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absolute [absolute 词源字典]: absolute: [14] Absolute, absolution, and absolve all come ultimately from the same source: Latin absolvere ‘set free’, a compound verb made up from the prefix ab- ‘away’ and the verb solvere ‘loose’ (from which English gets solve and several other derivatives, including dissolve and resolve). From the 13th to the 16th century an alternative version of the verb, assoil, was in more common use than absolve; this came from the same Latin original, but via Old French rather than by a direct route.

The t of absolute and absolution comes from the past participial stem of the Latin verb – absolūt-. The noun, the adjective, and the verb have taken very different routes from their common semantic starting point, the notion of ‘setting free’: absolve now usually refers to freeing from responsibility and absolution to the remitting of sins, while absolute now means ‘free from any qualification or restriction’.
=> dissolve, resolve, solve[absolute etymology, absolute origin, 英语词源]
accoutre: accoutre: [16] Accoutre is related to both couture and sew. English borrowed it from French accoutrer, which meant ‘equip with something, especially clothes’. A stage earlier, Old French had acoustrer, formed from cousture (whence couture) and the prefix a-. This came from Vulgar Latin *consūtūra, literally ‘sewn together’, from con- ‘together’ and sūtūra ‘sewn’ (whence English suture); sūtūra in turn came from the past participial stem of Latin suere, which derived from the same Indo- European root as English sew.
=> couture, sew, suture
adamant: adamant: [14] In Greek, adamas meant ‘unbreakable, invincible’. It was formed from the verb daman ‘subdue, break down’ (which came from the same source as English tame) plus the negative prefix a-. It developed a noun usage as a ‘hard substance’, specifically ‘diamond’ or ‘very hard metal’, and this passed into Latin as adamāns, or, in its stem form, adamant-. Hence Old French adamaunt, and eventually English adamant.
=> diamond, tame
adjourn: adjourn: [14] Adjourn originally meant ‘appoint a day for’, but over the centuries, such is human nature, it has come to be used for postponing, deferring, or suspending. It originated in the Old French phrase à jour nomé ‘to an appointed day’, from which the Old French verb ajourner derived. Jour ‘day’ came from late Latin diurnum, a noun formed from the adjective diurnus ‘daily’, which in turn was based on the noun diēs ‘day’.
=> diary, journal
admonish: admonish: [14] In Middle English times this verb was amoneste. It came, via Old French amonester, from an assumed Vulgar Latin verb *admonestāre, an alteration of Latin admonēre (monēre meant ‘warn’, and came from the same source as English mind). The prefix ad- was reintroduced from Latin in the 15th century, while the -ish ending arose from a mistaken analysis of -este as some sort of past tense inflection; the t was removed when producing infinitive or present tense forms, giving spellings such as amonace and admonyss, and by the 16th century this final -is had become identified with and transformed into the more common -ish ending.
=> mind
advertise: advertise: [15] When it was originally borrowed into English, from French, advertise meant ‘notice’. It comes ultimately from the Latin verb advertere ‘turn towards’ (whose past participle adversus ‘hostile’ is the source of English adverse [14] and adversity [13]). A later variant form, advertīre, passed into Old French as avertir ‘warn’ (not to be confused with the avertir from which English gets avert [15] and averse [16], which came from Latin abvertere ‘turn away’).

This was later reformed into advertir, on the model of its Latin original, and its stem form advertiss- was taken into English, with its note of ‘warning’ already softening into ‘giving notice of’, or simply ‘noticing’. The modern sense of ‘describing publicly in order to increase sales’ had its beginnings in the mid 18th century. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the verb was pronounced with the main stress on its second syllable, like the advertise- in advertisement.
=> adverse, adversity, verse
age: age: [13] Age has undergone considerable transmutations and abbreviations since its beginnings in Latin. Its immediate source in English is Old French aage, which was the product of a hypothetical Vulgar Latin form *aetāticum (the t is preserved in Provençal atge). This was based on Latin aetāt- (stem of aetās), which was a shortening of aevitās, which in turn came from aevum ‘lifetime’.

