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abound [abound 词源字典]: 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[abound etymology, abound origin, 英语词源]
ache: ache: [OE] Of the noun ache and the verb ache, the verb came first. In Old English it was acan. From it was formed the noun, æce or ece. For many centuries, the distinction between the two was preserved in their pronunciation: in the verb, the ch was pronounced as it is now, with a /k/ sound, but the noun was pronounced similarly to the letter H, with a /ch/ sound.

It was not until the early 19th century that the noun came regularly to be pronounced the same way as the verb. It is not clear what the ultimate origins of ache are, but related forms do exist in other Germanic languages (Low German āken, for instance, and Middle Dutch akel), and it has been conjectured that there may be some connection with the Old High German exclamation (of pain) ah.
achieve: achieve: [14] Achieve is related to chief. It comes from Old French achever ‘bring to an end’, or literally ‘bring to a head’, which was based on the phrase a chief ‘to a head’ (chief derives ultimately from Latin caput ‘head’). The heraldic meaning of achievement, ‘coat of arms’, comes from the notion that the escutcheon was granted as a reward for a particular achievement. Over the centuries it has evolved an alternative form, hatchment [16].
=> chief, hatchment
adage: adage: [16] Adage was borrowed, via French, from Latin adagium ‘maxim, proverb’. This seems to have been formed from a variant of aio ‘I say’ plus the prefīx ad- ‘to’. In the 16th and 17th centuries an alternative version, adagy, existed.
address: address: [14] Address originally meant ‘straighten’. William Caxton, for example, here uses it for ‘stand up straight’: ‘The first day that he was washed and bathed he addressed him[self] right up in the basin’ Golden Legend 1483. This gives a clue to its ultimate source, Latin dīrectum ‘straight, direct’. The first two syllables of this seem gradually to have merged together to produce *drictum, which with the addition of the prefix ad- was used to produce the verb *addrictiāre.

Of its descendants in modern Romance languages, Italian addirizzare most clearly reveals its source. Old French changed it fairly radically, to adresser, and it was this form which English borrowed. The central current sense of ‘where somebody lives’ developed in the 17th and 18th centuries from the notion of directing something, such as a letter, to somebody.
=> direct
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
admire: admire: [16] Admire has rather run out of steam since it first entered the language. It comes originally from the same Latin source as marvel and miracle, and from the 16th to the 18th centuries it meant ‘marvel at’ or ‘be astonished’. Its weaker modern connotations of ‘esteem’ or ‘approval’, however, have been present since the beginning, and have gradually ousted the more exuberant expressions of wonderment. It is not clear whether English borrowed the word from French admirer or directly from its source, Latin admīrārī, literally ‘wonder at’, a compound verb formed from ad- and mīrārī ‘wonder’.
=> marvel, miracle
admit: admit: [15] This is one of a host of words, from mission to transmit, to come down to English from Latin mittere ‘send’. Its source, admittere, meant literally ‘send to’, hence ‘allow to enter’. In the 15th and 16th centuries the form amit was quite common, borrowed from French amettre, but learned influence saw to it that the more ‘correct’ Latin form prevailed.
=> commit, mission, transmit
adultery: adultery: [14] Neither adultery nor the related adulterate have any connection with adult. Both come ultimately from the Latin verb adulterāre ‘debauch, corrupt’ (which may have been based on Latin alter ‘other’, with the notion of pollution from some extraneous source). By the regular processes of phonetic change, adulterāre passed into Old French as avoutrer, and this was the form which first reached English, as avouter (used both verbally, ‘commit adultery’, and nominally, ‘adulterer’) and as the nouns avoutery ‘adultery’ and avouterer ‘adulterer’.

Almost from the first they coexisted in English beside adult- forms, deriving either from Law French or directly from Latin, and during the 15th to 17th centuries these gradually ousted the avout- forms. Adulter, the equivalent of avouter, clung on until the end of the 18th century, but the noun was superseded in the end by adulterer and the verb by a new form, adulterate, directly based on the past participle of Latin adulterāre, which continued to mean ‘commit adultery’ until the mid 19th century.
=> alter
advance: advance: [13] Advance originated in the Latin adverb abante ‘before’ (source of, among others, French avant and Italian avanti), which in turn was based on ab ‘from’ and ante ‘before’. In post-classical times a verb, *abantiāre, seems to have been formed from the adverb. It developed into Old French avancer, and passed into English as avaunce, initially with the meaning ‘promote’.

