英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

act [act 词源字典]: act: [14] Act, action, active, actor all go back to Latin agere ‘do, perform’ (which is the source of a host of other English derivatives, from agent to prodigal). The past participle of this verb was āctus, from which we get act, partly through French acte, but in the main directly from Latin. The Latin agent noun, āctor, came into the language at about the same time, although at first it remained a rather uncommon word in English, with technical legal uses; it was not until the end of the 16th century that it came into its own in the theatre (player had hitherto been the usual term).

Other Latin derivatives of the past participial stem āct- were the noun āctiō, which entered English via Old French action, and the adjective āctīvus, which gave English active. See also ACTUAL.
=> action, active, agent, cogent, examine, prodigal[act etymology, act origin, 英语词源]
actual: actual: [14] In common with act, action, etc, actual comes ultimately from Latin āctus, the past participle of the verb agere ‘do, perform’. In late Latin an adjective āctuālis was formed from the noun āctus, and this passed into Old French as actuel. English borrowed it in this form, and it was not until the 15th century that the spelling actual, based on the original Latin model, became general. At first its meaning was simply, and literally, ‘relating to acts, active’; the current sense, ‘genuine’, developed in the mid 16th century.
=> act, action
ago: ago: [14] Historically, ago is the past participle of a verb. Its earlier, Middle English, form – agone – reveals its origins more clearly. It comes from the Old English verb āgān ‘pass away’, which was formed from gān ‘go’ and the prefix ā- ‘away, out’. At first it was used before expressions of time (‘For it was ago five year that he was last there’, Guy of Warwick 1314), but this was soon superseded by the now current postnominal use.
=> go
agoraphobia: agoraphobia: [19] Agoraphobia – fear of open spaces or, more generally, of simply being out of doors – is first referred to in an 1873 issue of the Journal of Mental Science; this attributes the term to Dr C Westphal, and gives his definition of it as ‘the fear of squares or open places’. This would be literally true, since the first element in the word represents Greek agorá ‘open space, typically a market place, used for public assemblies’ (the most celebrated in the ancient world was the Agora in Athens, rivalled only by the Forum in Rome).

The word agorá came from ageirein ‘assemble’, which is related to Latin grex ‘flock’, the source of English gregarious. Agoraphobia was not the first of the -phobias. That honour goes to hydrophobia in the mid 16th century. But that was an isolated example, and the surge of compounds based on Greek phóbos ‘fear’ really starts in the 19th century.

At first it was used for symptoms of physical illness (photophobia ‘abnormal sensitivity to light’ 1799), for aversions to other nationalities (Gallophobia 1803; the synonymous Francophobia does not appear until 1887), and for facetious formations (dustophobia, Robert Southey, 1824), and the range of specialized psychological terms familiar today does not begin to appear until the last quarter of the century (CLAUSTROPHOBIA 1879, acrophobia ‘fear of heights’ from Greek akros ‘topmost’ – see ACROBAT – 1892).
=> aggregate, allegory, gregarious, segregate
alligator: alligator: [16] The Spanish, on encountering the alligator in America, called it el lagarto ‘the lizard’. At first English adopted simply the noun (‘In this river we killed a monstrous Lagarto or Crocodile’, Job Hortop, The trauailes of an Englishman 1568), but before the end of the 16th century the Spanish definite article el had been misanalysed as part of the noun – hence, alligator. Spanish lagarto derived from Latin lacerta ‘lizard’, which, via Old French lesard, gave English lizard.
=> lizard
amble: amble: [14] The ultimate source of amble (and of perambulator [17], and thus of its abbreviation pram [19]) is the Latin verb ambulāre ‘walk’. This was a compound verb, formed from the prefix ambi- (as in AMBIDEXTROUS) and the base *el- ‘go’, which also lies behind exile and alacrity [15] (from Latin alacer ‘lively, eager’, a compound of the base *el- and ācer ‘sharp’ – source of English acid).

