英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

abash [abash 词源字典]: abash: [14] Abash shares a common ancestry with abeyance [16], although the latter underwent an about-turn in meaning in the 17th century which disguises their relationship. They go back to a Latin verb batāre, meaning ‘yawn’ or ‘gape’. This was borrowed into French as baer, later bayer (it was the source of English bay ‘recessed space’).

The addition of the prefix es- (from Latin ex-) produced esbaer, later e(s)bahir ‘gape with astonishment’, whence, via the present stem e(s)bass-, came English abash, which originally meant ‘stand amazed’ as well as ‘embarrass, discomfit’. (Bashful is a 16thcentury derivative, with elision of the a-, which was first used by the dramatist Nicholas Udall.) Addition of the prefix a- to Old French baer, meanwhile, had given abaer ‘aspire after’, and its noun abeance ‘aspiration, desire’.

In legal terminology, this word was used in French for the condition of a person in expectation or hope of receiving property, but in English the focus quickly became reversed to the property, and its condition of being temporarily without an owner.
=> abeyance, bashful[abash etymology, abash origin, 英语词源]
abstain: abstain: [14] The literal meaning of this word’s ultimate source, Latin abstinēre, was ‘hold or keep away’, and hence ‘withhold’ (the root verb, tenēre, produced many other derivatives in English, such as contain, maintain, obtain, and retain, as well as tenacious, tenant, tenement, tenet, tenor, and tenure).

That is how it was used when it was first introduced into English (via Old French abstenir), and it was not until the 16th century that it began to be used more specifically for refraining from pleasurable activities, particularly the drinking of alcohol. The past participial stem of the Latin verb, abstent-, gave us abstention, while the present participial stem, abstinent-, produced abstinent and abstinence.

There is no connection, incidentally, with the semantically similar abstemious, which comes from a Latin word for alcoholic drink, tēmōtum.
abyss: abyss: [16] English borrowed abyss from late Latin abyssus, which in turn derived from Greek ábussos. This was an adjective meaning ‘bottomless’, from a- ‘not’ and bussós ‘bottom’, a dialectal variant of buthós (which is related to bathys ‘deep’, the source of English bathyscape). In Greek the adjective was used in the phrase ábussos limnē ‘bottomless lake’, but only the adjective was borrowed into Latin, bringing with it the meaning of the noun as well.

In medieval times, a variant form arose in Latin – abysmus. It incorporated the Greek suffix -ismós (English -ism). It is the source of French abîme, and was borrowed into English in the 13th century as abysm (whence the 19th-century derivative abysmal). It began to be ousted by abyss in the 16th century, however, and now has a distinctly archaic air.
ace: ace: [13] Ace comes from the name of a small ancient Roman coin, the as (which may have been of Etruscan origin). As well as denoting the coin, Latin as stood for ‘one’ or ‘unity’, and it was as the ‘score of one at dice’ that it first entered English.
acorn: acorn: [OE] Acorn has no etymological connection with oak; its nearest linguistic relative in English is probably acre. The Old English word was æcern, which may well have derived from æcer ‘open land’ (the related Middle High German ackeran referred to beech mast as well as acorns, and Gothic akran developed more widely still, to mean simply ‘fruit’).

There are cognate words in other, non- Germanic, Indo-European languages, such as Russian yagoda ‘berry’ and Welsh aeron ‘fruits’. Left to develop on its own, æcern would have become modern English achern, but the accidental similarity of oak and corn have combined to reroute its pronunciation.
=> acre
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
aggravate: aggravate: [16] Aggravate originally meant literally ‘to weigh down’ or ‘to make heavier’ (it was modelled on Latin aggravare ‘to make heavier’, which in turn was based on gravis ‘heavy’, source of English gravity and grief; its first cousin is aggrieve [13], which came via Old French agrever). From the first it was generally used in a metaphorical sense, and by the end of the 16th century the meaning ‘to make worse’ was well established. The sense ‘to annoy’, which some purists still object to, dates from at least the early 17th century.
=> grave, gravity, grief
album: album: [17] Latin albus ‘white’ has been the source of a variety of English words: alb ‘ecclesiastical tunic’ [OE], albedo ‘reflective power’ [19], Albion [13], an old word for Britain, probably with reference to its white cliffs, albumen ‘white of egg’ [16], and auburn, as well as albino. Album is a nominalization of the neuter form of the adjective, which was used in classical times for a blank, or white, tablet on which public notices were inscribed.