This entered English in more recognizable form in medieval, primeval, etc; it is related to Greek aión ‘age’, from which English gets aeon [17], and it can be traced back to the same root that produced (via Old Norse eí) the now archaic adverb ay(e) ‘ever’ (as in ‘will aye endure’).
=> aeon, aye
agog: agog: [15] Agog probably comes from Old French gogue ‘merriment’. It was used in the phrase en gogue, meaning ‘enjoying oneself’ (Randle Cotgrave, in his Dictionarie of the French and English tongues 1611, defines estre en ses gogues as ‘to be frolicke, lustie, lively, wanton, gamesome, all-a-hoit, in a pleasant humour; in a veine of mirth, or in a merrie mood’), and this was rendered into English as agog, with the substitution of the prefix a- (as in asleep) for en and the meaning toned down a bit to ‘eager’.

It is not clear where gogue came from (it may perhaps be imitative of noisy merrymaking), but later in its career it seems to have metamorphosed into go-go, either through reduplication of its first syllable (gogue had two syllables) or through assimilation of the second syllable to the first: hence the French phrase à go-go ‘joyfully’, and hence too English go-go dancers.
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
ail: ail: [OE] Now virtually obsolete except in the metaphorical use of its present participial adjective ailing, ail is of long but uncertain history. The Old English verb egl(i)an came from the adjective egle ‘troublesome’, which had related forms in other Germanic languages, such as Middle Low German egelen ‘annoy’ and Gothic agls ‘disgraceful’, aglo ‘oppression’. The derivative ailment did not appear until as late as the 18th century.
air: air: [13] Modern English air is a blend of three strands of meaning from, ultimately, two completely separate sources. In the sense of the gas we breathe it goes back via Old French air and Latin āēr to Greek áēr ‘air’ (whence the aero-compounds of English; see AEROPLANE). Related words in Greek were áērni ‘I blow’ and aúrā ‘breeze’ (from which English acquired aura in the 18th century), and cognates in other Indo-European languages include Latin ventus ‘wind’, English wind, and nirvana ‘extinction of existence’, which in Sanskrit meant literally ‘blown out’.

In the 16th century a completely new set of meanings of air arrived in English: ‘appearance’ or ‘demeanour’. The first known instance comes in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, IV, i: ‘The quality and air of our attempt brooks no division’ (1596). This air was borrowed from French, where it probably represents an earlier, Old French, aire ‘nature, quality’, whose original literal meaning ‘place of origin’ (reflected in another derivative, eyrie) takes it back to Latin ager ‘place, field’, source of English agriculture and related to acre. (The final syllable of English debonair [13] came from Old French aire, incidentally; the phrase de bon aire meant ‘of good disposition’.) The final strand in modern English air comes via the Italian descendant of Latin āēr, aria.

This had absorbed the ‘nature, quality’ meanings of Old French aire, and developed them further to ‘melody’ (perhaps on the model of German weise, which means both ‘way, manner’ and ‘tune’ – its English cognate wise, as in ‘in no wise’, meant ‘song’ from the 11th to the 13th centuries). It seems likely that English air in the sense ‘tune’ is a direct translation of the Italian.

Here again, Shakespeare got in with it first – in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I, i: ‘Your tongue’s sweet air more tunable than lark to shepherd’s ear’ (1590). (Aria itself became an English word in the 18th century.)
=> acre, aeroplane, agriculture, aria, aura, eyrie, malaria, wind
albatross: albatross: [17] The word albatross has a confused history. The least uncertain thing about it is that until the late 17th century it was alcatras; the change of the first element to albaseems to have arisen from association of the albatross’s white colour with Latin albus ‘white’. However, which particular bird the alcatras was, and where the word alcatras ultimately came from, are much more dubious.

