英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

aeolian harp: aeolian harp: [18] Aeolus was the Greek god of the winds (the form of the name is Latin; the original Greek was Aiolos, deriving from the adjective aiolos ‘quick-moving’). Hence the application of the epithet to a musical instrument whose strings are sounded by the breeze blowing over them. The term is first recorded in the writings of Erasmus Darwin, at the end of the 18th century.
bellows: bellows: [OE] Bellows and belly were originally the same word, Old English belig, which meant ‘bag’. This was used in the compound blǣstbelig, literally ‘blowing bag’, a device for blowing a fire, which was replaced in the late Old English period by the plural form of the noun, belga or belgum, from which we get bellows. Meanwhile the meaning of belly developed from ‘bag’ to, in the 13th century, ‘body’ and, in the 14th century, ‘abdomen’.

Ultimately the word goes back to Germanic *balgiz ‘bag’, from the base *balg- or *belg- (itself a descendant of Indo-European *bhel- ‘swell’), which also lies behind billow [16], bolster, and possibly bellow and bell.
=> bell, bellow, belly, billow, bold, bolster
bubble: bubble: [14] Several Germanic languages have words that sound like, and mean the same as, bubble – Swedish bubla, for instance, and Dutch bobbel – but all are relatively modern, and there is no evidence to link them to a common source. As likely as not, the whole family of bubble words represents ultimately an attempt to lexicalize the sound of bubbling, by blowing through nearly closed lips.
buffer: buffer: Neither buffer ‘fellow’ [18] nor buffer ‘shock absorber’ [19] can be traced back with any certainty to a source, but the likeliest conjecture is that they both come (independently) from an obsolete English verb buff, which was probably originally (like puff) imitative of the sound of blowing or breathing out. The earliest recorded sense of this, in the late 13th century, was ‘stammer’, and so the human buffer may originally have been a ‘stammerer’. By the 16th century we find the verb being used in the sense ‘make the sound of something soft being hit’, which is a likely source of buffer ‘shock absorber’.
dandelion: dandelion: [13] Dandelion means literally ‘lion’s tooth’. It was borrowed from French dent-de-lion, which itself was a translation of medieval Latin dēns leōnis. It was presumably so called from the toothlike points of its leaves (although some have speculated that the name comes from the long taproot). The plant has a variety of local dialectal names, many of them (clock, farmer’s clocks, schoolboy’s clock, telltime, time flower) reflecting the traditional practice of telling the time by blowing off all the plant’s tufted seeds (the number of puffs needed indicates the hour). Piss-a-bed, like its French counterpart pissenlit, betrays the plant’s diuretic properties.
=> dentist, lion
flavour: flavour: [14] The form of the word flavour, and probably to some extent its meaning, owe a lot to savour. It was borrowed from Old French flaor, and originally meant ‘smell’ (the current association with ‘taste’ did not develop until the 17th century). The savour-influenced change from flaor to flavour seems to have happened somewhere in the crack between Old French and Middle English: there is no evidence of a -vspelling in Old French.

The Old French word itself came from Vulgar Latin *flātor ‘smell’, a derivative of Latin flātus ‘blowing, breeze, breath’ (possibly influenced by Latin foetor ‘foul smell’). Flātus in turn came from the past participle of flāre ‘blow’.
fuss: fuss: [18] The early use of fuss by Irish-born writers such as Jonathan Swift and George Farquhar has led to the supposition that it is of Anglo-Irish origin, but no substantiation for this has ever been found on the other side of the Irish Sea. Among suggestions as to how it came into being have been that it was an alteration of force, as in the now obsolete phrase make no force of ‘not bother about’, and that it was simply onomatopoeic, imitating the sound of someone puffing and blowing and making a fuss.
mine: mine: English has two quite distinct words mine. The first person possessive pronoun [OE] goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *mīnaz (source also of German mein, Dutch mijn, and Swedish and Danish min), which was derived from the same Indo-European source as produced English me. Originally it was an adjective, but in the 13th century the -n was dropped before consonants, and eventually the resulting my took over the adjective slot altogether, leaving mine as a pronoun only. Mine ‘excavation’ [14] is of uncertain origin.

