英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

abacus [abacus 词源字典]: abacus: [17] Abacus comes originally from a Hebrew word for ‘dust’, ’ābāq. This was borrowed into Greek with the sense of ‘drawing board covered with dust or sand’, on which one could draw for, among other purposes, making mathematical calculations. The Greek word, ábax, subsequently developed various other meanings, including ‘table’, both in the literal sense and as a mathematical table.

But it was as a ‘dust-covered board’ that its Latin descendant, abacus, was first used in English, in the 14th century. It was not until the 17th century that the more general sense of a counting board or frame came into use, and the more specific ‘counting frame with movable balls’ is later still.
[abacus etymology, abacus origin, 英语词源]
abbot: 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
able: able: [14] Able and ability both come ultimately from the Latin verb habēre ‘have’ or ‘hold’. From this the Latin adjective habilis developed, meaning literally ‘convenient or suitable for holding on to’, and hence in more general terms ‘suitable’ or ‘apt’, and later, more positively, ‘competent’ or ‘expert’. It came into English via Old French, bringing with it the noun ablete ‘ability’. This was later reformed in English, on the model of its Latin source habilitās, to ability.
=> habit
act: 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
alphabet: alphabet: [15] This word is based on the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta, standing for the whole. It derives from Greek alphabētos, via Latin alphabētum. When it first came into English, purists tried to insist that it should be reserved for the Greek alphabet, and that the English alphabet should be referred to by the term ABC (which had been lexicalized in various forms, such as abece, apece, and absee, since the late 13th century), but, like most such prescriptive demands, this was a waste of breath and ink.
Alsatian: Alsatian: [17] Alsatian has been around since at least the late 17th century (although in early use it generally denoted not the Franco-German border province of Alsace but a no-go area in London, near the banks of the Thames, where criminals, vagabonds and prostitutes hung out, which was nicknamed ‘Alsatia’ because of the real Alsace’s reputation as a harbour for the disaffected).

It really came into its own, however, during World War I. A breed of dog known as the ‘German sheepdog’ or ‘German shepherd dog’ (German deutscher Schäferhund) had been introduced into Britain, but understandably, between 1914 and 1918 its stock fell considerably. When it was reintroduced after the war it was thought politic to give it a less inflammatory name, so it became officially the ‘Alsatian wolf-dog’ (even though it has nothing to do with Alsace, and there is no element of wolf in its genetic make-up).

It continued to be called the German shepherd in the USA, and in the latter part of the 20th century that usage crept back into Britain.
anatomy: anatomy: [14] Etymologically, anatomy means ‘cutting up’ (the Greek noun anatomíā was compounded from the prefix ana- ‘up’ and the base *tom-, which figures in several English surgical terms, such as tonsillectomy [19], as well as in atom and tome), and when it first came into English it meant literally ‘dissection’ as well as ‘science of bodily structure’.

From the 16th century to the early 19th century it was also used for ‘skeleton’, and in this sense it was often misanalysed as an atomy, as if the initial anwere the indefinite article: ‘My bones … will be taken up smooth, and white, and bare as an atomy’, Tobias Smollett, Don Quixote 1755.
=> atom, tome
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
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.
anthrax: anthrax: [14] In Greek, anthrax means ‘coal’ (hence English anthracite [19]). The notion of a burning coal led to its being applied metaphorically to a very severe boil or carbuncle, and that is how it was first used in English. It was not until the late 19th century that the word came into general use, when it was applied to the bacterial disease of animals that had been described by Louis Pasteur (which produces large ulcers on the body).
=> anthracite
apart: apart: [14] English acquired apart from Old French apart, where it was based on the Latin phrase ā parte ‘at or to the side’ (Latin pars, part- is the source of English part). By the time it came into English it already contained the notion of separation.
=> part
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
arch: arch: [14] English acquired arch via Old French arche and a hypothetical Vulgar Latin *arca from Latin arcus ‘curve, arch, bow’ (from which English also got arc [14]). When it first came into the language it was still used in the general sense of ‘curve, arc’ as well as ‘curved structure’ (Chaucer in his Treatise on the astrolabe 1391 wrote of ‘the arch of the day … from the sun arising till it go to rest’), but this had died out by the mid 19th century.

