英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

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
content: content: The adjective and noun content come ultimately from the same source, but as their divergent pronunciations suggest, they reached English via different routes. Their common original is Latin contentus, past participle of continēre ‘hold together, enclose, contain’ (source of English contain, continent, continue, and countenance). The more recent borrowing, the noun content [15], comes directly from medieval Latin contentum, and retains the original meaning of the Latin verb.

The adjective content [14], however, comes via Old French content, and reflects a metaphorical change in the Latin past participle from ‘contained’ via ‘restrained’ and ‘self-restrained’ to ‘satisfied’.
=> contain, continent, continue, countenance, retentive
culprit: culprit: [17] Culprit appears to be a fossilized survival of the mixture of English and French once used in English courts. The usually accepted account of its origin is that it is a lexicalization of an exchange in court between the accused and the prosecutor. If the prisoner pleaded ‘not guilty’ to the charge read out against him, the prosecutor would have countered, in Law French, with ‘Culpable: prit d’averrer …’, literally ‘Guilty: ready to prove’. (English culpable [14] comes ultimately from Latin culpa ‘guilt’, and prit is the Anglo- Norman form of what in modern French has become prêt ‘ready’, from Latin praestus – source of English presto).

The theory is that this would have been noted down by those recording the proceedings in abbreviated form as cul. prit, which eventually came to be apprehended as a term used for addressing the accused.
=> culpable, presto
evolution: evolution: [17] Evolution originally meant simply ‘unfolding’, or metaphorically ‘development’; it was not used in its main current sense, ‘gradual change in form of a species over the centuries’, until the early 19th century. The Scottish geologist Charles Lyell appears to have been the first to do so, in his Principles of Geology 1832, and it was subsequently taken up by Charles Darwin.

The word comes from Latin ēvolūtiō, which denoted specifically the unrolling of a papyrus or parchment roll. It was a derivative of ēvolvere, a compound formed from the prefix ex- ‘out’ and volvere ‘roll’ (source also of English convolution, involve, and revolve and related to vault, voluble, volume, vulva, and wallow).
=> convolution, involve, revolve, volume, wallow
island: island: [OE] Despite their similarity, island has no etymological connection with isle (their resemblance is due to a 16th-century change in the spelling of island under the influence of its semantic neighbour isle). Island comes ultimately from a prehistoric Germanic *aujō, which denoted ‘land associated with water’, and was distantly related to Latin aqua ‘water’.

This passed into Old English as īeg ‘island’, which was subsequently compounded with land to form īegland ‘island’. By the late Middle English period this had developed to iland, the form which was turned into island. (A diminutive form of Old English īeg, incidentally, has given us eyot ‘small island in a river’ [OE].) Isle [13] itself comes via Old French ile from Latin insula (the s is a 15th-century reintroduction from Latin).

Other contributions made by insula to English include insular [17], insulate [16], insulin, isolate (via Italian) [18], and peninsula [16].
=> eyot
paddock: paddock: [17] Paddock is ultimately the same word as park. Their common ancestor was a prehistoric Germanic word which took a route through Latin and French to reach English as park. Its direct Old English descendant, however, was pearruc. This in due course became parrock, which survived dialectally into the 20th century. But in the early modern English period a variant form paddock appeared. It is not clear how this arose, but it may be a hypercorrect form reflecting the change in the opposite direction, from /d/ to /r/, in words such as porridge for pottage and geraway for get away.
=> park
precarious: precarious: [17] Precarious comes from Latin precārius (source also of English prayer), which meant ‘obtained by asking or praying’. It was originally used in English as a legal term, in which ‘obtained by asking’ had undergone a slight change in focus to ‘held through the favour of another’. This introduced the notion that the favour might be withdrawn, and that the possession was therefore uncertain, and so the adjective soon came to be used for ‘depending on chance or caprice’ and, in the 18th century, ‘risky’.

Latin precārius was derived from prex ‘prayer’, a close relative of precārī ‘ask, entreat, pray’, from which English gets pray.
=> pray
soon: soon: [OE] In Old English times, soon meant ‘straightaway’, but human nature being what it is, the tendency to procrastinate led over the centuries to a change in meaning to ‘after a short while’. (The same thing happened to anon, and is in the process of happening to directly.) The word itself comes from a prehistoric West Germanic *sǣnō, whose other descendants apart from soon have all but died out.
sundae: sundae: [19] The ice-cream concoction known as a ‘sundae’ first appeared on the scene in America, at the end of the 19th century. It is generally agreed that its name is an alteration of Sunday, but the why and the how remain unclear. As far as the change in spelling is concerned (sundi was another early variant), it seems plausible that it was intended to placate those who might have been offended by naming a dessert after the Lord’s day.