Latin ambulāre developed into Provençal amblar, which eventually reached English via Old French ambler. At first the English word was used for referring to a particular (leisurely) gait of a horse, and it was not until the end of the 16th century that it began to be used of people.
=> acid, alacrity, exile, perambulator
amen: amen: [OE] Amen was originally a Hebrew noun, āmēn ‘truth’ (based on the verb āman ‘strengthen, confirm’), which was used adverbially as an expression of confirmation or agreement. Biblical texts translated from Hebrew simply took it over unaltered (the Greek Septuagint has it, for example), and although at first Old English versions of the gospels substituted an indigenous term, ‘truly’, by the 11th century amen had entered English too.
ammunition: ammunition: [17] Ammunition is one of many words which resulted from a mistaken analysis of ‘article’ plus ‘noun’ (compare ADDER). In this case, French la munition ‘the munitions, the supplies’ was misapprehended as l’ammunition, and borrowed thus into English. At first it was used for military supplies in general, and it does not seem to have been until the beginning of the 18th century that its meaning became restricted to ‘bullets, shells, etc’.

The word munition itself was borrowed into English from French in the 16th century. It originally meant ‘fortification’, and came from the Latin noun mūnītiō; this was a derivative of the verb munīre, ‘defend, fortify’, which in turn was based on the noun moenia ‘walls, ramparts’ (related to mūrus ‘wall’, the source of English mural).

Also from munīre, via medieval Latin mūnīmentum, comes muniment [15], a legal term for ‘title deed’; the semantic connection is that a title deed is a means by which someone can ‘defend’ his or her legal right to property.
=> muniment, munition, mural
amphibious: amphibious: [17] The Greek prefix amphimeant ‘both, on both sides’ (hence an amphitheatre [14]: Greek and Roman theatres were semicircular, so two joined together, completely surrounding the arena, formed an amphitheatre). Combination with bios ‘life’ (as in biology) produced the Greek adjective amphibios, literally ‘leading a double life’. From the beginning of its career as an English word it was used in a very wide, general sense of ‘combining two completely distinct or opposite conditions or qualities’ (Joseph Addison, for example, used it as an 18th-century equivalent of modern unisex), but that meaning has now almost entirely given way to the word’s zoological application.

At first, amphibious meant broadly ‘living on both land and water’, and so was applied by some scientists to, for example, seals; but around 1819 the zoologist William Macleay proposed the more precise application, since generally accepted, to frogs, newts, and other members of the class Amphibia whose larvae have gills but whose adults breathe with lungs.
=> biology
anorak: anorak: [20] This was originally a word in the Inuit language of Greenland: annoraaq. It came into English in the 1920s, by way of Danish. At first it was used only to refer to the sort of garments worn by Eskimos, but by the 1930s it was being applied to a waterproof hooded coat made in imitation of these. In Britain, such jackets came to be associated with the sort of socially inept obsessives who stereotypically pursue such hobbies as train-spotting and computer-gaming, and by the early 1980s the term ‘anorak’ was being contemptuously applied to them.
arbour: arbour: [14] Despite its formal resemblance to, and semantic connections with, Latin arbor ‘tree’, arbour is not etymologically related to it. In fact, its nearest English relative is herb. When it first came into English it was erber, which meant ‘lawn’ or ‘herb/flower garden’. This was borrowed, via Anglo-Norman, from Old French erbier, a derivative of erbe ‘herb’.

This in turn goes back to Latin herba ‘grass, herb’ (in the 16th century a spelling with initial h was common in England). Gradually, it seems that the sense ‘grassy plot’ evolved to ‘separate, secluded nook in a garden’; at first, the characteristic feature of such shady retreats was their patch of grass, but their seclusion was achieved by surrounding trees or bushes, and eventually the criterion for an arbour shifted to ‘being shaded by trees’.

