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abbot [abbot 词源字典]: abbot: [OE] Abbot comes ultimately from abbā, a Syriac word meaning ‘father’ (which itself achieved some currency in English, particularly in reminiscence of its biblical use: ‘And he said, Abba, father, all things are possible unto thee’, Mark 14:36). This came into Greek as abbás, and thence, via the Latin accusative abbatem, into Old English as abbud or abbod.

The French term abbé (which is much less specific in meaning than English abbot) comes from the same source. In much the same way as father is used in modern English for priests, abba was widely current in the East for referring to monks, and hence its eventual application to the head of a monastery. A derivative of Latin abbatem was abbatia, which has given English both abbacy [15] and (via Old French abbeie) abbey [13]. Abbess is of similar antiquity (Latin had abbatissa).
=> abbess, abbey[abbot etymology, abbot origin, 英语词源]
abode: abode: see bide
abominable: abominable: [14] The Latin original of this word meant ‘shun as an evil omen’. The prefix ab- ‘away’ was added to ōmen (source of English omen) to produce the verb abōminārī. From this was created the adjective abōminābilis, which reached English via Old French. From the 14th to the 17th century there was a general misapprehension that abominable was derived from Latin ab hominem ‘away from man’, hence ‘beastly, unnatural’.

This piece of fanciful folk etymology not only perpetuated the erroneous spelling abhominable throughout this period, but also seems to have contributed significantly to making the adjective much more strongly condemnatory.
=> omen
abort: abort: see origin
abound: abound: [14] Abound has no connection with bind or bound. Its Latin source means literally ‘overflow’, and its nearest relative among English words is water. Latin undāre ‘flow’ derived from unda ‘wave’ (as in undulate), which has the same ultimate root as water. The addition of the prefix ab- ‘away’ created abundāre, literally ‘flow away’, hence ‘overflow’, and eventually ‘be plentiful’.

The present participial stem of the Latin verb gave English abundant and abundance. In the 14th and 15th centuries it was erroneously thought that abound had some connection with have, and the spelling habound was consequently common.
=> inundate, surround, undulate, water
about: about: [OE] About in Old English times meant ‘around the outside of’; it did not develop its commonest present-day meaning, ‘concerning’, until the 13th century. In its earliest incarnation it was onbūtan, a compound made up of on and būtan ‘outside’ (this is the same word as modern English but, which was itself originally a compound, formed from the ancestors of by and out – so broken down into its ultimate constituents, about is on by out).
=> but, by, out
above: above: [OE] As in the case of about, the a- in above represents on and the -b- element represents by; above (Old English abufan) is a compound based on Old English ufan. This meant both ‘on top’ and ‘down from above’; it is related to over, and is probably descended from a hypothetical West Germanic ancestor *ufana, whose uf- element eventually became modern English up. So in a sense, above means ‘on by up’ or ‘on by over’.
=> by, on, up
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
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
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.
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
bimbo: bimbo: [20] Bimbo most recently made its mark on the English language in the 1980s, when it was in heavy use among journalists to denigrate buxom young women of limited IQ who sold the secrets of their affairs with the rich and famous to the press. It was by no means a newcomer, though. It first crossed the Atlantic to America, from Italy, in the late 1910s. In Italian it means ‘baby’, and US slang took it up in the colloquial sense of baby, for referring to a usually hapless fellow.

By the 1920s it was being applied equally to young women, especially promiscuous or empty-headed ones (the latter feature probably reinforced by the appearance of dumbo ‘fool’ in the early 1930s).
board: board: [OE] Old English bord had a wide range of meanings, whose two main strands (‘plank’ and ‘border, side of a ship’) reveal that it came from two distinct sources: Germanic *bortham and *borthaz respectively (despite their similarity, they have not been shown to be the same word). Related forms in other Germanic languages that point up the dichotomy are Dutch bord ‘shelf’ and boord ‘border, side of a ship’.