But why Sunday? Perhaps, it has been speculated, because ice cream was a dessert that could be eaten on Sunday without offending propriety; or because it was a special sort of ice cream that could be sold on Sundays without breaking the Sabbath trading laws; or because it was made of assorted odds and ends of ice cream left over from Sunday. The jury is still out.
accidence (n.): late 14c., in philosophy, "non-essential or incidental characteristic," also "part of grammar dealing with inflection" (mid-15c.), in some cases a misspelling of accidents, or else directly from Latin accidentia (used as a term in grammar by Quintilian), neuter plural of accidens, present participle of accidere (see accident). The grammar sense is because they change in accordance with use.
alteration (n.): late 14c., "action of altering," from Old French alteracion (14c.) "change, alteration," and directly from Medieval Latin alterationem (nominative alteratio), noun of action from past participle stem of Late Latin alterare (see alter). Meaning "change in character or appearance" is from 1530s; that of "change in ready-made clothes to suit a customer's specifications" is from 1901. Related: Alterations.
cesspool (n.): also cess-pool, 1670s, the first element perhaps an alteration of cistern, perhaps a shortened form of recess [Klein]; or the whole may be an alteration of suspiral (c. 1400), "drainpipe," from Old French sospiral "a vent, air hole," from sospirer "breathe," from Latin suspirare "breathe deep" [Barnhart]. Meaning extended to "tank at the end of the pipe," which would account for a possible folk-etymology change in final syllable.

Other possible etymologies: Italian cesso "privy," from Latin secessus "place of retirement" (in Late Latin "privy, drain"); dialectal suspool, from suss, soss "puddle;" or cess "a bog on the banks of a tidal river."
cunt (n.): "female intercrural foramen," or, as some 18c. writers refer to it, "the monosyllable," Middle English cunte "female genitalia," by early 14c. (in Hendyng's "Proverbs" -- ʒeve þi cunte to cunni[n]g, And crave affetir wedding), akin to Old Norse kunta, Old Frisian, Middle Dutch, and Middle Low German kunte, from Proto-Germanic *kunton, which is of uncertain origin. Some suggest a link with Latin cuneus "wedge," others to PIE root *geu- "hollow place," still others to PIE *gwen-, root of queen and Greek gyne "woman."

The form is similar to Latin cunnus "female pudenda" (also, vulgarly, "a woman"), which is likewise of disputed origin, perhaps literally "gash, slit," from PIE *sker- (1) "to cut," or literally "sheath," from PIE *kut-no-, from root *(s)keu- "to conceal, hide."
Hec vulva: a cunt. Hic cunnus: idem est. [from Londesborough Illustrated Nominale, c. 1500, in "Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabularies," eds. Wright and Wülcker, vol. 1, 1884]
First known reference in English apparently is in a compound, Oxford street name Gropecuntlane cited from c. 1230 (and attested through late 14c.) in "Place-Names of Oxfordshire" (Gelling & Stenton, 1953), presumably a haunt of prostitutes. Used in medical writing c. 1400, but avoided in public speech since 15c.; considered obscene since 17c.

in Middle English also conte, counte, and sometimes queinte, queynte (for this, see q). Chaucer used quaint and queynte in "Canterbury Tales" (late 14c.), and Andrew Marvell might be punning on quaint in "To His Coy Mistress" (1650).
"What eyleth yow to grucche thus and grone? Is it for ye wolde haue my queynte allone?" [Wife of Bath's Tale]
Under "MONOSYLLABLE" Farmer lists 552 synonyms from English slang and literature before launching into another 5 pages of them in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. [A sampling: Botany Bay, chum, coffee-shop, cookie, End of the Sentimental Journey, fancy bit, Fumbler's Hall, funniment, goatmilker, heaven, hell, Itching Jenny, jelly-bag, Low Countries, nature's tufted treasure, parenthesis, penwiper, prick-skinner, seminary, tickle-toby, undeniable, wonderful lamp, and aphrodisaical tennis court, and, in a separate listing, Naggie. Dutch cognate de kont means "a bottom, an arse," but Dutch also has attractive poetic slang ways of expressing this part, such as liefdesgrot, literally "cave of love," and vleesroos "rose of flesh."

Alternative form cunny is attested from c. 1720 but is certainly much earlier and forced a change in the pronunciation of coney (q.v.), but it was good for a pun while coney was still the common word for "rabbit": "A pox upon your Christian cockatrices! They cry, like poulterers' wives, 'No money, no coney.' " [Philip Massinger: "The Virgin-Martyr," Act I, Scene 1, 1622]
deforestation (n.): 1884, from deforest + -ation. Earlier was deforesting (1530s) which was a legal term for the change in definition of a parcel of land from "forest" to something else.
draft (n.): c. 1500, spelling variant of draught (q.v.) to reflect change in pronunciation. Among the senses that have gone with this form of the word in American English, the meaning "rough copy of a writing" (something "drawn") is attested from 14c.; that of "preliminary sketch from which a final copy is made" is from 1520s; that of "flow of a current of air" is from c. 1770. Of beer from the 1830s, in reference to the method of "drawing" it from the cask. Sense in bank draft is from 1745. The meaning "a drawing off a group for special duty" is from 1703, in U.S. especially of military service; the verb in this sense first recorded 1714. Related: Drafted; drafting.
-ed: past participle suffix of weak verbs, from Old English -ed, -ad, -od (leveled to -ed in Middle English), from Proto-Germanic *-da- (cognates: Old High German -ta, German -t, Old Norse -þa, Gothic -da, -þs), from PIE *-to-, "suffix forming adjectives marking the accomplishment of the notion of the base" [Watkins] (cognates: Sanskrit -tah, Greek -tos, Latin -tus; see -th (1)).