Vulgar Latin *arca also produced Italian arcata, which entered English via French as arcade in the 18th century. Arch meaning ‘saucy’ is an adjectival use of the prefix arch- (as in archetype).
=> arc
ark: ark: [OE] The notion underlying ark seems to be that of ‘enclosing or defending a space’. Its ultimate Latin source, arca ‘large box or chest’, was related to arx ‘citadel’ and to arcēre ‘close up’ (from which English gets arcane). Arca was borrowed into prehistoric Germanic, and came into English as ærc. In addition to meaning ‘chest’ (a sense which had largely died out by the 18th century), it signified the ‘coffer in which the ancient Hebrews kept the tablets of the Ten Commandments’ – the Ark of the Covenant – and by extension, the large commodious vessel in which Noah escaped the Flood.
=> arcane, exercise
arm: arm: [OE] The two distinct senses of arm, ‘limb’ and ‘weapon’, both go back ultimately to the same source, the Indo-European base *ar- ‘fit, join’ (which also produced art and article). One derivative of this was Latin arma ‘weapons, tools’, which entered English via Old French armes in the 13th century (the singular form was virtually unknown before the 19th century, but the verb arm, from Latin armāre via Old French armer, came into the language in the 13th century).

The other strand is represented in several European languages, meaning variously ‘joint’, ‘shoulder’, and ‘arm’: Latin armus ‘shoulder’, for example, and Greek harmos ‘joint’. The prehistoric Germanic form was *armaz, from which developed, among others, German, Dutch, Swedish, and English arm.
=> art, article
armour: armour: [13] Armour comes ultimately from Latin armātūra ‘armour, equipment’, a derivative of the verb armāre ‘arm’ (the direct English borrowing armature [15] originally meant ‘armour’ or ‘weapons’, but the ‘protective’ notion of armour led to its application in the 18th century to ‘metal covering the poles of a magnet’). In Old French armātūra became armeure, and subsequently armure, the form in which it was borrowed into English (the -our ending was artificially grafted on in the 14th century on the model of other Latin-based words such as colour and odour). Armoury is French in origin: Old French armoier ‘coat of arms’ was a derivative of arme ‘weapon’; this became armoirie, which was borrowed into English in the 15th century as armory, meaning ‘heraldry’, but also, owing to their formal similarity, came to be used with the same sense as armour – ‘protective metal suit’ or ‘weapons’.

This was what armoury meant when it came into English in the 14th century (and the sense survived long enough to be used by Wordsworth in a sonnet to ‘Liberty’ 1802: ‘In our halls is hung armoury of invincible knights of old’). The meaning ‘place for keeping weapons’ developed in the 16th century.
=> armature
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.
asphalt: asphalt: [14] The ultimate source of asphalt is Greek ásphalton, but when it first came into English it was with the p that had developed in late Latin aspaltus: aspalte. The ph of the original Greek form began to be reintroduced in the 18th century.
baby: baby: [14] Like mama and papa, baby and the contemporaneous babe are probably imitative of the burbling noises made by an infant that has not yet learned to talk. In Old English, the term for what we would now call a ‘baby’ was child, and it seems only to have been from about the 11th century that child began to extend its range to the slightly more mature age which it now covers. Then when the word baby came into the language, it was used synonymously with this developed sense of child, and only gradually came to refer to infants not yet capable of speech or walking.
barge: barge: [13] Barge comes in the first instance from Old French barge, but speculation has pushed it further back to medieval Latin *barica, which would have derived from báris, a Greek word for an Egyptian boat. This hypothetical *barica would have been a by-form of late Latin barca, which came into English via Old French as barque, also spelled bark, ‘sailing vessel’ [15] (source of embark). The metaphorical use of the verb barge, ‘move clumsily or rudely’, is barely a hundred years old; it comes from the ponderous progress made by barges.
=> bark, barque, embark
best: best: [OE] Best and better, the anomalous superlative and comparative of good, go back to a prehistoric Germanic base *bat-, which is related to the archaic English boot ‘remedy’ (as in to boot) and meant generally ‘advantage, improvement’. Its comparative and superlative were *batizon and *batistaz, which came into Old English as respectively betera and betest (gradually reduced via betst to best). The term best man originated in Scotland; it has gradually replaced the earlier bride(s)man and groomsman.
=> better, boot
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
bison: bison: [14] Bison appears to be of Germanic origin, from a stem *wisand- or *wisund-. This became Old English wesand, which did not survive; and it was acquired again in the 19th century as wisent, borrowed from German wisent, applied to the ‘aurochs’, an extinct species of European wild ox. The b- form came into English via Latin bison, a borrowing from the Germanic. Originally of course referring to the European bison, the term was first applied to the North American species at the end of the 17th century.
bleed: bleed: [OE] As its form suggests, bleed is a derivative of blood, but a very ancient one. From Germanic *blōtham ‘blood’ was formed the verb *blōthjan ‘emit blood’, which came into Old English as blēdan, ancestor of bleed.
=> blood
blow: blow: There are three distinct blows in English. The commonest, the verb ‘send out air’ [OE], can be traced back to an Indo-European base *bhlā-. It came into English (as Old English blāwan) via Germanic *blǣ-, source also of bladder. The Indo-European base also produced Latin flāre ‘blow’, from which English gets flatulent and inflate.