It comes via Old French from an assumed Vulgar Latin *mina, which may go back ultimately to a Celtic *meini- ‘ore’ (Gaelic has mein ‘ore, mine’ and Welsh mwyn ‘ore’). The use of the word for an ‘explosive device’, which dates from the 17th century, arose from the practice of digging tunnels or ‘mines’ beneath enemy positions and then blowing them up.
=> me, my
ocarina: ocarina: [19] The ocarina, a primitive sort of musical instrument played by blowing, gets its name from a supposed resemblance to a goose (it is shaped like an elongated egg, with a neck-like mouthpiece). Italian ocarina means literally ‘little goose’. It is a diminutive form of oca ‘goose’, which in turn goes back to Latin auca, a derivative of avis ‘bird’.
=> aviary
opportunity: opportunity: [14] Opportunity has its origins in a Latin nautical term denoting ‘favourable winds’. This was opportūnus, a compound adjective formed from the prefix ob- ‘to’ and portus ‘harbour’ (source of English port). It was used originally for winds, ‘blowing towards the harbour’, and since it is good when such advantageous winds arrive, it developed metaphorically to ‘coming at a convenient time’. From it English got opportune [15] and the derived opportunity. Opportunism [19] is a much more recent introduction, which originated in the world of Italian politics.
=> port
raspberry: raspberry: [17] The origins of the word raspberry are a mystery. At first, the fruit was known simply as raspes or raspis (recorded in an Anglo-Latin text as early as the 13th century), and the -berry was not tacked on until the early 17th century – but no one knows where raspes came from. Its use for a ‘rude noise made by blowing’, first recorded in the 1890s, comes from rhyming slang raspberry tart ‘fart’.
sneeze: sneeze: [15] The Old English word for ‘sneeze’ was fnēsan, a distant relative of Greek pneuma ‘breath’ (source of English pneumatic). This survived into Middle English as fnese. The letters f and s were very similar in medieval script, so it could have played a part in the late 15th-century emergence of sneeze. Fnese had largely died out by the early 15th century, and it could well be that when printing got into full swing in the 1490s, with many old manuscript texts being reissued in printed form, printers unfamiliar with the old word fnese assumed it had the much more common initial consonant cluster sn-.

Another factor in the equation is the now obsolete verb neeze ‘sneeze’. This was borrowed in the 14th century from Old Norse hnósja, a descendant of the Indo-European base *ksneu-, which also produced German niesen, Dutch niezen, Swedish nysa, Danish nyse, and Russian chikhat’ ‘sneeze’. It bridged the gap between fnese and sneeze, and the new sneeze no doubt struck people as a more expressive alternative to the old neeze. (Both fnese and neeze go back ultimately to an imitation of the sound of breathing, blowing, or sneezing.)
=> pneumatic
spirit: spirit: [13] Latin spīritus originally meant ‘breath’: it was derived from the verb spīrāre ‘breathe’ (source of English aspire [15], conspire [14], expire [15], inspire [14], perspire [17], respire [14], transpire [16], etc), which probably came ultimately from the prehistoric Indo-European base *speis- or *peis-, imitative of the sound of blowing or breathing out (source also of Old Church Slavonic piskati ‘whistle’, Serbo-Croat pistati ‘hiss’, and Old Norse físa ‘fart’).

But in the Augustan period it gradually began to take over as the word for ‘soul’ from anima (source of English animal, animate, etc), which itself originally denoted ‘breath’, and in Christian Latin writings it was the standard term used.
=> aspire, conspire, expire, inspire, perspire, respire, transpire
aspiration (n.1): 1530s, "action of breathing into," from Latin aspirationem (nominative aspiratio) "a breathing on, a blowing upon; rough breathing; influence," noun of action from past participle stem of aspirare (see aspire). Meaning "steadfast longing for a higher goal, earnest desire for something above one" is recorded from c. 1600 (sometimes collectively, as aspirations).
bellows (n.): c. 1200, belwes, "a bellows," literally "bags," plural of belu, belw, northern form of beli, from late Old English belg "bag, purse, leathern bottle" (see belly (n.)). Reduced from blæstbælg, literally "blowing bag." Used exclusively in plural since 15c., probably due to the two handles or halves.
blast (n.): Old English blæst "blowing, breeze, puff of wind," from Proto-Germanic *bles- (cognates: Old Norse blastr, Old High German blast "a blowing, blast," German blasen, Gothic blesan "to blow"), from PIE *bhle- "to blow," probably a variant of root *bhel- (2) "to blow, inflate, swell" (see bole).