The second, ‘edge’ element of board (which is probably related to border) now survives in English only in seaboard (literally the ‘edge of the sea’) and in variations on the phrase on board ship (whose original reference to the ship’s sides is nowadays perceived as relating to the deck). Board ‘food’ (as in ‘board and lodging’), and hence boarder, are metaphorical applications of board ‘table’.
=> border
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’.
boat: boat: [OE] In origin, the word boat seems to be restricted to northern parts of Europe: Old English bāt and Old Norse beit are the only early examples (German boot was borrowed from them, and French bateau comes from the English word). They point to a common Germanic origin in *bait-. It has been speculated that this may be related to bitt ‘post for fastening ship’s cables’. If true, this could mean that boat originally referred to one or other of the structural members of a wooden vessel.
bobby: bobby: [19] The British bobby ‘policeman’ gets his name from the English statesman Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850) – Bobby or Bob being the pet form of Robert. Peel was Home Secretary when the Metropolitan Police Force was formed in 1828, but the term bobby is not actually recorded until 1844. A much earlier application of his name was the now obsolete Peeler, used from 1817 for members of the Irish Constabulary, founded under Peel’s auspices, and later for English policemen.
Boche: Boche: see cabbage
bodice: bodice: [16] Originally, bodice was identical with bodies – that is, the plural of body. This use of body began early in the 16th century, when it referred to the part of a woman’s dress that covered the trunk, as opposed to the arms; and it soon became restricted specifically to the part above the waist. The reason for the adoption of the plural form (which was often used originally in the phrase pair of bodies) was that the upper portion of women’s dresses was usually in two parts, which fastened down the middle. In the 17th and 18th centuries the term bodice was frequently applied to ‘corsets’.
=> body
bodkin: bodkin: [14] A bodkin was originally a small dagger, and only in the 18th century did it develop the perhaps more familiar sense ‘long blunt needle’. Initially it was a three-syllable word, spelled boidekyn, and its origins are mysterious. Most speculation has centred on Celtic as a source. Welsh bidog ‘dagger’ being cited (the -kin is no doubt a diminutive suffix).
body: body: [OE] For a word so central to people’s perception of themselves, body is remarkably isolated linguistically. Old High German had potah ‘body’, traces of which survived dialectally into modern times, but otherwise it is without known relatives in any other Indo- European language. Attempts have been made, not altogether convincingly, to link it with words for ‘container’ or ‘barrel’, such as medieval Latin butica. The use of body to mean ‘person in general’, as in somebody, nobody, got fully under way in the 14th century.
bog: bog: [13] Bog is of Gaelic origin. It comes from bogach ‘bog’, which was a derivative of the adjective bog ‘soft’. A possible link between Gaelic bog and Old English būgan ‘bend’ (source of modern English bow) has been suggested. The British slang use ‘lavatory’, which dates from the 18th century, appears to be short for the slightly earlier bog-house, which may have been an alteration of the 16th-century boggard – quite possibly completely unrelated to bog ‘swamp’.
bogey: bogey: [19] Bogey is one of a set of words relating to alarming or annoying manifestations of the supernatural (others are bogle, bug, bugbear, and possibly boggle and bugaboo) whose interconnections are difficult to sort out. A strand common to most of them is a northern origin, which has led some to suggest an ultimate source in Scandinavia – perhaps an ancestor of Norwegian dialect bugge ‘important man’ (which has also been linked with English big) might lie behind Middle English bugge, originally ‘scarecrow’ but later used for more spectral objects of terror.