The other verb blow, ‘come into flower’ [OE], now archaic, comes ultimately from Indo-European *bhlō-. It entered English (as Old English blōwan) via Germanic *blo-, from which English also gets bloom and probably blade. A variant form of the Indo-European base with -s- produced Latin flōs (source of English flower) and English blossom.

The noun blow ‘hard hit’ [15] is altogether more mysterious. It first appears, in the form blaw, in northern and Scottish texts, and it has been connected with a hypothetical Germanic *bleuwan ‘strike’.
=> bladder, flatulent, inflate; blade, bloom, blossom, flower
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
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
brand: brand: [OE] A brand was originally a ‘piece of burning wood’; the word comes from West and North Germanic *brandaz, a derivative of the same base (*bran-, *bren-) as produced burn, brandy, and perhaps broil. In the 16th century it came to be applied to an ‘(identifying) mark made with a hot iron’, which provided the basis for the modern sense ‘particular make of goods’, a 19th-century development.

A specialized (now archaic) sense of the word in English and other Germanic languages was ‘sword’ (perhaps from the flashing sword blade’s resemblance to a burning stick). This was borrowed into Vulgar Latin as *brando, and its derived verb *brandīre came into English via Old French as brandish [14]. Brand-new [16] may be from the notion of emerging pristine from the furnace.
=> brandish, brandy, broil, burn
breadth: breadth: [16] Breadth was formed in the 16th century by adding the suffix -th (as in length) to the already existing noun brede ‘breadth’. This was an ancient formation, directly derived in prehistoric Germanic times from *braid-, the stem of broad. It came into Old English as brǣdu.
=> broad
brief: brief: [14] Brief comes via Old French bref from Latin brevis ‘short’, which is probably related to Greek brakhús ‘short’, from which English gets the combining form brachy-, as in brachycephalic. Latin produced the nominal derivative breve ‘letter’, later ‘summary’, which came into English in the 14th century in the sense ‘letter of authority’ (German has brief simply meaning ‘letter’).

The notion of an ‘abbreviation’ or ‘summary’ followed in the next century, and the modern legal sense ‘summary of the facts of a case’ developed in the 17th century. This formed the basis of the verbal sense ‘inform and instruct’, which is 19th-century. Briefs ‘underpants’ are 20th-century. The musical use of the noun breve began in the 15th century when, logically enough, it meant ‘short note’.

Modern usage, in which it denotes the longest note, comes from Italian breve. Other derivatives of brief include brevity [16], introduced into English via Anglo-Norman brevete; abbreviate [15], from late Latin abbreviāre (which is also the source, via Old French abregier, of abridge [14]); and breviary ‘book of church services’ [16], from Latin breviārium.
=> abbreviate, abridge, brevity
buckram: buckram: [14] Etymologically, buckram ‘stiffened cloth’ is cloth from Bokhara, a city in central Asia (now the Uzbek city of Bukhara), from where in the Middle Ages cloth was exported to Europe. And not just any cloth: originally buckram denoted a high-quality cotton or linen fabric, and it was only in the 15th century that the word came to be applied to a coarser textile. It came into English from Old French boquerant.
bulimia: bulimia: [19] The condition now called ‘bulimia’ – in which bouts of overeating are followed by bouts of purging – was recognized and so named in the 1970s. The word used to name it, however, is much more ancient than that. It goes back to Greek boulimia, which meant ‘ravenous hunger’ (it was formed from limos ‘hunger’, with the prefix bou-; this may well have been adapted from bous ‘ox’, in which case the word would have meant literally ‘the hunger of an ox’).