The term was applied variously, over the 16th to the 19th centuries, to albatrosses, frigate birds, gannets, gulls, and pelicans. Its immediate source was Spanish and Portuguese alcatraz ‘pelican’ (hence Alcatraz, the prison-island in San Francisco Bay, USA, once the haunt of pelicans), which was clearly of Arabic origin, and it has been speculated that it comes from Arabic al qādūs ‘the bucket’, on the premise that the bucket of a water-wheel used for irrigation resembles a pelican’s beak.

Arabic qādūs itself comes from Greek kádos ‘jar’.
alien: alien: [14] The essential notion contained in alien is of ‘otherness’. Its ultimate source is Latin alius ‘other’ (which is related to English else). From this was formed a Latin adjective aliēnus ‘belonging to another person or place’, which passed into English via Old French alien. In Middle English an alternative version alient arose (in the same way as ancient, pageant, and tyrant came from earlier ancien, pagin, and tyran), but this died out during the 17th century.

The verb alienate ‘estrange’ or ‘transfer to another’s ownership’ entered the language in the mid 16th century, eventually replacing an earlier verb alien (source of alienable and inalienable).
=> alibi, else
alley: alley: [14] Alley is related to French aller ‘go’. Old French aler (which came from Latin ambulāre ‘walk’, source of English amble and ambulance) produced the derived noun alee ‘act of walking’, hence ‘place where one walks, passage’.
=> amble, ambulance
ally: ally: [13] The verb ally was borrowed into English from Old French alier, an alteration of aleier (a different development of the Old French word was aloier, which English acquired as alloy). This came from Latin alligāre ‘bind one thing to another’, a derivative of ligāre ‘tie’; hence the idea etymologically contained in being ‘allied’ is of having a bond with somebody else.

The noun ally seems originally to have been independently borrowed from Old French allié in the 14th century, with the meaning ‘relative’. The more common modern sense, ‘allied person or country’, appeared in the 15th century, and is probably a direct derivative of the English verb.
=> alloy, ligament
alms: alms: [OE] The word alms has become much reduced in its passage through time from its ultimate Greek source, eleēmosúnē ‘pity, alms’. This was borrowed into post-classical (Christian) Latin as eleēmosyna, which subsequently became simplified in Vulgar Latin to *alimosina (source of the word for ‘alms’ in many Romance languages, such as French aumône and Italian limosina).

At this stage Germanic borrowed it, and in due course dispersed it (German almosen, Dutch aalmoes). It entered Old English as ælmesse, which became reduced in Middle English to almes and finally by the 17th century to alms (which because of its -s had come to be regarded as a plural noun). The original Greek eleēmosúnē is itself a derivative, of the adjective eleémōn ‘compassionate’, which in turn came from the noun éleos ‘pity’.

From medieval Latin eleēmosyna was derived the adjective eleēmosynarius (borrowed into English in the 17th century as the almost unpronounceable eleemosynary ‘giving alms’). Used as a noun, this passed into Old French as a(u)lmonier, and eventually, in the 13th century, became English aumoner ‘giver of alms’. The modern sense of almoner as a hospital social worker did not develop until the end of the 19th century.
=> almoner, eleemosynary
also: also: [OE] Also was a late Old English compound formed from all ‘exactly, even’ and swa ‘so’; it meant ‘in just this way, thus’, and hence (recalling the meaning of German also ‘therefore’) ‘similarly’. These two uses died out in, respectively, the 15th and 17th centuries, but already by the 13th century ‘similarly’ was developing into the current sense ‘in addition’. As came from also in the 12th century. In Old English, the notion of ‘in addition’ now expressed by also was verbalized as eke.
=> as
altar: altar: [OE] The etymological notion underlying the word altar is that of sacrificial burning. Latin altar, which was borrowed directly into Old English, was a derivative of the plural noun altāria, ‘burnt offerings’, which probably came from the verb adolēre ‘burn up’. Adolēre in turn appears to be a derivative of olēre ‘smell’ (the connection being the smell made by combustion), which is related to English odour, olfactory, and redolent. (The traditional view that altar derives from Latin altus ‘high’ is no longer generally accepted, although no doubt it played a part, by association, in its development.) In Middle English, the Old French form auter replaced altar, but in the 16th century the Latin form re-established itself.
=> odour, olfactory, redolent
ambergris: ambergris: [15] The original term for ambergris (a waxy material from the stomach of the sperm whale) was amber. But as confusion began to arise between the two substances amber and ambergris, amber came to be used for both in all the languages that had borrowed it from Arabic, thus compounding the bewilderment. The French solution was to differentiate ambergris as ambre gris, literally ‘grey amber’, and this eventually became the standard English term. (Later on, the contrastive term ambre jaune ‘yellow amber’ was coined for ‘amber’ in French.) Uncertainty over the identity of the second element, -gris, has led to some fanciful reformulations of the word.