Others, however, noting Welsh bwg, bwgan ‘ghost’, have gone with a Celtic origin. Of more recent uses of bogey, ‘policeman’ and ‘nasal mucus’ seem to have appeared between the two World Wars, while ‘golf score of one stroke over par’ is said to have originated at the Great Yarmouth Golf Club in the 1890s, when a certain Major Wellman exclaimed, during the course of a particularly trying round, that he must be playing against the ‘bogey-man’ (a figure in a popular song of the time). Bogie ‘undercarriage’ [19] is a different word (of if anything obscurer origin than bogey).
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
bold: bold: [OE] In Old English, bold meant simply ‘brave’; the modern connotations of immodesty or presumptuousness do not seem to have developed until the 12th century. The word goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *balthaz, based ultimately, it has been speculated, on Indo- European *bhel- ‘swell’ (the psychological link through ‘being puffed up’ via ‘adventurous courage’ to ‘audacity’ is scarcely far-fetched). If this is so it would mean bold is related to bellows, belly, billow, bolster, and possibly bellow and bell. The notion of impetuosity is perhaps retained in the related German bald ‘soon’.
=> bell, bellows, belly, billow, bolster
bollock: bollock: see ball
bolshevik: bolshevik: [20] Russian bol’ shévik is a derivative of ból’ shiy, the comparative form of the adjective ból’ shoy ‘big’. It was originally applied, at the 1903 congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party, to those party members who wished to go for a ‘big’, or extreme, socialist programme (in contrast with the more moderate Mensheviks – from Russian mén’ shij ‘less’); but since the Bolsheviks outnumbered the Mensheviks, the word soon became interpreted as ‘those in the majority in the party’. The transferred use of the English abbreviation bolshy to mean ‘stubbornly uncooperative’ dates from around 1918.
=> debility
bolster: bolster: [OE] The idea underlying bolster ‘long pillow’ is of something stuffed, so that it swells up. It comes from a prehistoric Germanic *bolstraz, which was a derivative of *bolg-, *bulg- (source also of bellows, belly, billow and possibly bell, bellow, and bold). German has the related polster ‘cushion, pillow’.
=> bell, bellow, belly, billow, bold
bolt: bolt: [OE] In Old English, a bolt was an arrow, particularly of the short stout variety used in crossbows (hence the phrase shoot one’s bolt). The more familiar modern sense ‘fastening pin’ developed in the 13th century. The verbal sense ‘make a quick escape’ comes from the notion of firing a projectile. The word appears in other Germanic languages (for instance German bolz ‘bolt’), but its ultimate origin is unknown.
bomb: bomb: [17] Bomb is ultimately of onomatopoeic origin, and can probably be traced back to Greek bómbos, a word for a booming or buzzing sound. This passed into Latin as bombus, the probable source of Italian bomba, which acquired more explosive connotations. English got the word via French bombe. The derivative bombard preceded bomb into English, in the 15th century.
=> bound
bombast: bombast: [16] Bombast originally meant ‘cotton-wool’, especially as used for stuffing or padding clothes, upholstery, etc; hence, before the end of the 16th century, it had been transferred metaphorically to ‘pompous or turgid language’. The ultimate source of the word was Greek bómbux ‘silk, silkworm’, which came into English via Latin bombyx, bombax (source also of English bombazine [16]) and Old French bombace. The earliest English form was bombace, but it soon developed an additional final -t.
=> bombazine
bonanza: bonanza: [19] Bonanza entered the language via American English from Spanish, where bonanza means ‘prosperity’, or literally ‘good weather’. It came from an unrecorded general Romance *bonacia, a derivative of Latin bonus ‘good’. (Other English words acquired ultimately from bonus – a descendant of Old Latin duenos – include bonbon [19], bonus [18], boon [14] (as in ‘boon companion’), bounty [13] (from Latin bonitas ‘goodness’), and perhaps bonny [15].) It appears to have been formed on the analogy of Latin malacia, as if this meant ‘bad weather’, from malus ‘bad’, although it in fact originally meant ‘calm at sea’, from Greek malakós.
=> bonbon, bonny, bonus, boon, bounty
bond: bond: English has two distinct words bond, which started life very differently but have gradually grown together. Bond ‘something that binds’ [13] was originally the same word as band (from Old Norse band), and only gradually diverged from it in pronunciation, spelling, and meaning. The key modern legal and financial senses began to develop in the 16th century, the underlying notion being of something one is ‘bound’ or ‘tied’ to by a promise. Bond ‘bound in slavery’ [14], as in bondservant, is an adjectival use of the late Old English noun bonda ‘householder’, which came from Old Norse bóndi (the second element of húsbóndi, from which English gets husband).