It originally came into English, via medieval Latin, in the late 14th century, and for many hundred years its standard form was bulimy. It was applied to a sort of hunger so extreme that it could be categorized as an illness.
canoe: canoe: [16] Like cannibal, canoe is a word of Caribbean origin. In the language of the local Carib people it was canaoua, and it passed via Arawakan into Spanish (recorded by Christopher Columbus) as canoa. That was the form in which it first came into English; modern canoe is due to the influence of French canoe. Originally, the word was used for referring to any simple boat used by ‘primitive’ tribes; it was not until the late 18th century that a more settled idea of what we would today recognize as a canoe began to emerge.
caravan: caravan: [16] Caravans have no etymological connection with cars, nor with char-a-bancs. The word comes ultimately from Persian kārwān ‘group of desert travellers’, and came into English via French caravane. Its use in English for ‘vehicle’ dates from the 17th century, but to begin with it referred to a covered cart for carrying passengers and goods (basis of the shortened form van [19]), and in the 19th century it was used for the basic type of thirdclass railway carriage; its modern sense of ‘mobile home’ did not develop until the late 19th century. Caravanserai ‘inn for accommodating desert caravans’ [16] comes from Persian kārwānserāī: serāī means ‘palace, inn’, and was the source, via Italian, of seraglio ‘harem’ [16].
=> caravanserai, van
catechism: catechism: [16] Etymologically, catechism is ‘teaching by the spoken word’. It is a derivative of catechize [15], which comes ultimately from the Greek verb katēkhein, a compound formed from the prefix katá- ‘thoroughly’ and the verb ēkhein ‘sound, resound’ (related to English echo). Thus originally to ‘catechize’ someone was literally to ‘din’ instruction into them, hence ‘instruct orally’. The word came into English via a later ecclesiastical Greek derivative katēkhízein and Latin catēchīzāre.
=> echo
celery: celery: [17] Celery comes ultimately from Greek sélīnon, which signified ‘parsley’ – like the celery, a plant of the group Umbelliferae (the English word parsley comes from Greek petrōselínon, literally ‘rock parsley’). It came into English via Latin selīnon, Italian dialect selleri, and French céleri. The term celeriac was formed from celery in the early 18th century; it first appears in an advertisement in the London and country brewer 1743.
=> parsley
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
chamber: chamber: [13] The ultimate source of chamber is Greek kamárā ‘something with an arched cover, room with a vaulted roof’. This passed into Latin as camara or camera (source of English camera), and in Old French became transformed into chambre, the immediate source of the English word. Related forms in English include comrade (from Spanish camarada), originally ‘someone sharing a room’; chamberlain [13], which was originally coined in the West Germanic language of the Franks as *kamerling using the diminutive suffix -ling, and came into English via Old French chamberlenc; and chimney.
=> camera, chamberlain, chimney
chancellor: chancellor: [11] Etymologically, a chancellor was an attendant or porter who stood at the cancellī, or ‘lattice-work bar’, of a court in Roman times – hence the Latin term cancellārius. Over the centuries the cancellārius’s status rose to court secretary, in due course with certain legal functions. The word came into English, via Anglo-Norman canceler or chanceler, in the time of Edward the Confessor, denoting the king’s official secretary, a post which developed into that of Lord Chancellor, head of the English judiciary.

The court over which he presides, Chancery, gets its name by alteration from Middle English chancellerie, which came from an Old French derivative of chancelier ‘chancellor’. The word’s ultimate source, Latin cancellī ‘cross-bars, lattice, grating’ (a diminutive form of cancer ‘lattice’), came to be applied to the part of a church or other building separated off by such a screen: hence, via Old French, English chancel ‘part of a church containing the altar and choir’ [14].

And a metaphorical application of the notion of a lattice or bars crossing each other has given English cancel [14], via Latin cancellāre and Old French canceller, which originally meant ‘cross something out’.
=> cancel, chancel
character: character: [14] The ultimate source of character is Greek kharaktér, a derivative of the verb kharássein ‘sharpen, engrave, cut’, which in turn came from kharax ‘pointed stake’. Kharaktér meant ‘engraved mark’, and hence was applied metaphorically to the particular impress or stamp which marked one thing as different from another – its ‘character’. The word came into English via Latin charactēr and Old French caractere. Characteristic followed in the 17th century.
=> gash
chestnut: chestnut: [16] The Greek word for ‘chestnut’ was kastanéā, which appears to have meant originally ‘nut from Castanea’ (in Pontus, Asia Minor) or ‘nut from Castana’ (in Thessaly, Greece). It came into English via Latin castanea and Old French chastaine, which in the 14th century produced the Middle English form chasteine or chesteine. Over the next two hundred years this developed to chestern, and in due course had nut added to it to produce the modern English form. Castana, the Spanish descendant of Latin castanea, is the source of castanet.
=> castanet
chickpea: chickpea: [18] Chickpeas have nothing to do with chickens, and only remotely anything to do with peas (they are both legumes). The word comes ultimately from Latin cicer (the name of the Roman orator Cicero is based on it – one of his ancestors must have had a chickpea-shaped wart). That came into English in the 14th century, by way of Old French, as chich, and chich remained for several centuries the name of the vegetable. The French, meanwhile, noting the leguminous resemblance, had taken to calling it pois chiche, which the English duly translated in the 16th century as chich-pea. Later, folk-etymology transformed chich to chick.
cobra: cobra: [19] Cobra is a shortening of Portuguese cobra de capella, which came into English in India in the 17th century. This meant literally ‘snake with a hood’: cobra from Latin colubra ‘snake’ and capella (referring of course to the ‘hood’ it makes when agitated, by spreading out the skin at the side of its head) from Vulgar Latin *cappellus ‘little cape’, from late Latin cappa ‘hood’.
=> cap, cape, chapel, chaperon
complete: complete: [14] Complete first reached English as an adjective, either via Old French complet or direct from Latin complētus. This was the past participle of complēre ‘fill up, finish’, a compound verb formed from the intensive prefix com- and plēre ‘fill’, a word related to Latin plēnus ‘full’ (whence plenary, plenitude, plenty, etc) and indeed to English full.