Its original adoption in the modern era seems to have been in Germany, where scholars kept an album amicorum ‘album of friends’ in which to collect colleagues’ signatures. This notion of an autograph book continues in Dr Johnson’s definition of album in his Dictionary 1755: ‘a book in which foreigners have long been accustomed to insert the autographs of celebrated people’, but gradually it became a repository for all sorts of souvenirs, including in due course photographs.
=> alb, albedo, albino, albumen, auburn, daub
almost: almost: [OE] Almost is simply a combination of all and most. In Anglo-Saxon times, and up until the 17th century, it meant ‘mostly all’ or ‘nearly all’ (thus one could say ‘My best friends are almost men’, meaning most of them are men); but already by the 13th century the modern sense ‘nearly, not quite’ was well in place.
=> all, most
altruism: altruism: [19] Etymologically as well as semantically, altruism contains the notion of ‘other people’. It was borrowed from French altruisme, which was apparently coined in 1830 by the philosopher Auguste Comte on the basis of Italian altrui ‘that which belongs to other people’. This was the oblique case of altro ‘other’, from Latin alter. Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française suggests that the coinage was based on such French legal phrases as le bien d’autrui ‘the welfare of others’ and le droit d’autrui ‘the rights of others’ (autrui corresponds to Italian altrui).
=> alias, alter, else
always: always: [13] In Old English, the expression was alne weg, literally ‘all the way’. It seems likely that this was used originally in the physical sense of ‘covering the complete distance’, but by the time it starts to appear in texts (King Alfred’s is the first recorded use, in his translation of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae around 888) it already meant ‘perpetually’. Alway survived into modern English, albeit as an archaism, but began to be replaced as the main form by always in the 12th century.

The final -s is genitive, not plural, and was originally added to all as well as way: alles weis. It has a generalizing force, much as in modern English one might say of a morning for ‘every morning’.
=> way
amok: amok: [17] Amok is Malayan in origin, where it is an adjective, amoq, meaning ‘fighting frenziedly’. Its first brief brush with English actually came in the early 16th century, via Portuguese, which had adopted it as a noun, amouco, signifying a ‘homicidally crazed Malay’. This sense persisted until the late 18th century, but by then the phrase run amok, with all its modern connotations, was well established, and has since taken over the field entirely. The spelling amuck has always been fairly common, reflecting the word’s pronunciation.
anatomy: anatomy: [14] Etymologically, anatomy means ‘cutting up’ (the Greek noun anatomíā was compounded from the prefix ana- ‘up’ and the base *tom-, which figures in several English surgical terms, such as tonsillectomy [19], as well as in atom and tome), and when it first came into English it meant literally ‘dissection’ as well as ‘science of bodily structure’.

From the 16th century to the early 19th century it was also used for ‘skeleton’, and in this sense it was often misanalysed as an atomy, as if the initial anwere the indefinite article: ‘My bones … will be taken up smooth, and white, and bare as an atomy’, Tobias Smollett, Don Quixote 1755.
=> atom, tome
appreciate: appreciate: [17] Like appraise, appreciate originally comes from the notion of setting a price on something. It comes from late Latin appretiāre, a compound verb formed from ad- ‘to’ and pretium ‘price’. The neutral sense of ‘estimating worth’ was already accompanied by the more positive ‘esteem highly’ when the word began to be used in English, and by the late 18th century the meaning ‘rise in value’ (apparently an American development) was well in place.
=> appraise, price
arch: arch: [14] English acquired arch via Old French arche and a hypothetical Vulgar Latin *arca from Latin arcus ‘curve, arch, bow’ (from which English also got arc [14]). When it first came into the language it was still used in the general sense of ‘curve, arc’ as well as ‘curved structure’ (Chaucer in his Treatise on the astrolabe 1391 wrote of ‘the arch of the day … from the sun arising till it go to rest’), but this had died out by the mid 19th century.