In the 17th century, many people thought ambergris came from Greece – hence spellings such as amber-degrece and amber-greece. And until comparatively recently its somewhat greasy consistency encouraged the spelling ambergrease.
=> amber
amiable: amiable: [14] Amiable and amicable are the two English descendants of that most familiar of Latin verbs, amo, amas, amat … ‘love’. It had two rather similar adjectives derived from it: amābilis ‘lovable’ and, via amīcus ‘friend’, amīcābilis ‘friendly’ (source of English amicable [15]). Amīcābilis became in French amiable, and this was borrowed into English as amiable, but its meaning was subsequently influenced by that of French aimable ‘likeable, lovable’, which came from Latin amābilis.
=> amicable
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
anecdote: anecdote: [17] In Greek, anékdotos meant ‘unpublished’. It was formed from the negative prefix an- and ékdotos, which in turn came from the verb didónai ‘give’ (a distant cousin of English donation and date) plus the prefix ek- ‘out’ – hence ‘give out, publish’. The use of the plural anékdota by the 6th-century Byzantine historian Procopius as the title of his unpublished memoirs of the life of the Emperor Justinian, which revealed juicy details of court life, played a major part in the subsequent use of Latin anecdota for ‘revelations of secrets’, the sense which anecdote had when it first came into English.

The meaning ‘brief amusing story’ did not develop until the mid 18th century.
=> date, donation
angel: angel: [12] In a sense, English already had this word in Anglo-Saxon times; texts of around 950 mention englas ‘angels’. But in that form (which had a hard g) it came directly from Latin angelus. The word we use today, with its soft g, came from Old French angele (the ‘hard g’ form survived until the 13th century). The French word was in its turn, of course, acquired from Latin, which adopted it from Greek ángelos or ággelos.

This meant literally ‘messenger’, and its use in religious contexts arises from its being used as a direct translation of Hebrew mal’ākh ‘messenger’, the term used in the scriptures for God’s intermediaries. The Greek word itself may be of Persian origin.
=> evangelist
angle: angle: There have been two distinct words angle in English. The older is now encountered virtually only in its derivatives, angler and angling, but until the early 19th century an angle was a ‘fishing hook’ (or, by extension, ‘fishing tackle’). It entered the language in the Old English period, and was based on Germanic *angg- (source also of German angel ‘fishing tackle’).

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

It came from Latin angulus ‘corner’, either directly or via French angle. The Latin word was originally a diminutive of *angus, which is related to other words that contain the notion of ‘bending’, such as Greek ágkūra (ultimate source of English anchor) and English ankle. They all go back to Indo-European *angg- ‘bent’, and it has been speculated that the fishhook angle, with its temptingly bent shape, may derive from the same source.
=> english; anchor, ankle
anguish: anguish: [13] English acquired anguish from Old French anguisse, changing its ending to -ish in the 14th century. Its central notion of ‘distress’ or ‘suffering’ goes back ultimately (as in the case of the related anger) to a set of words meaning ‘constriction’ (for the sense development, compare the phrase in dire straits, where strait originally meant ‘narrow’).