The verb complēre itself came into Old French as the now obsolete complir (complete as a verb is a later formation from the adjective), and was prefixed with a- to produce accomplir. From its stem accompliss- English got accomplish [14].
=> accomplish, compliment, comply, expletive, plenary, plenty
copy: copy: [14] Copy has a very devious semantic history. It comes from Latin copia ‘abundance’ (source also of English copious), and came into English via Old French copie. In addition to its central sense ‘abundance’, Latin copia could also mean ‘power, right’, and it appears that its use in such phrases as ‘give someone the right to transcribe’ led to its application to ‘right of reproduction’ and ultimately to simply ‘reproduction’.
=> copious
cord: cord: [13] Cord ‘string’ and chord ‘straight line’ were originally the same word. They go back to Greek khordé ‘string’, which came into English via Latin chorda and Old French corde. In English it was originally written cord, a spelling which included the sense ‘string of a musical instrument’. But in the 16th century the spelling of this latter sense was remodelled to chord, on the basis of Latin chorda, and it has been retained for its semantic descendants ‘straight line joining two points on a curve’ and ‘straight line joining the front and rear edges of a wing’. (Chord ‘combination of musical notes’ [15] is no relation: it is a reduced version of accord, which comes via Old French acorder from Vulgar Latin *accordāre, a compound verb based on Latin cors ‘heart’, and ironically was originally spelled cord.) Related words include cordon [16], from the French diminutive form cordon, and cordite [19], so named from its often being shaped into cords resembling brown twine.
=> chord, cordite, cordon, yarn
count: count: There are two distinct words count in English. Count ‘enumerate’ [14] comes ultimately from Latin computāre ‘calculate’ (source of English compute). It came into English from Old French conter, which had, via the notion of ‘adding up and rendering an account’, developed the sense ‘tell a story’ (preserved in English in the derivatives account and recount).

The derivative counter [14] began life as medieval Latin computātōrium ‘place of accounts’, and entered English via Anglo- Norman counteour. Its modern sense ‘surface for transactions in a shop’ does not seem to have become firmly established until the early 19th century, although it was applied to similar objects in banks from the late 17th century. The noble title count [16] comes via Old French conte from Latin comes, which originally meant ‘companion, attendant’ (it was a compound noun, formed from the prefix com- ‘with’ and īre ‘go’, and so its underlying etymological meaning is ‘one who goes with another’).

In the Roman empire it was used for the governor of a province, and in Anglo- Norman it was used to translate English earl. It has never been used as an English title, but the feminine form countess was adopted for the wife of an earl in the 12th century (and viscount was borrowed from Anglo-Norman viscounte in the 14th century). The Latin derivative comitātus was originally a collective noun denoting a ‘group of companions’, but with the development of meaning in comes it came to mean first ‘office of a governor’ and latterly ‘area controlled by a governor’.

In England, this area was the ‘shire’, and so county [14], acquired via Anglo-Norman counte, came to be a synonym for ‘shire’. Another descendant of Latin comes is concomitant [17], from the present participle of late Latin concomitārī.
=> account, compute, putative, recount; concomitant, county
couple: couple: [13] The notion underlying couple is of ‘joining’. The noun came into English via Old French from Latin cōpula ‘tie, connection’. This was a compound noun formed from the prefix com- ‘together’ and the verb apere ‘fasten’ (source of English apt, adapt, adept, and inept). Derived from it was the verb cōpulāre, source of English copulate [17].
=> adapt, adept, apt, copulate, inept
coy: coy: [14] Essentially, coy is the same word as quiet, and ‘quiet’ is what it meant when it first came into English (it soon developed to ‘shyly reserved’, and the sense ‘quiet’ died out in the 17th century). Its ultimate source was Latin quiētus, but whereas in the case of quiet this passed directly through Old French, coy came via the more circuitous route of Vulgar Latin *quētus, which produced early Old French quei, and later coi, the source of the English word.
=> quiet