Vulgar Latin *arca also produced Italian arcata, which entered English via French as arcade in the 18th century. Arch meaning ‘saucy’ is an adjectival use of the prefix arch- (as in archetype).
=> arc
army: army: [14] Latin armāta ‘armed’, the past participle of the verb armāre, was used in postclassical times as a noun, meaning ‘armed force’. Descendants of armāta in the Romance languages include Spanish armada and French armée, from which English borrowed army. In early usage it could (like Spanish armada) mean a naval force as well as a land force (‘The King commanded that £21,000 should be paid to his army (for so that fleet is called everywhere in English Saxon) which rode at Greenwich’, Marchamont Needham’s translation of Selden’s Mare clausum 1652), but this had virtually died out by the end of the 18th century.
=> arm, armada
arthritis: arthritis: [16] Greek árthron meant ‘joint’ (it is used in various technical terms in biology, such as arthropod ‘creature, such as an insect, with jointed limbs’). It came from the Indo-European root *ar- ‘put things together, join, fit’, which also produced Latin artus ‘limb’ (source of English article) and English arm, as well as art. The compound arthritis is a Greek formation (-itis was originally simply an adjectival suffix, so arthritis meant ‘of the joints’ – with ‘disease’ understood; its application to ‘inflammatory diseases’ is a relatively modern development); it reached English via Latin.
=> arm, art, article
ashamed: ashamed: [OE] Ashamed is an Old English compound, formed ultimately from the noun scamu ‘shame’. The verb derived from this, scamian, meant ‘feel shame’ as well as (as in modern English) ‘put to shame’, and in this sense the intensive prefix ā- was added to it. The resulting verb ashame died out in the 16th century, but its past participle ashamed has survived.
=> shame
at: at: [OE] The preposition at was originally found throughout the Germanic languages: Old English had æt, Old High German az, Gothic and Old Norse at. It survives in the Scandinavian languages (Swedish att, for instance) as well as English, but has been lost from German and Dutch. Cognates in other Indo-European languages, including Latin ad ‘to, at’, suggest an ultimate common source.
attempt: attempt: [14] Attempting is etymologically related to tempting. The Latin verb attemptāre was formed with the prefix ad- from temptāre, which meant ‘try’ as well as ‘tempt’ (the semantic connection is preserved in modern English try, with the contrasting senses ‘attempt’ and ‘put to the test’). The Latin form passed into Old French as atenter (hence modern French attenter), but was later latinized back to attempter, the form in which English acquired it.
=> tempt
author: author: [14] Latin auctor originally meant ‘creator, originator’; it came from auct-, the past participial stem of augēre, which as well as ‘increase’ (as in English augment) meant ‘originate’. But it also developed the specific sense ‘creator of a text, writer’, and brought both these meanings with it into English via Old French autor. Forms with -th- began to appear in the mid 16th century (from French), and originally the-th- was just a spelling variant of -t-, but eventually it affected the pronunciation.

While the ‘writing’ sense has largely taken over author, authority [13] (ultimately from Latin auctōritās) and its derivatives authoritative and authorize have developed along the lines of the creator’s power to command or make decisions.
=> auction, augment
avarice: avarice: [13] The Latin verb avēre meant ‘covet’. One of its derivatives was the adjective avārus ‘greedy’, from which the noun avāritia was formed. This entered English via Old French avarice. Another of its derivatives was the adjective avidus ‘greedy’ which, as well as being the source of English avid [18], produced, via a hypothetical contracted form *audus, the adjective audax ‘bold’, source of English audacity [15].
=> audacity, avid
axis: axis: [14] Axis is at the centre of a complex web of ‘turning’ words. Besides its immediate source, Latin axis, there were Greek áxōn, Sanskrit ákshas, and a hypothetical Germanic *akhsō which produced Old English eax ‘axle’ as well as modern German achse ‘axle, shaft’ and Dutch as; and there could well be a connection with Latin agere (source of English act, agent, etc) in the sense ‘drive’.

Also related is an unrecorded Latin form *acslā, which produced āla ‘wing’ (source of English aileron and aisle); its diminutive was axilla ‘armpit’, from which English gets the adjective axillary [17] and the botanical term axil [18].
=> aileron, aisle, axil
baboon: baboon: [14] The origins of baboon are obscure, but it seems that the notion underlying it may be that of ‘grimacing’. Baboons characteristically draw back their lips in snarling, revealing their teeth, and it has been speculated that there may be a connection with Old French baboue ‘grimace’. However that may be, it was certainly in Old French that the word first surfaced, as babuin, and originally it meant ‘gaping figure’ (as in a gargoyle) as well as ‘ape’. This alternative meaning was carried over when the Old French word was borrowed into English, where it remained a live sense of baboon until the 16th century.
beam: beam: [OE] In Old English times the word bēam (like modern German baum) meant ‘tree’ – a signification preserved in tree-names such as hornbeam and whitebeam. But already before the year 1000 the extended meanings we are familiar with today – ‘piece of timber’ and ‘ray of light’ – had started to develop. Related forms in other Germanic languages (which include, as well as German baum, Dutch boom, from which English gets boom ‘spar’ [16]) suggest a West Germanic ancestor *bauma, but beyond that all is obscure.
=> boom
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
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
blank: blank: [15] Although English got blank from French blanc ‘white’, its ultimate source is Germanic. Forms such as Old High German blanc ‘white’ suggest a prehistoric Germanic *blangkaz, which could have been borrowed into Romanic, the undifferentiated precursor of the Romance languages, as *blancus – hence French blanc, Italian bianco, Spanish blanco, and Portuguese branco.