This represented an earlier bóandi, which was originally the present participle of east Norse bóa ‘dwell’, a derivative of the Germanic base *bū- ‘dwell’, (from which English also gets be, boor, booth, bower, build, burly, byelaw, and byre). The semantic association of ‘tying up’ and ‘servitude’ has led to the merging of the two words, as shown in the derivative bondage.
=> band; be, boor, booth, build, byelaw, neighbour
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’.
bonfire: bonfire: [14] A bonfire was originally a fire in which bones were burned. References to such (presumably rather evil-smelling) fires, which were large open air affairs, continue down to the 18th century, but latterly they have a distinctly antiquarian air, as if such things were a thing of the past. By the later 15th century the word was already passing to the more general modern meaning ‘large outdoor fire’, either celebratory (as in Bonfire Night, 5 November) or for destroying refuse.
=> bone
bonus: bonus: see beauty
book: book: [OE] Book is widespread throughout the Germanic languages. German has buch, for example, Dutch bock, and Swedish bok. There point to a prehistoric Germanic *bōks, which was probably related to *bōkā ‘beech’, the connection being that the early Germanic peoples used beechwood tablets for writing runic inscriptions on. The original meaning of the word in Old English (bōc) was simply ‘written document or record’, but by the 9th century it had been applied to a collection of written sheets fastened together.
=> beech
boom: boom: see beam
boor: boor: [15] Boor was borrowed into English either from Low German hūr or from Dutch boer (Boer ‘Dutch colonist in South Africa’ is a later, 19thcentury borrowing). When first acquired it meant ‘peasant farmer’, and did not develop its modern explicit connotations of coarseness and rudeness until the 16th century. Its ultimate source was the Germanic base *bū- ‘dwell’, so its original meaning was something like ‘person who lives in a particular place’ (the related neighbour was literally ‘someone who lives nearby’).

Other English words from the same source include be, booth, bound ‘intending to go’, bower, build, burly, byelaw, byre, and the -band of husband.
=> be, boer, booth, bower, build, burly, byelaw, byre, husband, neighbour
boot: boot: [14] Boot is a comparatively late acquisition by English. It came, either directly or via Old Norse bóti, from Old French bote, whose source is unknown. The modern British sense ‘car’s luggage compartment’ goes back to a 17thcentury term for an outside compartment for attendants on a coach, which may have come directly from modern French botte. The boot of ‘to boot’ is a completely different word. It comes from Old English bōt ‘advantage, remedy’, which can be traced back to a prehistoric Germanic base *bat-, source also of better and best.
=> best, better
booth: booth: [12] In common with a wide range of other English words, including bower and the -bour of neighbour, booth comes ultimately from the Germanic base *bū- ‘dwell’. From this source came the East Norse verb bóa ‘dwell’ (whose present participle produced English bond and the -band of husband); addition of the suffix -th produced the unrecorded noun bóth. ‘dwelling’, which came into Middle English as bōth.
=> be, boor, bower, husband, neighbour
booty: booty: [15] Booty has no connection with boots. It came into English as butin (it did not finally lose its n until the 18th century), a borrowing from Old French butin, but Old French had got it from Middle Low German būte ‘exchange’ (whence German beute and Dutch buit ‘loot’), pointing to a prehistoric Germanic source *būtiōn.
=> filibuster, freebooter
booze: booze: [13] This word seems to have been borrowed on two distinct and widely separate occasions from Middle Dutch būsen ‘drink much alcohol’ (which some have connected with Middle High German būs ‘swelling’). In the 13th century this gave Middle English bouse, which if it had continued to the present day would have rhymed with the verb house. However, in the 16th century the Middle Dutch word was reborrowed, giving modern English booze.
borage: borage: [13] The plant-name borage comes via Old French bourrache from Latin borrāgo. Various words have been advanced as an ultimate source, including late Latin burra ‘shaggy cloth’, on account of its hairy leaves, but in view of the fact that the Arabs used the plant medicinally to induce sweating, the likeliest contender is Arabic abū ‘āraq, literally ‘father of sweat’.
border: border: [14] English acquired border from Old French bordure. This came from the common Romance verb *bordāre ‘border’, which was based on *bordus ‘edge’, a word of Germanic origin whose source, *borthaz, was the same as that of English board in the sense ‘side of a ship’.
=> board
bore: bore: Bore ‘make a hole’ [OE] and bore ‘be tiresome’ [18] are almost certainly two distinct words. The former comes ultimately from an Indo-European base *bhor-, *bhr-, which produced Latin forāre ‘bore’ (whence English foramen ‘small anatomical opening’), Greek phárynx, and prehistoric Germanic *borōn, from which we get bore (and German gets bohren). Bore connoting ‘tiresomeness’ suddenly appears on the scene as a sort of buzzword of the 1760s, from no known source; the explanation most commonly offered for its origin is that it is a figurative application of bore in the sense ‘pierce someone with ennui’, but that is not terribly convincing.