Training on a trellis soon followed, and the modern arbour as ‘bower’ was born. The shift from grass and herbaceous plants to trees no doubt prompted the alteration in spelling from erber to arbour, after Latin arbor; this happened in the 15th and 16th centuries.
=> herb
arsenal: arsenal: [16] The word arsenal has a complicated history, stretching back through Italian to Arabic. The Arabic original was dāras- sinā‘ah, literally ‘house of the manufacture’. This seems to have been borrowed into Venetian Italian, somehow losing its initial d, as arzaná, and been applied specifically to the large naval dockyard in Venice (which in the 15th century was the leading naval power in the Mediterranean).

The dockyard is known to this day as the Arzenale, showing the subsequent addition of the -al ending. English acquired the word either from Italian or from French arsenal, and at first used it only for dockyards (‘making the Arsenal at Athens, able to receive 1000 ships’, Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Natural history 1601); but by the end of the 16th century it was coming into more general use as a ‘military storehouse’.

The English soccer club Arsenal gets its name from its original home in Woolwich, south London, where there used to be a British government arsenal.
astronomy: astronomy: [13] Astronomy comes via Old French and Latin from Greek astronomíā, a derivative of the verb astronomein, literally ‘watch the stars’. Greek ástron and astér ‘star’ (whence English astral [17] and asterisk [17]) came ultimately from the Indo-European base *ster-, which also produced Latin stella ‘star’, German stern ‘star’, and English star.

The second element of the compound, which came from the verb némein, meant originally ‘arrange, distribute’. At first, no distinction was made between astronomy and astrology. Indeed, in Latin astrologia was the standard term for the study of the stars until Seneca introduced the Greek term astronomia. When the two terms first coexisted in English (astrology entered the language about a century later than astronomy) they were used interchangeably, and in fact when a distinction first began to be recognized between the two it was the opposite of that now accepted: astrology meant simply ‘observation’, whereas astronomy signified ‘divination’.

The current assignment of sense was not fully established until the 17th century.
=> asterisk, astral, star
attitude: attitude: [17] In origin, attitude is the same word as aptitude. Both come ultimately from late Latin aptitūdō. In Old French this became aptitude, which English acquired in the 15th century, but in Italian it became attitudine, which meant ‘disposition’ or ‘posture’. This was transmitted via French attitude to English, where at first it was used as a technical term in art criticism, meaning the ‘disposition of a figure in a painting’. The metaphorical sense ‘mental position with regard to something’ developed in the early 19th century.
=> aptitude
avoid: avoid: [14] Avoid at first meant literally ‘make void, empty’. It was formed in Old French from the adjective vuide ‘empty’ (source of English void [13], and derived from a hypothetical Vulgar Latin *vocitus, which is related ultimately to vacant). With the addition of the prefix es- ‘out’, a verb evuider was formed, which passed into English via Anglo-Norman avoider. The original sense ‘empty’ barely survived into the 17th century, but meanwhile it had progressed through ‘withdrawing, so as to leave someone alone or leave a place empty’ to ‘deliberately staying away from someone or something’.
=> vacant, void
bacon: bacon: [12] Originally, bacon meant literally ‘meat from a pig’s back’. It comes ultimately from a prehistoric Germanic *bakkon, which was related to *bakam, the source of English back. It reached English via Frankish báko and Old French bacon, and at first meant ‘a side of pig meat (fresh or cured)’. Gradually it narrowed down to ‘a side of cured pig meat’ (bringing it into competition with the Old English word flitch, now virtually obsolete), and finally to simply ‘cured pig meat’.
=> back
bacterium: bacterium: [19] Bacterium was coined in the 1840s from Greek baktérion, a diminutive of báktron ‘stick’, on the basis that the originally discovered bacteria were rod-shaped. At first it was sometimes anglicized to bactery, but the Latin form has prevailed. Related, but a later introduction, is bacillus [19]: this is a diminutive of Latin baculum ‘stick’, and the term was again inspired by the microorganism’s shape. Latin baculum is also responsible, via Italian bacchio and its diminutive form bacchetta, for the long French loaf, the baguette.
=> bacillus, baguette, débacle, imbecile
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
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
bishop: bishop: [OE] Bishop originally had no ecclesiastical connections; its Greek source, episkopos, at first meant simply ‘overseer’, from epi- ‘around’ and skopein ‘look’ (antecedent of English scope, and related to spy). From the general sense, it came to be applied as the term for various government officials, and was waiting to be called into service for a ‘church officer’ as Christianity came into being and grew. The Greek word was borrowed into ecclesiastical Latin as episcopus (source of French évêque), and in more popular parlance lost its e-, giving *biscopus, which was acquired by English in the 9th century.
=> scope, spy
bluff: bluff: English has two words bluff, one or perhaps both of them of Dutch origin. The older, ‘hearty’ [17], originally referred to ships, and meant ‘having a flat vertical bow’. This nautical association suggests a Dutch provenance, though no thoroughly convincing source has been found. The sense ‘flat, vertical, (and broad)’ came to be applied to land features, such as cliffs (hence the noun bluff ‘high steep bank’, which emerged in America in the 18th century).