The word originally meant simply ‘white’ in English, but this sense had all but died out by the early 18th century, by which time the present-day ‘unmarked’ was well established. Other derivatives of French blanc include the verb blanch [14], from French blanchier, and blanket [13], from Old French blancquet. Blanco is a trade name (based on blanc) coined in the 1890s for a whitening preparation for military webbing (subsequently applied to the khakicoloured version as well).
=> blanch, blanket
blood: blood: [OE] Blood is a Germanic word, occurring as German blut, Dutch bloed, Swedish blod, etc. as well as in English (the Romance languages take their words from Latin sanguis, whence English sanguine [14], while Greek had haima, as in English haemorrhage, haemoglobin, etc). The ultimate source of all these was Germanic *blōtham, a derivative of which, *blōthjan, produced English bleed. Old English had the adjective blōdig, from which we get bloody; its use as an expletive dates from the 17th century.
=> bleed, bless
boast: boast: [13] The immediate source of boast appears to be Anglo-Norman bost, but where it came from before that is far from clear; German dialect bauste(r)n ‘swell’ has been compared, suggesting that it could be of Germanic origin. To begin with it meant ‘loud or threatening talk’ as well as ‘bragging’.
boil: boil: Boil ‘large spot’ [OE] and boil ‘vaporize with heat’ [13] are distinct words. The former comes from Old English byl or byle, which became bile in Middle English; the change to boil started in the 15th century, perhaps from association with the verb. The Old English word goes back ultimately to a West Germanic *būlja, whose central meaning element was ‘swelling’; from it also comes German beule ‘lump, boil’.

The verb’s source, via Anglo-Norman boiller, is Latin bullīre, a derivative of bulla ‘bubble’, a word which also gave us bull (as in ‘Papal bull’), bullion, bowl (as in the game of ‘bowls’), budge, bullet, bulletin and bully (as in ‘bully beef’), as well, perhaps, as bill.
=> bill, bowl, budge, bull, bullet, bulletin, bullion, bully, ebullient
bone: bone: [OE] Somewhat unusually for a basic body-part term, bone is a strictly Germanic word: it has no relatives in other Indo-European languages. It comes from a presumed Germanic *bainam, which also produced for example German bein and Swedish ben. These both mean ‘leg’ as well as ‘bone’, suggesting that the original connotation of *bainam may have been ‘long bone’.
bowl: bowl: Bowl ‘round receptacle’ [OE] and bowl ‘ball used in bowls’ [15] come from different sources. The former (Old English bolle or bolla) comes ultimately from the Germanic base *bul-, *bal-, which was also the source of English ball, balloon, and ballot. The Middle Dutch form corresponding to Old English bolle was bolle, which was borrowed into English in the 13th century as boll, initially meaning ‘bubble’ but latterly ‘round seed-head’.

The other bowl was originally simply a synonym for ball, but its modern specialized uses in the game of bowls, and the verbal usage ‘deliver the ball’ in cricket and other games, had already begun their development in the 15th century. The word came via Old French boule from Latin bulla ‘bubble’, which also lies behind English boil, bull (as in ‘papal bull’), bullion, bullet, bulletin, and bully (as in ‘bully beef’), as well, perhaps, as bill.
=> ball, balloon, ballot; boil, bull, bullet, bulletin, bully
brandy: brandy: [17] English acquired the word for this distilled spirit from Dutch brandewijn, and at first altered and translated it minimally to brandewine. Soon however this became brandy wine, and by the mid-17th century the abbreviated brandy was in common use. The Dutch compound meant ‘distilled wine’, from branden, which denoted ‘distil’ as well as ‘burn’ (it was a derivative of brand ‘fire’, cognate with English brand).
=> brand
brother: brother: [OE] The word brother is widespread throughout the Indo-European languages. The Indo-European form was *bhrāter, from which are descended, among many others, Latin frāter (as in English fraternal), Greek phrátēr, Sanskrit bhrātr, and Breton breur. Its Germanic descendant was *brōthar, which, as well as English brother, has produced German bruder, Dutch broeder, and Swedish broder.
=> buddy, fraternal, pal
bruise: bruise: [OE] Modern English bruise is a blend of words from two sources. The main contributor is Old English brysan, which as well as ‘bruise’ meant ‘crush to pieces’, and is related to Latin frustum ‘piece broken or cut off’. But then in the early Middle English period we begin to see the influence of the unrelated Old French verb bruisier ‘break’ and its Anglo-Norman form bruser (which in modern French has become briser).