In its early noun use it meant what we would now call a ‘fit of boredom’. There is one other, rather rare English word bore – meaning ‘tidal wave in an estuary or river’ [17]. It may have come from Old Norse bára ‘wave’.
=> perforate, pharynx
born: born: [OE] The Old English past participle of the verb meaning ‘bear’ was boren. By Middle English times this had become contracted to born(e), but no distinction in meaning was made on the basis of spelling. This did not come about until around 1600, since when born has become established as the obstetric orthography, while borne remains the straightforward past participle of bear ‘carry’.
=> bear
borough: borough: [OE] Borough (Old English burg or burh) comes from Germanic *burgs ‘fortress’ (whence also German burg ‘castle, stronghold’). It was a derivative of the base *burg- ‘protect’ (whence also bury), a variant of *berg- (source of English barrow ‘mound’ and German berg ‘mountain’) and *borg- (source of English borrow).

At some time during the prehistoric Germanic period a progression in meaning began to take place from ‘fortress’ (which had largely died out in English by 1000), through ‘fortified town’, to simply ‘town’. Romance languages borrowed the word, giving for instance French bourg, from which English gets burgess [13] and bourgeois [16]. Burrow [13] is probably a variant form.
=> bourgeois, burgess, burrow, bury
borrow: borrow: [OE] Modern English borrow is a descendant of Old English borgian, which came from the Germanic base *borg-. This was a variant of *berg- (source of English barrow ‘mound’) and *burg- (source of English borough and bury). The underlying sense of the Germanic base was ‘protection, shelter’, and the development of meaning in the case of borrow seems to have been like this: originally, to borrow something from somebody was to receive it temporarily from them in return for some sort of security, which would be forfeited if the thing borrowed were not kept safe and eventually returned.

Gradually, the notion of giving some sort of concrete security, such as money, weakened into a spoken pledge, which by modern times had become simply the unspoken assumption that anything that has been borrowed must by definition be returned.
=> barrow, borough, bury
bosom: bosom: [OE] The immediate source of Old English bōsm was West Germanic *bösm-, which also produced German busen and Dutch boezem. It has been conjectured that it may come ultimately from Indo-European *bhāghús, which perhaps meant ‘arm’ (source of English bought and possibly bow, as in ‘ship’s bow’); the early occurrence of phrases like ‘in someone’s bosom’ meaning ‘clasped to someone’s chest, in someone’s arms’ may support this.
=> bough, bow