A new form, advancer, started life in Old French, on the mistaken association of avancer with other av- words, such as aventure, which really did derive from Latin words with the ad- prefix; over the 15th and 16th centuries this gradually established itself in English. The noun advance did not appear until the 17th century.
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
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’.
alcohol: alcohol: [16] Originally, alcohol was a powder, not a liquid. The word comes from Arabic alkuhul, literally ‘the kohl’ – that is, powdered antimony used as a cosmetic for darkening the eyelids. This was borrowed into English via French or medieval Latin, and retained this ‘powder’ meaning for some centuries (for instance, ‘They put between the eyelids and the eye a certain black powder made of a mineral brought from the kingdom of Fez, and called Alcohol’, George Sandys, Travels 1615).

But a change was rapidly taking place: from specifically ‘antimony’, alcohol came to mean any substance obtained by sublimation, and hence ‘quintessence’. Alcohol of wine was thus the ‘quintessence of wine’, produced by distillation or rectification, and by the middle of the 18th century alcohol was being used on its own for the intoxicating ingredient in strong liquor.

The more precise chemical definition (a compound with a hydroxyl group bound to a hydrocarbon group) developed in the 19th century.
=> kohl
ale: ale: [OE] Old English ealu ‘ale’ goes back to a Germanic root *aluth-, which also produced Old Norse öl (Scandinavian languages still use alerelated words, whereas other Germanic languages now only use beer-related words; English is the only one to retain both). Going beyond Germanic in time takes us back to the word’s ultimate Indo-European source, a base meaning ‘bitter’ which is also represented in alum and aluminium. Ale and beer seem to have been virtually synonymous to the Anglo- Saxons; various distinctions in usage have developed over the centuries, such as that ale is made without hops, and is heavier (or some would say lighter) than beer, but most of the differences have depended on local usage.

The word bridal is intimately connected with ale. Nowadays used as an adjective, and therefore subconsciously associated with other adjectives ending in -al, in Old English it was a noun, literally ‘bride ale’, that is, a beer-drinking session to celebrate a marriage.
allay: allay: [OE] In Old English, alecgan meant literally ‘lay aside’ (-a ‘away, aside, out’, lecgan ‘lay’). The more recent senses ‘relieve, mitigate’ developed from the 13th to the 15th centuries owing to the influence of two formally similar Old French verbs: aleger ‘lighten’ (from Latin alleviāre, source of English alleviate [15]); and al(e)ier ‘qualify, moderate’ (source of English alloy).
=> lay
allege: allege: [14] Allege is related to law, legal, legislation, legation, and litigation. Its original source was Vulgar Latin *exlitigāre, which meant ‘clear of charges in a lawsuit’ (from ex- ‘out of’ and litigāre ‘litigate’). This developed successively into Old French esligier and Anglo- Norman alegier, from where it was borrowed into English; there, its original meaning was ‘make a declaration before a legal tribunal’.

Early traces of the notion of making an assertion without proof can be detected within 50 years of the word’s introduction into English, but it took a couple of centuries to develop fully. The hard g of allegation suggests that though it is ultimately related to allege, it comes from a slightly different source: Latin allēgātiō, from allēgāre ‘adduce’, a compound verb formed from ad- ‘to’ and lēgāre ‘charge’ (source of English legate and legation).
=> law, legal, legation, legislation, litigation
almanac: almanac: [14] One of the first recorded uses of almanac in English is by Chaucer in his Treatise on the astrolabe 1391: ‘A table of the verray Moeuyng of the Mone from howre to howre, every day and in every signe, after thin Almenak’. At that time an almanac was specifically a table of the movements and positions of the sun, moon, and planets, from which astronomical calculations could be made; other refinements and additions, such as a calendar, came to be included over succeeding centuries.