Meaning "explosion" is from 1630s; that of "noisy party, good time" is from 1953, American English slang. Sense of "strong current of air for iron-smelting" (1690s) led to blast furnace and transferred sense in full blast "the extreme" (1839). Blast was the usual word for "a smoke of tobacco" c. 1600.
blister (n.): c. 1300, perhaps via Old French blestre "blister, lump, bump," from a Scandinavian source (compare Old Norse blastr "a blowing," dative blæstri "swelling"), or from Middle Dutch blyster "swelling;" perhaps from PIE *bhlei- "to blow, swell," extension of root *bhel- (2) "to blow, inflate, swell;" see bole.
blow (n.2): "a blowing, a blast," 1650s, from blow (v.1).
dandelion (n.): early 15c., earlier dent-de-lioun (late 14c.), from Middle French dent de lion, literally "lion's tooth" (from its toothed leaves), translation of Medieval Latin dens leonis. Other folk names, like tell-time refer to the custom of telling the time by blowing the white seed (the number of puffs required to blow them all off supposedly being the number of the hour), or to the plant's more authentic diuretic qualities, preserved in Middle English piss-a-bed and French pissenlit.
Favonius: personification of the west wind in Roman mythology, from Latin Favonius, which de Vaan suggests is cognate with the god-name Faunus (see faun), from a prehistoric noun meaning "who favors" (see favor (n.)):
This also yields a good semantic motivation: the wind that stimulates vegetation can be called favourable. Favonius was regarded by the Romans as the herald of spring and the start of new vegetation (e.g. Cato Agr. 50.1, Cicero Ver. 5.27, Lucretius 1.11, Vitruvius 2.9.1).
The Latin word is the source (via Old High German phonno, 10c., via Vulgar Latin contraction *faonius) of German Föhn "warm, dry wind blowing down Alpine valleys." Related: Favonian.
flatulent (adj.): "affected by digestive gas," 1590s, from Middle French flatulent (16c.), from Modern Latin flatulentus, from Latin flatus "a blowing, breathing, snorting; a breaking wind," past participle of flare "to blow, puff," which is cognate with Old English blawan (see blow (v.1)).
flatus (n.): 1660s, "wind in the bowels," from Latin flatus "a blowing," from flare "to blow" (see blow (v.1)).
glass-blower (n.): 1510s, from glass (n.) + blower. Related: Glass-blowing.
glory hole (n.): 1825, "drawer or box where things are heaped together in a disorderly manner." The first element probably is a variant of Scottish glaur "to make muddy, dirty, defile" (Middle English glorien, mid-15c.), which is perhaps from Old Norse leir "mud." Hence, in nautical use, "a small room between decks," and, in mining, "large opening or pit." Meaning "opening through which the interior of a furnace may be seen and reached" (originally in glassblowing) is from 1849, probably from glory (n.), which had developed a sense of "circle or ring of light" by 1690s. Sexual (originally homosexual) sense from 1940s.
jug band (n.): musical ensemble in which the bass line is carried or augmented by a player blowing on the open lip of a jug (n.), 1886, American English.
nirvana (n.): 1836, from Sanskrit nirvana-s "extinction, disappearance" (of the individual soul into the universal), literally "to blow out, a blowing out" ("not transitively, but as a fire ceases to draw;" a literal Latinization would be de-spiration), from nis-, nir- "out" + va- "to blow" (see wind (n.1)). Figurative sense of "perfect bliss" is from 1895.
north-easter (n.): sometimes nor'easter, "wind blowing from the northeast," 1794, from northeast.
ph: now in English usually representing "f," originally it was the combination used by Romans to represent Greek letter phi (cognate with Sanskrit -bh-, Germanic -b-), which at first was an aspirated "p," later the same sound as German -pf-. But by 2c. B.C.E. had become a simple sound made by blowing through the lips (bilabial spirant).