Their main effect has been on the spelling of the word, although the use of bruise for ‘break’ from the 14th to the 17th century seems to have been due to French influence too, rather than a survival of the Old English meaning: ‘Had his foot once slipped … he would have been bruised in pieces’, The most dangerous and memorable adventure of Richard Ferris 1590. Bruiser ‘large rough man’ originated in an 18th-century term for a prizefighter.
=> débris
buckle: buckle: [14] English acquired buckle via Old French boucla from Latin buccula ‘cheek strap of a helmet’. This was a diminutive form of Latin bucca ‘cheek’ (source of French bouche ‘mouth’), which gave English the anatomical term buccal ‘of the cheeks’ [19], and some have speculated is related to English pock. The notion of ‘fastening’ implicit in the Latin word carried through into English.

As well as ‘cheek strap’, Latin buccula meant ‘boss in the middle of a shield’. Old French boucle adopted this sense too, and created the derivative boucler, originally an adjective, meaning (of a shield) ‘having a central boss’. English borrowed this as buckler ‘small round shield’ [13]. The verb buckle was created from the English noun in the late 14th century, but the sense ‘distort’, which developed in the 16th century, comes from French boucler, which had come to mean ‘curl, bulge’.

Also from the French verb is bouclé ‘yarn with irregular loops’ [19].
=> bouclé, buckler
bullet: bullet: [16] Etymologically, a bullet is a ‘little ball’. It comes from French boulette, a diminutive form of boule ‘ball’, from which English also gets bowl, as in the game of bowls. It originally meant ‘cannon-ball’ as well as ‘rifle or pistol projectile’, but this sense had effectively died out by the mid-18th century.
=> bowl
calcium: calcium: [19] Calcium was coined by the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy in 1808 on the basis of Latin calx ‘limestone’ (which is also the ancestor of English calcareous, calculate, calculus, causeway, and chalk). The Latin word probably came from Greek khálix, which meant ‘pebble’ as well as ‘limestone’.
=> calcarious, calculate, causeway, chalk
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.
cattle: cattle: [13] Ultimately, cattle is the same word as chattel [13], and when it first entered English it had the same meaning, ‘property’. From earliest times, however, it was applied specifically to livestock thought of as property. In the Middle Ages it was a wide-ranging term in animal husbandry, being used for horses, sheep, pigs, and even poultry and bees, as well as cows, and such usages survived dialectally until comparatively recently, but from the mid 16th century onwards there is increasing evidence of the word’s being restricted solely to cows.

Its ultimate source is medieval Latin capitāle ‘property’, which came to English via Old French chatel as chattel and via Anglo-Norman catel as cattle. Capitāle itself goes back to classical Latin capitālis (from caput ‘head’), from which English gets capital.
=> capital, chattel
cause: cause: [13] Cause comes via Old French cause from Latin causa, which as well as ‘reason’ meant ‘law-suit’; this was carried over into English legal language (it survives in terms such as cause-list ‘list of cases to be tried’) and its use in expressions like ‘plead someone’s cause’ led in the late 16th century to a more general application ‘goal or principle pursued or supported’. French chose ‘thing’ also comes from Latin causa, in the weakened sense ‘matter, subject’.
=> excuse
ceiling: ceiling: [14] Ceiling is something of a mystery word. It originally signified the internal lining of any part of a building, including walls as well as roof (the modern sense ‘overhead inside surface of a room’ began to crystallize out in the 16th century), and the material of which it was made took in wooden planks and even tapestry hangings, as well as plaster. But where it comes from is not at all clear.