The word’s metaphorical extension to people was at first derogatory – ‘rough, blunt’ – but the more favourable ‘hearty’ had developed by the early 19th century. Bluff ‘deceive’ [19] was originally a US poker term. It comes from Dutch bluffen ‘boast’, the descendant of Middle Dutch bluffen ‘swell up’.
botulism: botulism: [19] The fact that Latin botulus was used metaphorically for ‘intestine’ is in this case just a red herring; its principal meaning was ‘sausage’, and it was the discovery of the foodpoisoning germ in cooked meats, such assausages, which led to the term botulism. Early work on unmasking the bacterium responsible (now known as Clostridium botulinum) was done in Germany, and at first the German form of the word, botulismus, was used in English, but by the late 1880s we find the naturalized botulism fairly well established.
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
brooch: brooch: [13] English acquired brooch from Old French broche, a source it returned to a century later to borrow broach. The French word meant ‘long needle’, and at first a brooch was simply a decorative pin whose main function was to fasten a garment. Over the centuries the decorative role has replaced the practical one.
=> broach
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.
carriage: carriage: [14] Carriage is literally ‘carrying’. It is an Old Northern French derivative of the verb carier, in the sense ‘transport in a vehicle’. At first it meant simply ‘conveyance’ in the abstract sense, but in the 15th century more concrete meaning began to emerge: ‘load, luggage’ (now obsolete) and ‘means of conveyance, vehicle’. By the 18th century the latter had become further specialized to ‘horse-drawn wheeled vehicle for carrying people’ (as opposed to goods).
=> carry
carrion: carrion: [13] Ultimately, carrion is a derivative of Latin carō ‘flesh’ (source also of English carnal). This appears to have had a Vulgar Latin offshoot *carōnia, which entered English via Anglo-Norman caroine. At first it was used in English for ‘dead body’, but before the end of the 13th century the current sense ‘flesh unfit for human consumption’ had begun to establish itself.
=> carnal, crone
cell: cell: [12] Cell has branched out a lot over the centuries, but its original meaning seems to be ‘small secluded room’, for it comes ultimately from an Indo-European base *kel-, which is also the source of English conceal, clandestine, and occult. It came into English either via Old French celle or directly from Latin cella ‘small room, storeroom, inner room of a temple’, and at first was used mainly in the sense ‘small subsidiary monastery’.

It is not until the 14th century that we find it being used for small individual apartments within a monastic building, and the development from this to ‘room in a prison’ came as late as the 18th century. In medieval biology the term was applied metaphorically to bodily cavities, and from the 17th century onwards it began to be used in the more modern sense ‘smallest structural unit of an organism’ (the botanist Nehemiah Grew was apparently the first so to use it, in the 1670s).