The earliest authenticated reference to an almanac comes in the (Latin) works of the English scientist Roger Bacon, in the mid 13th century. But the ultimate source of the word is obscure. Its first syllable, al-, and its general relevance to medieval science and technology, strongly suggest an Arabic origin, but no convincing candidate has been found.
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
amuse: amuse: [15] Amuse is probably a French creation, formed with the prefix a- from the verb muser (from which English gets muse ‘ponder’ [14]). The current meaning ‘divert, entertain’ did not begin to emerge until the 17th century, and even so the commonest application of the verb in the 17th and 18th centuries was ‘deceive, cheat’. This seems to have developed from an earlier ‘bewilder, puzzle’, pointing back to an original sense ‘make someone stare open-mouthed’.

This links with the probable source of muser, namely muse ‘animal’s mouth’, from medieval Latin mūsum (which gave English muzzle [15]). There is no connection with the inspirational muse, responsible for music and museums.
=> muse, muzzle
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
antimacassar: antimacassar: [19] An antimacassar was a cloth spread over chairbacks in the 19th and early 20th centuries to protect them from greasy hair. It took its name from Macassar oil, a proprietary brand of hair oil made by Rowland and Son, allegedly from ingredients obtained from Makassar, a region of the island of Sulawesi (formerly Celebes) in Indonesia.
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
argosy: argosy: [16] On the face of it argosy, an archaic term for ‘large merchant ship’, gives every appearance of being connected with the Argonauts, members of the crew of the ship Argo who sailed with Jason in quest of the Golden Fleece; but in fact the words are completely unrelated. When English first acquired argosy, from Italian, it was ragusea, which meant literally ‘vessel from Ragusa’ (an important city and seaport on the Dalmatian coast, now known as Dubrovnik). From the hotchpotch of spellings used in English in the 16th and 17th centuries (including ragusye, rhaguse, argosea, and arguze), argosy finally emerged as victor.
asparagus: asparagus: [15] Asparagus comes ultimately from Greek aspáragos (a word related to the Greek verb spargan ‘swell’, to the Latin verb spargere ‘scatter’ – ultimate source of English sparse, disperse, and aspersions – and also to English spark), and has over the past 150 years or so returned to the full Latin form, asparagus, in which it was originally borrowed by English.

In the intervening centuries, however, it went through several metamorphoses: in the 16th century, the truncated medieval Latin variant sparagus was current (it also occurs in one isolated example from a book of Anglo-Saxon remedies of around 1000 AD); from then until the 18th century an anglicized version, sperage, was used; and in the 17th century folk etymology (the process by which an unfamiliar word is assimilated to one more familiar) turned asparagus into sparrowgrass.

This gradually died out during the 19th century, but the abbreviation grass remains current in the jargon of the grocery trade.
=> aspersion, spark
aspic: aspic: [18] Aspic was borrowed from French, where, like the archaic English asp which reputedly bit Cleopatra, it also means ‘snake’ (ultimately from Greek aspís). This has led to speculation that aspic the jelly was named from aspic the snake on the basis that the colours and patterns in which moulds of aspic were made in the 18th and 19th centuries resembled a snake’s coloration.

There does not appear to be any watertight evidence for this rather far-fetched theory, and perhaps more plausible is some connection with French aspic ‘lavender, spikenard’, formerly used for flavouring aspic, or with Greek aspís ‘shield’ (source of aspidistra [19]), on the basis that the earliest aspic moulds were shield-shaped.
attorney: attorney: [14] Attorney was formed in Old French from the prefix a- ‘to’ and the verb torner ‘turn’. This produced the verb atorner, literally ‘turn to’, hence ‘assign to’ or ‘appoint to’. Its past participle, atorne, was used as a noun with much the same signification as appointee – ‘someone appointed’ – and hence ‘someone appointed to act as someone else’s agent’, and ultimately ‘legal agent’.