Old French anguisse came from Latin angustia ‘distress’, which was derived from the adjective angustus ‘narrow’. Like Greek ánkhein ‘squeeze, strangle’ (ultimate source of English angina [16]) and Latin angere ‘strangle’, this came originally from an Indo-European base *angg- ‘narrow’.
=> anger, angina
annex: annex: [14] The verb annex entered English about a century and a half before the noun. It came from French annexer, which was formed from the past participial stem of Latin annectere ‘tie together’ (a verb annect, borrowed directly from this, was in learned use in English from the 16th to the 18th centuries). Annectere itself was based on the verb nectere ‘tie’, from which English also gets nexus and connect. The noun was borrowed from French annexe, and in the sense ‘extra building’ retains its -e.
=> connect, nexus
answer: answer: [OE] Etymologically, the word answer contains the notion of making a sworn statement rebutting a charge. It comes from a prehistoric West and North Germanic compound *andswarō; the first element of this was the prefix *and- ‘against’, related to German ent- ‘away, un-’ and to Greek anti-, source of English anti-; and the second element came from the same source as English swear.

In Old English, the Germanic compound became andswaru (noun) and andswarian (verb) ‘reply’, which by the 14th century had been reduced to answer. The synonymous respond has a similar semantic history: Latin respondēre meant ‘make a solemn promise in return’, hence ‘reply’. And, as another element in the jigsaw, Swedish ansvar means ‘responsibility’ – a sense echoed by English answerable.
=> swear
anvil: anvil: [OE] Etymologically, an anvil is ‘something on which you hit something else’. The Old English word was anfīlte, which came from a prehistoric West Germanic compound formed from *ana ‘on’ and a verbal component meaning ‘hit’ (which was also the source of English felt, Latin pellere ‘hit’, and Swedish dialect filta ‘hit’). It is possible that the word may originally have been a loan-translation based on the Latin for ‘anvil’, incūs; for this too was a compound, based on in ‘in’ and the stem of the verb cūdere ‘hit’ (related to English hew).
=> appeal
aplomb: aplomb: [18] Originally, aplomb meant literally ‘quality of being perpendicular’. It was borrowed from French, where it was a lexicalization of the phrase à plomb ‘according to the plumb line’ (plomb came from Latin plumbum ‘lead’, also the ultimate source of English plumb, plumber, plumbago, and plummet). The notion of ‘uprightness’ gave rise in the 19th century to the metaphorical sense ‘composure’.
=> plumb, plumber, plummet
apostle: apostle: [OE] Apostle was an early borrowing into Old English from Latin, and like angel it originally meant ‘messenger’. Latin apostolus came from Greek apóstolos ‘messenger’, or literally ‘someone sent out’; this was a compound formed from the prefix apo- ‘away’ and the verb stéllein ‘send’ (related to English stall and local). The Old English form, apostol, was gradually replaced from the 12th century by apostle, from Old French apostle.
=> epistle, local, stall
apparel: apparel: [13] Apparel has the same source as apparatus, and originally it had the same meaning, too: until as late as the start of the 18th century, it was used for ‘equipment needed for performing a particular function’. But the sense ‘clothing’ is of equal antiquity in English, and by the 16th century it had become established as the central meaning of the word. Its immediate source was Old French apareil (modern French appareil means chiefly ‘apparatus’), which came from a hypothetical Vulgar Latin verb *appariculāre, an irregular formation based on Latin apparāre ‘make ready’ (see APPARATUS).
=> parent, prepare
appoint: appoint: [14] Appoint came from the Old French verb apointier ‘arrange’, which was based on the phrase a point, literally ‘to a point’. Hints of the original meaning can still be found in some of the verb’s early uses in English, in the sense ‘settle a matter decisively’, but its main modern meanings, ‘fix by prior arrangement’ and ‘select for a post’, had become established by the mid 15th century.
=> point
appraise: appraise: [15] Originally, appraise meant simply ‘fix the price of’. It came from the Old French verb aprisier ‘value’, which is ultimately a parallel formation with appreciate; it is not clear whether it came directly from late Latin appretiāre, or whether it was a newly formed compound in Old French, based on pris ‘price’. Its earliest spellings in English were thus apprize and apprise, and these continued in use down to the 19th century, with the more metaphorical meaning ‘estimate the worth of’ gradually coming to the fore.