A late Latin derivative of cella was cellārium ‘group of cells, storeroom’; this was the source of English cellar [13], via Anglo-Norman celer.
=> apocalypse, cellar, clandestine, conceal, hall, hell, hull, occult
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.
charlatan: charlatan: [17] Charlatan is of Italian origin. It comes from the verb cialare ‘chatter, prattle’. Its original application was to the patter of salesmen trying to sell quack remedies, and hence Italian ciarlatano at first referred to such vendors, and then by extension to any dispenser of impostures. Some etymologists have sought to connect the word with Italian Cerretano, literally ‘inhabitant of Cerreto’, an Italian village supposedly noted for exaggeration, alleging that it may have contributed its suffix to ciarlatano and reinforced its meaning. However that may be, the word reached English in its current from via French charlatan.
chemical: chemical: [16] Essentially chemical, and the related chemistry and chemist, come from alchemy with the initial al- dropped. Alchemy itself is of Arabic origin; al represents the Arabic definite article ‘the’, while the second element was borrowed from Greek khēmíā ‘alchemy’. Loss of al- seems to have taken place originally in French, so the immediate source of the English words was French chimiste and chimique (whence the now obsolete English chemic, on which chemical was based).

At first this whole group of words continued to be used in the same sense as its progenitor alchemy; it is not really until the 17th century that we find it being consistently applied to what we would now recognize as the scientific discipline of chemistry.
=> alchemy
chintz: chintz: [17] Chintz is originally an Indian word. English borrowed it from Hindi chīnt, and at first used it unaltered: Samuel Pepys, for instance, writing in his diary for 5 September 1663, notes ‘Bought my wife a chint, that is, a painted Indian calico, for to line her new study’. However, since in commercial use the plural form, chints, was so much commoner than the singular, it eventually came to be regarded as a singular itself, and the s-less form dropped out of the language.

In the 18th century, for some unexplained reason (perhaps on the analogy of such words as quartz) chints began to be spelled chintz. The Hindi word itself was originally an adjective, which came from Sanskrit chitra ‘many-coloured, bright’ (ultimate source of English chit ‘small piece of paper containing some sort of official notification’ [18]).
=> chit
city: city: [13] The Latin word for ‘city’ was urbs (whence English urban), but a ‘citizen’ was cīvis. From this was derived the noun cīvitās, which originally had the abstract sense ‘citizenship’. Gradually it acquired more concrete connotations, eventually coming to be used as a synonym of urbs. It passed into English via Old French cite, and at first was used for any settlement, regardless of size (although it was evidently felt to be a grander term than the native borough); the modern distinction between towns and cities developed during the 14th century.

The Italian descendant of Latin cīvitās is città. A now obsolete variant of this was cittade, whose diminutive form is the source of English citadel [16].
=> citadel, citizen, civil
compete: compete: [17] Compete comes from Latin competere. This was a compound verb formed from com- ‘together’ and petere ‘seek, strive’ (source of English petition, appetite, impetus, and repeat). At first this meant ‘come together, agree, be fit or suitable’, and the last of these meanings was taken up in the present participial adjective competēns, source of English competent [14]. In later Latin, however, competere developed the sense ‘strive together’, and this formed the basis of English compete.
=> appetite, competent, impetus, petition, repeat
complaisant: complaisant: [17] Complaisant and complacent [17] are virtual doublets. Both come from Latin complacēre ‘please greatly’ (a compound verb formed from placēre, source of English please), but they reached English along different routes. Complaisant came via French, from complaisant, the present participle of complaire ‘gratify’, but complacent was a direct borrowing from the Latin present participle. It originally meant simply ‘pleasant, delightful’, and did not take on its present derogatory connotations (at first expressed by the now obsolete complacential) until the mid 18th century.
=> complacent, please
constipation: constipation: [15] Latin constīpātiō originally meant ‘condition of being closely packed or compressed’. Its English descendant constipation was briefly used in that literal sense in the 17th and 18th centuries, but for the most part it has been a medical term: at first for constriction of some internal organ, blood vessel, etc, and from the mid-16th century for impaired bowel function. The Latin past participle constīpātus passed into Old French as costive, which English acquired, via an unrecorded Anglo-Norman *costif ‘constipated’ [14].
=> costive, stevedore, stiff
continent: continent: [14] Continent comes via Old French from Latin continēns, the present participle of continēre ‘hold together, enclose, contain’ (source of English contain). From the beginning it meant in general ‘exercising self-restraint’; of the more specific senses, ‘chaste’ developed in the 14th century and ‘able to retain urine and faeces’ apparently in the early 19th century.