Borrowed into English, over the centuries the term came to mean ‘lawyer practising in the courts of Common Law’ (as contrasted with a solicitor, who practised in the Equity Courts); but it was officially abolished in that sense by the Judicature Act of 1873, and now survives only in American English, meaning ‘lawyer’, and in the title Attorney- General, the chief law officer of a government.
=> turn
auburn: auburn: [15] The colour of auburn has changed over the centuries. The word comes originally from Latin albus ‘white’ (whence English album, albino, alb, albedo, and albion), from which was derived in medieval Latin alburnus ‘off-white’. This passed via Old French alborne, auborne into English, still meaning ‘yellowishwhite’. From the 15th to the 17th century it was often spelled abrun or abrown, and it seems likely that its similarity to brown led to its gradual shift in meaning to ‘golden-brown’ or ‘reddish-brown’ over the centuries.
=> albino, album
bad: bad: [13] For such a common word, bad has a remarkably clouded history. It does not begin to appear in English until the end of the 13th century, and has no apparent relatives in other languages (the uncanny resemblance to Persian bad is purely coincidental). The few clues we have suggest a regrettably homophobic origin. Old English had a pair of words, bǣddel and bǣdling, which appear to have been derogatory terms for homosexuals, with overtones of sodomy.

The fact that the first examples we have of bad, from the late 13th and early 14th centuries, are in the sense ‘contemptible, worthless’ as applied to people indicates that the connotations of moral depravity may have become generalized from an earlier, specifically anti-homosexual sense.
badger: badger: [16] The Old English term for a ‘badger’ was brock, a word of Celtic origin, and badger does not begin to appear, somewhat mysteriously, until the early 16th century. The name has never been satisfactorily explained, but perhaps the least implausible explanation is from the word badge, in reference to the white stripes on the animal’s forehead, as if it were wearing a badge (a term originally applied to a distinctive device worn by a knight for purposes of recognition); the early spelling bageard suggests that it may have been formed with the suffix -ard, as in dullard and sluggard. (Badge itself is of even more obscure origin; it first turns up in Middle English, in the mid 14th century.) Other early terms for the badger were bauson (14th– 18th centuries), from Old French bausen, and grey (15th–17th centuries).
bald: bald: [14] In Middle English times, bald was ballede, which suggests that it may have been a compound formed in Old English with the suffix -ede ‘characterized by, having’. It has been conjectured that the first element in the compound was Old English *ball-, meaning ‘white patch’ or ‘blaze’ on an animal’s head; this may be supported by isolated examples of the use of the adjective to mean (of a horse) ‘whitefaced’ from the 16th to the 18th centuries, and by the obsolete dialectal ball meaning both ‘white patch on the head’ and ‘white-faced horse’.

This would have produced the Old English adjective *bællede or *beallede, which, from ‘having a white blaze’, progressed naturally in meaning to ‘hairless’. The compounds piebald [16] and skewbald [17] are both based on bald: piebald means ‘having black and white patches like a magpie’, while skewbald may be based on Middle English skew ‘(cloudy) skies’ or on Old French escu ‘shield’.
=> piebald, skewbald
balm: balm: [13] In origin, balm and balsam are the same word. Both come via Latin balsamum from Greek bálsamon, an ‘aromatic oily resin exuded from certain trees’. Its ultimate source may have been Hebrew bāśām ‘spice’. Latin balsamum passed into Old French, and thence into English, as basme or baume (hence the modern English pronunciation), and in the 15th to 16th centuries the Latin l was restored to the written form of the word. The new borrowing balsam, direct from Latin, was made in the 15th century.
=> balsam
bandy: bandy: [16] To ‘bandy words with someone’ may go back to an original idea of ‘banding together to oppose others’. The word comes from French bander ‘oppose’, which is possibly a derivative of bande ‘group, company’ (source of English band). The rather complex semantic development goes from ‘taking sides’, through ‘opposing a third party’, ‘exchanging blows’, ‘exchanging hits’ (in the 16th and 17th centuries it was a term in tennis), to ‘exchanging hostile words’.