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

It comes from appris, the past participle of French apprendre ‘teach’ (closely related to English apprehend).
=> appreciate, price
apron: apron: [14] As in the case of adder, umpire, and many others, apron arose from a mistaken analysis of the combination ‘indefinite article + noun’. The original Middle English word was napron, but as early as the 15th century a napron had turned into an apron. Napron itself had been borrowed from Old French naperon, a derivative of nape ‘cloth’ (source of English napery and napkin); and nape came from Latin mappa ‘napkin, towel’ (source of English map).
=> map, mat, napkin
arcane: arcane: [16] Arcane comes from the Latin adjective arcānus ‘hidden, secret’. This was formed from the verb arcēre ‘close up’, which in turn came from arca ‘chest, box’ (source of English ark). The neuter form of the adjective, arcānum, was used to form a noun, usually used in the plural, arcāna ‘mysterious secrets’.
=> ark
arid: arid: [17] English acquired arid from Latin aridus, either directly or via French aride. The Latin adjective is part of a web of related words denoting ‘dryness’ or ‘burning’: it came from the verb ārēre ‘be dry’, which may be the source of area; it seems to have connections with a prehistoric Germanic *azgon, source of English ash ‘burnt matter’, and with Greek azaléos ‘dry’, source of English azalea [18] (so named from its favouring dry soil); and the Latin verb ardēre ‘burn’ was derived from it, from which English gets ardour [14], ardent [14], and arson.
=> ardour, area, arson, ash, azalea
artery: artery: [14] Artery is a direct borrowing from Latin artēria, which in turn came from Greek artēria. This appears to have been based on the root *ar- ‘lift’. A parallel formation is thus aorta ‘main coronary artery’ [16], which comes from Greek aortē, a derivative of aeírein ‘lift’ – again ultimately from the root *ar-.

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

Hence Hippocrates’ application of the term aorta to branches of the windpipe, and the use of artery for ‘windpipe’ in English up until as late as the mid 17th century: ‘[The lungs] expel the air: which through the artery, throat and mouth, makes the voice’, Francis Bacon, Sylva sylvarum 1626.
=> aorta
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
asbestos: asbestos: [14] Originally, the word we now know as asbestos was applied in the Middle Ages to a mythical stone which, once set alight, could never be put out; it came from the Greek compound ásbestos, literally ‘inextinguishable’, which was formed from the prefix a- ‘not’ and sbestós, a derivative of the verb sbennúnai ‘extinguish’. However, by the time it first came into English, its form was not quite what it is today.

To begin with, it was the Greek accusative form, ásbeston, that was borrowed, and in its passage from Latin through Old French it developed several variants, including asbeston and albeston, most of which turned up in English. Then, in the early 17th century, the word was reborrowed from the original Greek source, ásbestos, and applied to a noncombustible silicate mineral.
assist: assist: [15] Etymologically, assist means ‘stand by’. It comes, via French assister, from Latin assistere, a compound verb formed from the prefix ad- ‘near’ and sistere ‘stand’ (related to Latin stāre ‘stand’, from which English gets state, station, status, statue, etc). A remnant of this original meaning survives in the sense ‘be present without actually participating’, but the main use of the word in English has always been that which came from the metaphorical sense of the Latin verb – ‘help’.
=> state, station, statue, status
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
audible: audible: [16] Audible is one of a wide range of English words based ultimately on the Latin verb audīre ‘hear’ (which came from the Indo- European root *awiz-, source also of Greek aithánesthai ‘perceive’ and Sanskrit āvis ‘evidently’). Others include audience [14], audio- [20], audit [15] (from Latin audītus ‘hearing’; audits were originally done by reading the accounts out loud), audition [16], and auditorium [17].
=> obey, oyez
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
awl: awl: [OE] The Old English form, æl, came from a hypothetical Germanic base *āl-, which had a probable relative in Sanskrit ārā. The compound bradawl was formed in the 19th century using the term brad ‘thin flat nail’, which came originally from Old Norse broddr ‘spike’. Awls, tools for making holes to take nails, are part of the shoemaker’s traditional set of implements: hence the apparently quite recent, early 20thcentury rhyming slang cobbler’s awls (cobblers for short) for ‘balls’.
axle: axle: [17] The word axle emerges surprisingly late considering the antiquity of axles, but related terms had existed in the language for perhaps a thousand years. Old English had eax, which came from a hypothetical Germanic *akhsō, related to Latin axis. This survived in the compound ax-tree until the 17th century (later in Scotland); tree in this context meant ‘beam’.