The word’s noun use developed from the Latin phrase terra continēns ‘continuous land’ (for this sense of Latin continēre see CONTINUE). It was at first applied in the 16th century to any large continuous expanse of territory, and from the early 17th century specifically to any of the Earth’s major landmasses (the English use of ‘the Continent’ for mainland Europe is roughly contemporary with this).
=> contain, content, continue, countenance
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.
conversation: conversation: [14] Latin convertere meant ‘turn round, transform’. It was a compound verb formed from the intensive prefix com- and vertere ‘turn’ (source of English verse, version, and vertigo). It has spawned a variety of English words, its most direct descendant being convert [13]. Its past participle conversus produced the noun converse ‘opposite’ [16], but this should not be confused with the verb converse ‘talk’ [14], which came via quite a different route.

Latin vertere had a specialized form, vertāre, denoting repeated action. From it came versārī ‘live, occupy oneself’, which, with the addition of the com- prefix, produced conversārī ‘live, dwell, associate or communicate with others’. This passed via Old French converser into English, but at first both it and its derivative conversation were limited semantically to the notion of ‘dwelling’ and ‘social life’; the specific modern sense ‘talk’ was not brought into play until the late 16th century.
=> convert, verse, version
corpse: corpse: [14] Latin corpus ‘body’ has two direct descendants in English: corpse, which came via Old French cors, and corps [18], which came via modern French corps. The former first entered English in the 13th century as cors, and during the 14th century it had its original Latin p reinserted. At first it meant simply ‘body’, but by the end of the 14th century the current sense ‘dead body’ was becoming firmly established.

The idea originally underlying corps, on the other hand, was of a small ‘body’ of troops. Other English derivatives of corpus include corporal, corporate [15], from the past participle of Latin corporāre ‘make into a body’, corpulent [14], two diminutives corpuscle [17] and corset [14], and corsage [15]. Corpus itself was acquired in the 14th century.
=> corporal, corporate, corpulent, corset
crew: crew: [15] The idea originally underlying crew is ‘augmentation’. It comes from Old French creue, which was derived from the verb creistre ‘grow, increase, augment’, a descendant of Latin crēscere ‘grow’. At first in English it denoted a squad of military reinforcements. Soon its meaning had spread to any band of soldiers, and by the end of the 16th century the word was being used for any group of people gathered together with or without a particular purpose. The most familiar modern application, to the people manning a ship, emerged in the latter part of the 17th century.
=> crescent, croissant, increase
cunning: cunning: [13] Cunning did not always have its present-day negative connotations. At first it was a term of approval, meaning ‘learned’. It is connected in some way to the verb can, which originally meant ‘know’, although it is not altogether clear whether it is a direct use of the present participle of the English verb, or whether it was borrowed from the related Old Norse kunnandi, present participle of kunna ‘know’. Either way, it is a parallel formation to canny [16]. The sense ‘skilfully deceitful’ developed towards the end of the 16th century.
=> canny
currant: currant: [14] Etymologically, currants are grapes from ‘Corinth’. In the Middle Ages Corinth, in Greece, exported small dried grapes of particularly high quality, which became known in Old French as raisins de Corinthe ‘grapes of Corinth’. This phrase passed via Anglo-Norman raisins de corauntz into Middle English as raisins of coraunce. By the 16th century, coraunce had come to be regarded as a plural form, and a new singular was coined from it – at first coren, and then in the 17th century currant.

