bare’ (which would have been Icelandic berr), and in fact the anglicized form baresark was quite commonly used in the mid 19th century; the plausible-sounding notion underlying this is that the original berserkr was so called because in his battle-crazed frenzy he tore off his armour and fought in his shirt-sleeves – ‘bare-shirted’. However, 20th-century etymologists have tended to prefer the theory that ber- is ‘bear’, representing Icelandic bern-, a by-form of bjorn ‘bear’.

The concept of warriors dressing themselves in animals’ skins is an ancient one, found in many mythologies. The modern use of the word as an adjective, meaning ‘in a violent frenzy’, appears to date from the third quarter of the 19th century.
berth: berth: [17] Like birth, berth appears to be based on the verb bear, although it is a separate and much later formation. At first it meant ‘safe manoeuvring distance at sea’ (from which we get the metaphorical ‘give a wide berth to’); this seems to have come from the nautical sense of bear ‘steer in a particular direction’ as in bear away (from which we get bear down on, as well as more general applications, such as ‘bear left’). This led, via ‘convenient space for a ship to moor’, to, in the 18th century, the more familiar modern senses ‘sleeping place on a ship’ and ‘job, situation (originally on board ship)’.
=> bear, birth
bet: bet: [16] Since its comparatively late arrival, bet has ousted the earlier lay, wager, and game as the main term for ‘risking money on an uncertain outcome’ (gamble is later still). It is by no means clear where it came from; the usual explanation is that it is short for the noun abet, in the sense ‘instigation, encouragement, support’ – that is, one is giving one’s ‘support’ to that which one thinks, or hopes, may happen in the future (abet itself comes from the Old French verb abeter, and is related to English bait).

It first appears in Robert Greene’s Art of Cony Catching 1592, which suggests an origin in the argot of smalltime Elizabethan criminals.
=> abet, bait, bite
bib: bib: [16] The word bib is first mentioned in John Baret’s Quadruple dictionarie 1580, where it is described as being ‘for a child’s breast’. It appears to come from the now archaic verb bib (as in wine-bibber), perhaps from the notion that the bib protects the baby’s clothes as it drinks. The verb itself is possibly from Latin bibere ‘drink’, source of beer, beverage, bibulous, and imbibe.
=> beer, bibulous, imbibe
bide: bide: [OE] Bide appears to be related ultimately to Old English bēodan, partial source of modern English bid, but exactly how is not clear. It comes from a lengthened version of the same stem, producing a hypothetical Germanic *bīthan, and to all outward appearances is connected with such non-Germanic forms as Latin fīdere and Greek peithésthai; but as these mean ‘believe, trust’, it is not easy to reconstruct a semantic connection with bide ‘remain’. Bide itself is now little used, except in ‘bide one’s time’, but the derived abide [OE] remains current, especially in the sense ‘endure’, as does the noun formed from it, abode [13].
=> abide, abode, bid
bison: bison: [14] Bison appears to be of Germanic origin, from a stem *wisand- or *wisund-. This became Old English wesand, which did not survive; and it was acquired again in the 19th century as wisent, borrowed from German wisent, applied to the ‘aurochs’, an extinct species of European wild ox. The b- form came into English via Latin bison, a borrowing from the Germanic. Originally of course referring to the European bison, the term was first applied to the North American species at the end of the 17th century.