The adjective bandy [17], as in ‘bandy legs’, probably comes from the noun bandy ‘curved stick used in an early form of hockey’ (the game was also known as bandy). It may ultimately be related to the verb bandy, the connection being the notion of knocking a ball to and fro.
=> band
bank: bank: [12] The various disparate meanings of modern English bank all come ultimately from the same source, Germanic *bangk-, but they have taken different routes to reach us. Earliest to arrive was ‘ridge, mound, bordering slope’, which came via a hypothetical Old Norse *banki. Then came ‘bench’ [13] (now obsolete except in the sense ‘series of rows or tiers’ – as in a typewriter’s bank of keys); this arrived from Old French banc, which was originally borrowed from Germanic *bangk- (also the source of English bench).

Finally came ‘moneylender’s counter’ [15], whose source was either French banque or Italian banca – both in any case deriving ultimately once again from Germanic *bangk-. The current sense, ‘place where money is kept’, developed in the 17th century. The derived bankrupt [16] comes originally from Italian banca rotta, literally ‘broken counter’ (rotta is related to English bereave and rupture); in early times a broken counter or bench was symbolic of an insolvent moneylender.

The diminutive of Old French banc was banquet ‘little bench’ (perhaps modelled on Italian banchetto), from which English gets banquet [15]. It has undergone a complete reversal in meaning over the centuries; originally it signified a ‘small snack eaten while seated on a bench (rather than at table)’.
=> bench
bar: bar: [12] The history of bar cannot be traced back very far. Forms in various Romance languages, such as French barre (source of the English verb) and Italian and Spanish barra, point to a Vulgar Latin *barra, but beyond that nothing is known. The original sense of a ‘rail’ or ‘barrier’ has developed various figurative applications over the centuries: in the 14th century to the ‘rail in a court before which a prisoner was arraigned’ (as in ‘prisoner at the bar’); in the 16th century to a ‘partition separating qualified from unqualified lawyers in hall’ (as in ‘call to the bar’); and also in the 16th century to a ‘counter at which drink is served’.

Related nouns include barrage [19], originally an ‘artificial obstruction in a waterway’, and barrier [14], from Anglo- Norman barrere.
=> barrage, barrel, barrier, barrister, embargo
bird: bird: [OE] Bird is something of a mystery word. It was not the ordinary Old English word for ‘feathered flying animal’; that was fowl. In Old English, bird meant specifically ‘young bird, nestling’. It did not begin to replace fowl as the general term until the 14th century, and the process took many hundreds of years to complete. Its source is quite unknown; it has no obvious relatives in the Germanic languages, or in any other Indo-European language.

The connotations of its original meaning have led to speculation that it is connected with breed and brood (the usual Old English form was brid, but the r and i subsequently became transposed in a process known as metathesis), but no convincing evidence for this has ever been advanced. As early as 1300, bird was used for ‘girl’, but this was probably owing to confusion with another similar Middle English word, burde, which also meant ‘young woman’.

The usage crops up from time to time in later centuries, clearly as an independent metaphorical application, but there does not really seem to be an unbroken chain of occurrences leading up to the sudden explosion in the use of bird for ‘young woman’ in the 20th century. Of other figurative applications of the word, ‘audience disapproval’ (as in ‘get the bird’) comes from the hissing of geese, and in ‘prison sentence’ bird is short for bird lime, rhyming slang for time.
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
bridge: bridge: [OE] A distant relative of bridge, Old Slavic bruvino ‘beam’, coupled with the meaning of the cognate Old Norse bryggja ‘gangway’, suggest that the underlying etymological meaning of the word is not ‘spanning structure’ but ‘road or structure made of logs’. The Norse word, incidentally, produced the Scottish and northern English brig ‘bridge’.

The card game bridge is first unambiguously mentioned in English in the 1880s, and its name has no connection with the ‘spanning’ bridge. The earliest recorded form of the word is biritch. Its source has never been satisfactorily explained, but since a game resembling bridge is known to have been played for many centuries in the Middle East, it could well be that the name originated in that area.