Roman "f," like modern English "f," was dentilabial; by c. 400, however, the sounds had become identical and in some Romanic languages (Italian, Spanish), -ph- regularly was replaced by -f-. This tendency took hold in Old French and Middle English, but with the revival of classical learning the words subsequently were altered back to -ph- (except fancy and fantastic), and due to zealousness in this some non-Greek words in -f- began to appear confusedly in -ph-, though these forms generally have not survived.
pneuma (n.): used in English in various sense, from Greek pneuma "a blowing, a wind, blast; breeze; influence; breathed air, breath; odor, scent; spirit of a person; inspiration, a spirit, ghost," from pnein "to blow, to breathe," from PIE root *pneu- "to breathe," of imitative origin (compare Greek pnoe "breath," pnoia "breathing;" Old English fnora "sneezing," fnæran "to snort").
sea-breeze (n.): one blowing from the sea to the shore, 1690s, from sea + breeze (n.).
sirocco (n.): "hot wind blowing from the Libyan deserts," 1610s, from Italian sirocco, from vulgar Arabic shoruq "the east wind," from Arabic sharqi "eastern, east wind," from sharq "east," from sharaqa "to rise" (in reference to the sun).
torpedo (v.): "destroy or sink (a ship) by a torpedo," 1874, from torpedo (n.). Also used late 19c. of blowing open oil wells. Figurative sense attested from 1895. Related: Torpedoed; torpedoing.
trump (v.2): "fabricate, devise," 1690s, from trump "deceive, cheat" (1510s), from Middle English trumpen (late 14c.), from Old French tromper "to deceive," of uncertain origin. Apparently from se tromper de "to mock," from Old French tromper "to blow a trumpet." Brachet explains this as "to play the horn, alluding to quacks and mountebanks, who attracted the public by blowing a horn, and then cheated them into buying ...." The Hindley Old French dictionary has baillier la trompe "blow the trumpet" as "act the fool," and Donkin connects it rather to trombe "waterspout," on the notion of turning (someone) around. Connection with triumph also has been proposed. Related: Trumped; trumping. Trumped up "false, concocted" first recorded 1728.
wheeze (v.): mid-15c., probably from a Scandinavian source such as Old Norse hvoesa "to hiss," Danish hvæse cognate with Old English hwæst "act of blowing," hwosan "to cough," from an imitative root. Related: Wheezed; wheezing. The noun is first recorded 1834.
whistle (n.): "tubular musical instrument sounded by blowing," Old English hwistle (see whistle (v.)). Meaning "sound formed by pursing the lips and blowing" is from mid-15c. To wet one's whistle "take a drink" (late 14c.) originally may have referred to pipes, or be an allusion to the throat as a sort of pipe. Phrase clean as a whistle is recorded from 1878. Railroad whistle-stop (at which trains stop only if the engineer hears a signal from the station) is recorded from 1934.
wind (n.1): "air in motion," Old English wind "wind," from Proto-Germanic *windaz (cognates: Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Middle Dutch, Dutch wind, Old Norse vindr, Old High German wind, German Wind, Gothic winds), from PIE *we-nt-o- "blowing," from root *we- "to blow" (cognates: Sanskrit va-, Greek aemi-, Gothic waian, Old English wawan, Old High German wajan, German wehen, Old Church Slavonic vejati "to blow;" Sanskrit vatah, Avestan vata-, Hittite huwantis, Latin ventus, Old Church Slavonic vetru, Lithuanian vejas "wind;" Lithuanian vetra "tempest, storm;" Old Irish feth "air;" Welsh gwynt, Breton gwent "wind").

Normal pronunciation evolution made this word rhyme with kind and rind (Donne rhymes it with mind), but it shifted to a short vowel 18c., probably from influence of windy, where the short vowel is natural. A sad loss for poets, who now must rhyme it only with sinned and a handful of weak words. Symbolic of emptiness and vanity since late 13c.
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind. [Ernest Dowson, 1896]
Meaning "breath" is attested from late Old English; especially "breath in speaking" (early 14c.), so long-winded, also "easy or regular breathing" (early 14c.), hence second wind in the figurative sense (by 1830), an image from the sport of hunting.

Winds "wind instruments of an orchestra" is from 1876. Figurative phrase which way the wind blows for "the current state of affairs" is suggested from c. 1400. To get wind of "receive information about" is by 1809, perhaps inspired by French avoir le vent de. To take the wind out of (one's) sails in the figurative sense (by 1883) is an image from sailing, where a ship without wind can make no progress. Wind-chill index is recorded from 1939. Wind energy from 1976. Wind vane from 1725.
wind (v.2): "to perceive by scent, get wind of," c. 1400, from wind (n.1). Of horns, etc., "make sound by blowing through," from 1580s. Meaning "tire, put out of breath; render temporarily breathless" is from 1802, originally in pugilism, in reference to the effect of a punch in the stomach. Related: Winded; winding.
pan pipes: "A musical instrument made from a row of short pipes of varying length fixed together and played by blowing across the top", Originally associated with the Greek rural god Pan.
trade wind: "A wind blowing steadily towards the equator from the north-east in the northern hemisphere or the south-east in the southern hemisphere, especially at sea. Two belts of trade winds encircle the earth, blowing from the tropical high-pressure belts to the low-pressure zone at the equator", Mid 17th century: from the phrase blow trade 'blow steadily in the same direction'. Because of the importance of these winds to navigation, 18th-century etymologists were led erroneously to connect the word trade with ‘commerce’.
shamal: "A hot, dry north-westerly wind blowing across the Persian Gulf in summer, typically causing sandstorms", Late 17th century: from Arabic šamāl 'north (wind)'.