It has no apparent relations in other modern European languages, and the likeliest candidate as a source may be Latin caelāre ‘carve, engrave’. This is perhaps endorsed by an item in the accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, 1497, revealing how a ‘carver’ was paid £2 14s for ‘the ceiling of the chapel’ – an indication that the underlying notion of ceiling may be ‘carved internal surface of a room’.
chant: chant: [14] The Latin verb for ‘sing’ was canere (possibly related to English hen). A form derived from it to denote repeated action was cantāre ‘keep on singing’, a rich source of English words. From its French descendant chanter we have chant and the derived chantry [14]; from Italian, cantata [18], originally a past participle; and from the Latin noun cantus ‘song’ the derivatives accent, descant, and canticle [13], as well as (via Italian) canto [16]. Cant ‘hypocritical talk’ is probably from the same source, and shanty or chanty ‘sailor’s song’ is also related.
=> accent, cant, cantata, canto, chanty, descant, hen, incantation, recant
charcoal: charcoal: [14] The words char and charcoal are related, but not in the way commonsense might lead one to suppose: for the verb char [17], originally apparently a charcoal-burner’s term, appears to derive from charcoal. So etymologically, the element char has nothing to do with ‘burning’. There are two main suggestions as to charcoal’s origins: firstly that it comes from Old French charbon ‘charcoal’ (related to English carbon); and secondly that it represents the now obsolete English verb chare (see CHARWOMAN), which in Old English times (cerran) meant ‘turn’.

On the basis of this theory, the etymological meaning of the word would be ‘turning into charcoal’ (for in Old English, coal meant ‘charcoal’ as well as ‘coal’).
cheese: cheese: [OE] Cheese is of Latin origin, but was borrowed into the West Germanic languages in prehistoric times, producing German kāse and Dutch kaas as well as cheese. The Latin word was cāseus (source also of Spanish queso ‘cheese’), whose possible distant relative Sanskrit kvathati ‘he boils’ suggests an underlying idea of froth or bubbles in the milk from which the cheese is made.
cherry: cherry: [14] Cherry comes ultimately from Greek kerasós ‘cherry tree’, which in Latin became cerasus. This was borrowed into the Germanic languages in prehistoric times, producing, as well as German kirsche, Old English ciris ‘cherry’, which died out in the 11th century. In Vulgar Latin, meanwhile, cerasus had become ceresia, which passed into Old Northern French as cherise (source of modern French cerise). When it was borrowed into English, its -s ending was misinterpreted as indicating plurality, so a ‘new’ singular cherry was created.
choreography: choreography: [18] Choreography ‘arrangement of dances’ comes from French choréographie, which was based on Greek khoreíā ‘dance’, a derivative of khorós. (Source of English chorus, choir, and possibly also carol, this originally encompassed dancing as well as singing.) Khoreíā passed into Latin as chorea, applied in English to various muscular disorders (such as Huntington’s chorea); the usage probably originated in the Latin phrase chorea sancti Viti ‘St Vitus’s dance’.
=> carol, choir, chorea, chorus
chrome: chrome: [19] Compounds formed from the element chromium are brilliantly coloured green, red, and yellow. Hence, when it was first described by the French chemist Vauquelin in 1797, he named it chrome, after Greek khrōma ‘colour’. This was soon latinized to chromium, and chrome was henceforth used for chromium pigments or chromium plating. The Greek adjective derived from khrōma was khrōmatikós, which as well as referring to colour, denoted the gradations of notes in a musical scale; and it was in this musical sense that it was first borrowed into English in the 17th century.
cockle: cockle: [14] The cockle is related etymologically to another mollusc, the conch: they both began life in Greek kónkhē – which meant ‘mussel’ as well as ‘conch’. From this was formed the diminutive konkhúlion ‘small variety of conch’ – hence ‘cockle’. The Greek word subsequently became reduced to kokhúlion, whose plural passed into medieval Latin as *cochilia.

Next in the chain was Old French coquille, source of the English word. The origin of the phrase cockles of one’s heart (first recorded in the mid 17th century) are not clear: some have claimed that the heart resembles a cockle shell, or more specifically that the fibres of the heart muscle spiral like the lines on a cockle shell, while others note a supposed resemblance of cockle to corculum, a Latin diminutive of cor ‘heart’, and others again point out that the scientific name for the cockle is Cardium, from Greek kardíā ‘heart’, but none of these explanations really carries conviction.
=> conch