One suggestion put forward is that it came from an unrecorded Turkish *bir-ü, literally ‘one-three’ (one hand being exposed during the game while the other three are concealed).
broadcast: broadcast: [18] Broadcast was originally an adjective and adverb, and meant literally ‘scattered widely’, particularly in the context of sowing seeds. A metaphorical sense developed in the late 18th and 19th centuries (William Stubbs, in his Constitutional History of England 1875 writes of ‘broadcast accusations’), and the word was ready in the early 1920s for application to the transmission of radio signals (the first actual record of such a use is as a verb, in the April 1921 issue of Discovery: ‘The [radio] station at Poldhu is used partly for broadcasting Press and other messages to ships’).
brooch: brooch: [13] English acquired brooch from Old French broche, a source it returned to a century later to borrow broach. The French word meant ‘long needle’, and at first a brooch was simply a decorative pin whose main function was to fasten a garment. Over the centuries the decorative role has replaced the practical one.
=> broach
buff: buff: [16] Buff originally meant ‘buffalo’; it was presumably an alteration of the French word buffe ‘buffalo’. That sense had died out by the early 18th century, but since then the word has undergone a bizarre series of semantic changes. First, it came to mean ‘leather’, originally from buffalo hides, but later from ox hides. This was commonly used in the 16th and 17th centuries for making military uniforms, so be in buff came to mean ‘be in the army’.

Then in the 17th century the associations of ‘hide’ and ‘skin’ led to the expression in the buff ‘naked’. The colour of buff leather, a sort of dull yellowish-brown, led to the word’s adoption in the 18th century as a colour term. In the 19th century, soft buff or suede leather was used for the small pads or wheels used by silversmiths, watchmakers, etc for polishing: hence the verb buff ‘polish’.

And finally, in the 1820s New York City volunteer firemen were known as ‘buffs’, from the colour of their uniforms; thus anyone who was a volunteer or enthusiastic for something became known as a buff (as in ‘film buff’). The buff of blind-man’s buff is a different word. It meant ‘blow, punch’, and was borrowed in the 15th century from Old French buffe, source also of English buffet ‘blow’ [13].

The term blind-man’s buff is first recorded around 1600, some what later than its now obsolete synonym hoodman blind.
=> buffalo, buffet
bugger: bugger: [16] The Bulgarians, belonging from the early Christian era to the Eastern Orthodox Church, were regarded by Western Europeans as heretics. Thus it was that the Latin word Bulgarus came to be applied generically to any heretic, and eventually specifically to the Albigenses, a Catharistic sect in southern France in the 11th to 13th centuries. It passed via Old French bougre and Middle Dutch bugger into English, acquiring along the way bigoted associations of heresy with anal intercourse. The weakened use of the word as a general term of abuse dates from the early 18th century.
bulge: bulge: [13] Etymologically, bulge and budget are the same word, and indeed when English first acquired bulge it was as a noun, with, like budget, the sense ‘pouch’. It came from Old French bouge ‘leather bag’, a descendant of Latin bulga, which may have been of Gaulish origin (medieval Irish bolg ‘bag’ has been compared). The word’s present-day connotations of ‘swelling’ and ‘protruding’ presumably go back to an early association of ‘pouches’ with ‘swelling up when filled’ (compare the case of bellows and belly, which originally meant ‘bag’, and came from a source which meant ‘swell’), but curiously, apart from an isolated instance around 1400 when bulge is used for a ‘hump on someone’s back’, there is no evidence for this meaning in English before the 17th century.

Additionally, from the 17th to the 19th centuries bulge was used for the ‘bottom of a ship’s hull’; it has now been superseded in this sense by bilge [15], which may well be a variant form.
=> bilge, budget
bully: bully: [16] Bullies have undergone a sad decline in status. In the 16th century the word meant ‘sweetheart’: ‘Though she be somewhat old, it is my own sweet bully’, John Bale, Three laws 1538. But gradually the rot set in, its meaning passing through ‘fine fellow’ to ‘blusterer’ to the present-day harasser of inferiors. In the 18th and 19th centuries it also meant ‘pimp’.