But from the early 14th century the native ax-tree began to be ousted by Old Norse öxultré (or as it became in English axle-tree); the element öxull came from a prehistoric Germanic *akhsulaz, a derivative of *akhsō. Axle first appeared on its own in the last decade of the 16th century (meaning ‘axis’, a sense it has since lost), and became firmly established in the early 17th century.
backgammon: backgammon: [17] Backgammon appears to mean literally ‘back game’, although the reason for the name is far from clear (gammon had been used since at least the early 18th century for a particular type of victory in the game, but it is hard to say whether the term for the victory came from the term for the game, or vice versa). Either way, gammon represents Old English gamen, the ancestor of modern English game. The game backgammon goes back far further than the 17th century, of course, but before that it was called tables in English.
=> game
ballet: ballet: [17] Etymologically, a ballet is a ‘little dance’. English acquired the word, via French ballet, from Italian balletto, a diminutive of ballo ‘dance’, related to English ball (the diminutive of Italian balla ‘spherical ball’ is ballotta, whence English ballot). The noun ballo came from the verb ballare (a descendant via late Latin ballāre of Greek ballízein ‘dance’), of which another derivative was ballerino ‘dancing master’.

The feminine form, ballerina, entered English in the late 18th century. Balletomane ‘ballet enthusiast’ is a creation of the 1930s. Another word ballet, also a diminutive, exists, or at least existed, in English. It meant ‘little [spherical] ball’, and was used in the 18th century as a technical term in heraldry.
=> ball
barley: barley: [OE] The Old English word for ‘barley’ was bære or bere. It came from an Indo- European base *bhar- which also gave Latin farīna ‘flour’ (from which English gets farinaceous [17]) and Old Norse farr ‘barley’. Barley (Old English bærlic) was in fact originally an adjective formed from this (like princely based on prince), and it was not until the early twelfth century that it came to be used as a noun. A barn [OE] was originally a building for storing barley. The Old English word ber(e)n was a compound formed from bere and ern or ærn ‘house’ (which may be related to English rest).
=> barn, farinaceous, farrago
barnacle: barnacle: [12] The term barnacle was originally applied to a type of goose, Branta leucopsis, which according to medieval legend grew on trees or on logs of wood. Various fanciful versions of its reproductive cycle existed, among them that it emerged from a fruit or that it grew attached to a tree by its beak, but the most tenacious was that it developed inside small shellfish attached to wood, rocks, etc by the seashore.

Hence by the end of the 16th century the term had come to be applied to these shellfish, and today that is its main sense. The word was originally bernak (it gained its -le ending in the 15th century) and came from medieval Latin bernaca, but its ultimate source is unknown.
barrow: barrow: [OE] Barrow for carrying things and barrow the burial mound are two distinct words in English. The barrow of wheelbarrow is related to bear ‘carry’. The Old English word, bearwe, came from the same Germanic base, *ber- or *bar-, as produced bear, and also bier. Barrow the burial mound, as erected by ancient peoples over a grave site, is related to German berg ‘mountain, hill’. The Old English word, beorg, came from prehistoric Germanic *bergaz.
=> bear, bier