In the late 16th century, too, the name was transferred to fruit such as the blackcurrant and redcurrant, under the mistaken impression that the ‘dried-grape’ currant was made from them.
dainty: dainty: [13] In origin, dainty is the same word as dignity. The direct descendant of Latin dignitās in Old French was daintie or deintie, but Old French later reborrowed the word as dignete. It was the latter that became English dignity, but daintie took a route via Anglo-Norman dainte to give English dainty. At first it meant ‘honour, esteem’, but before a century was up it had passed through ‘pleasure, joy’ to ‘something choice, luxury’. The first record of its adjectival use comes in the 14th century, when it meant ‘choice, excellent, delightful’; this soon developed to ‘delicately pretty’.
=> dignity
defalcate: defalcate: [15] Defalcate comes from medieval Latin dēfalcāre ‘cut off’, a compound verb formed from the prefix dē- ‘off’ and falx ‘sickle’ (source of French faux ‘scythe’). At first it meant simply ‘deduct’ in English; the modern legal sense ‘embezzle’ did not develop until the 19th century.
dentist: dentist: [18] Dentist was borrowed from French dentiste, and at first was ridiculed as a highfalutin foreign term: ‘Dentist figures it now in our newspapers, and may do well enough for a French puffer; but we fancy Rutter is content with being called a tooth-drawer’, Edinburgh Chronicle 15 September 1759. It was a derivative of French dent ‘tooth’, which goes back via Latin dēns to an Indo-European base *dont-, *dent-, source also of English tooth. Other English descendants of Latin dēns include dental [16] and denture [19].
=> indent, tooth
die: die: English has two distinct words die. The noun, ‘cube marked with numbers’, is now more familiar in its plural form (see DICE). The verb, ‘stop living’ [12], was probably borrowed from Old Norse deyja ‘die’. This, like English dead and death, goes back ultimately to an Indo- European base *dheu-, which some have linked with Greek thánatos ‘dead’.

It may seem strange at first sight that English should have borrowed a verb for such a basic concept as ‘dying’ (although some have speculated that a native Old English verb *dīegan or *dēgan did exist), but in fact it is a not uncommon phenomenon for ‘die’ verbs to change their meaning euphemistically, and therefore to need replacing by new verbs. In the case of the Old English verbs for ‘die’, steorfan survives as starve and sweltan in its derivative swelter, while cwelan is represented by the related cwellan ‘kill’, which has come down to us as quell.
=> dead, death
disease: disease: [14] Disease and malaise are parallel formations: both denote etymologically an ‘impairment of ease or comfort’. Disease comes from Old French desaise, a compound formed from the prefix dis- ‘not, lacking’ and aise ‘ease’, and in fact at first meant literally ‘discomfort’ or ‘uneasiness’. It was only towards the end of the 14th century that this sense began to narrow down in English to ‘sickness’. (Malaise was borrowed from French malaise, an Old French formation from mal ‘bad’ and aise.)
=> ease, malaise
divulge: divulge: [15] Etymologically, to divulge something is to make it known to the vulgar masses. The word comes from Latin dīvulgāre, a compound verb formed from the prefix dis- ‘widely’ and vulgāre ‘make common, publish’. This in turn was derived from vulgus ‘common people’, source of English vulgar. At first in English it was semantically neutral, meaning ‘make widely known’ (‘fame of his ouvrages [works, achievements] hath been divulged’, William Caxton, Book of Eneydos 1490), but by the 17th century the word’s modern connotations of ‘disclosing what should be secret’ had developed.
=> vulgar
dope: dope: [19] Dope originated in the USA, where it was borrowed from Dutch doop ‘sauce’. This was a derivative of the verb doopen ‘dip’, which is related to English dip. It was at first used as a general colloquialism for any thick semi-liquid preparation, whether used as a food or, for example, as a lubricant, but during the 19th century some specific strands began to emerge: notably ‘drug’, and in particular ‘opium’, and ‘varnish painted on the fabric of an aircraft’.

The effects of the former led to its use in the sense ‘fool’, and to the coinage of the adjective dopey, first recorded in the 1890s. The sense ‘information’ dates from around 1900.
=> deep, dip