It is probably a modification of Dutch boele ‘lover’ which, as a term of endearment, may have originated as baby-talk. This bully has no connection with the bully of bully beef [18], which comes from French bouilli, the past participle of bouillir ‘boil’. The bully of bully off [19], a now discontinued way of starting play in hockey, appears to come from a term for ‘scrummage’ in Eton football, but whether that is related to the cruel bully is not clear.
burly: burly: [13] Burly has come down in the world over the centuries. Originally it meant ‘excellent, noble, stately’, and it appears to come from an unrecorded Old English adjective *būrlic, literally ‘bowerly’ – that is, ‘fit to frequent a lady’s apartment’. Gradually, connotations of ‘stoutness’ and ‘sturdiness’ began to take over, and by the 15th century the modern ‘heavily built’ had become well established.
=> boor, booth, bower
cabin: cabin: [14] English acquired cabin from Old French cabane, which had it via Provençal cabana from late Latin capanna or cavanna ‘hut, cabin’. Surprisingly, despite their formal and semantic similarity, which has grown closer together over the centuries, cabin has no ultimate connection with cabinet [16], whose immediate source is French cabinet [16], whose immediate source is French cabinet ‘small room’.

The etymology of the French word is disputed; some consider it to be a diminutive form of Old Northern French cabine ‘gambling house’, while others take it as a borrowing from Italian gabbinetto, which perhaps ultimately comes from Latin cavea ‘stall, coop, cage’ (from which English gets cage). Its modern political sense derives from a 17th-century usage ‘private room in which the sovereign’s advisors or council meet’; the body that met there was thus called the Cabinet Council, which quickly became simply Cabinet.
cadet: cadet: [17] Etymologically, a cadet is a ‘little head’. Its original meaning in English was ‘younger son or brother’, and it came from French cadet, an alteration of a Gascon dialect term capdet ‘chief’. This in turn derived from Vulgar Latin *capitellus ‘little head’, a diminutive form of Latin caput ‘head’ (from which English also gets captain and chief).

The reason for its apparently rather strange change in meaning from ‘chief’ to ‘younger son’ seems to be that the younger sons of Gascon families were in former times sent to the French court to fulfil the role of officers. When English borrowed French cadet, it did so not only in a form that retained the original spelling, but also as caddie or cadee, which originally meant ‘young officer’.

The Scottish version, caddie, gradually developed in meaning over the centuries through ‘person who runs errands’ to, in the 19th century, ‘golfer’s assistant’. Cad, originally ‘unskilled assistant’ [18], is an abbreviation of caddie or cadee.
=> captain, chief
calico: calico: [16] Calico, a plain cotton cloth, was originally Calicut-cloth. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was the main export of Calicut, now known as Kozhikode, a city and port on the southwest coast of India whose first European visitor was the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama (c. 1469–1524). In the 19th century Calicut was South India’s major port. (It has no connection with Calcutta.)
carbuncle: carbuncle: [13] Etymologically, a carbuncle is a ‘small piece of coal’. It comes ultimately from Latin carbunculus, a diminutive form of carbō ‘coal’ (source of English carbon). This reached English via Old French carbuncle. The Latin word had two main metaphorical meanings, based on the idea of a glowing coal: ‘red gem’ and ‘red inflamed spot’, both of which passed into English.

The latter achieved some notoriety in British English in the 1980s following a remark by the Prince of Wales in 1984 comparing a piece of modern architecture unfavourably to a ‘carbuncle’, although ironically from the 15th to the 17th centuries the word was used for ‘something of great splendour’.
=> carbon
cartoon: cartoon: [17] Cartoon comes via French carton from Italian cartone, which meant literally ‘strong heavy paper, pasteboard’ (it was a derivative of carta ‘paper’, which came from Latin charta, source also of English card, carton, chart, and charter). Its meaning was in due course transferred to the preliminary sketches made by artists on such paper, the original and for nearly two centuries the only sense of the word in English; ‘But the sight best pleased me was the cartoons by Raphael, which are far beyond all the paintings I ever saw’, Hatton family correspondence, 1697.

Its application to comic drawings in newspapers and magazines began in the 1840s.
=> card, carton, chart, charter