Originally fully pronounced, as still in beloved (which, with blessed, accursed, and a few others retains the full pronunciation through liturgical readings). In Old English already first and third person singular past tense forms of some "weak" verbs was -te, a variant of -de (see -ed), often accompanied by a change in vowel sound (as in modern keep/kept, sleep/slept). A tendency to shorten final consonants has left English with many past tense forms spelled in -ed but pronounced "-t." In some older words both forms exist, with different shades of meaning, as in gilded/gilt, burned/burnt.
-er (2): comparative suffix, from Old English -ra (masc.), -re (fem., neuter), from Proto-Germanic *-izon (cognates: Gothic -iza, Old Saxon -iro, Old Norse -ri, Old High German -iro, German -er), from PIE *-yos-, comparative adjective suffix. Originally also with umlaut change in stem, but this was mostly lost in Old English by historical times and has now vanished (except in better and elder).
For most comparatives of one or two syllables, use of -er seems to be fading as the oral element in our society relies on more before adjectives to express the comparative; thus prettier is more pretty, cooler is more cool [Barnhart].
faction (n.1): c. 1500, from Middle French faction (14c.) and directly from Latin factionem (nominative factio) "political party, class of persons," literally "a making or doing," noun of action from past participle stem of facere "to do" (see factitious). In ancient Rome, originally "one of the four teams of contenders for the chariot races in the circus," distinguished by the color of their dress. Later "oligarchy, usurping faction, party seeking by irregular means to bring about a change in government."
A spirit of faction, which is apt to mingle its poison in the deliberations of all bodies of men, will often hurry the persons of whom they are composed into improprieties and excesses for which they would blush in a private capacity. [Hamilton, "The Federalist," No. xv]
gather (v.): Old English gadrian, gædrian "unite, agree, assemble; gather, collect, store up" (transitive and intransitive), used of flowers, thoughts, persons; from Proto-Germanic *gaduron "come or bring together, unite" (cognates: Old English gæd "fellowship, companionship," gædeling "companion;" Middle Low German gadderen; Old Frisian gaderia; Dutch gaderen "to gather," gade "spouse;" German Gatte "husband;" Gothic gadiliggs), from PIE *ghedh- "to unite, join" (see good (adj.)). Change of spelling from -d- to -th- is 1500s, reflecting earlier change in pronunciation (as in mother, weather, father). Related: Gathered; gathering.
oxbow (n.): also ox-bow, mid-14c., "wooden collar for an ox," from ox + bow (n.1). Meaning "semicircular bend in a river" is from 1797, American English (New England); meaning "curved lake left after an oxbow meander has been cut off by a change in the river course" is from 1898. The reference is to similarity of shape.
progressive (adj.): c. 1600, "characterized by advancement" (in action, character, etc.), from progress (n.) + -ive, or else from French progressif, from past participle stem of Latin progredi. Of taxation, from 1889; of jazz, from 1947. Meaning "characterized by striving for change and innovation, avant-garde, liberal" is from 1908.

In the socio-political sense "favoring reform; radically liberal," it emerged in various British contexts from the 1880s; in the U.S. it was active as a movement in the 1890s and a generation thereafter, the name being taken again from time to time, most recently by some more liberal Democrats and other social activists, by c. 2000. The noun in the sense "one who favors social and political change in the name of progress" is first attested 1865 (originally in Christianity). Earlier in a like sense were progressionist (1849, adjective; 1884, noun), progressist (1848). Related: Progressively; progressiveness.
revolution (n.): late 14c., originally of celestial bodies, from Old French revolucion "course, revolution (of celestial bodies)" (13c.), or directly from Late Latin revolutionem (nominative revolutio) "a revolving," noun of action from past participle stem of Latin revolvere "turn, roll back" (see revolve).

General sense of "instance of great change in affairs" is recorded from mid-15c. Political meaning "overthrow of an established political system" first recorded c. 1600, derived from French, and was especially applied to the expulsion of the Stuart dynasty under James II in 1688 and transfer of sovereignty to William and Mary.
shuffle (n.): 1620s, "an evasion, trick;" 1640s, "a wavering or undecided course of behavior meant to deceive;" from shuffle (v.). Meaning "a slow, heavy, irregular manner of moving" is from 1847; that of "a dance in which the feet are shuffled" is from 1640s. Meaning "a change in the order of playing-cards" is from 1650s. Phrase lost in the shuffle is from 1930.
silly (adj.): Old English gesælig "happy, fortuitous, prosperous" (related to sæl "happiness"), from Proto-Germanic *sæligas (cognates: Old Norse sæll "happy," Old Saxon salig, Middle Dutch salich, Old High German salig, German selig "blessed, happy, blissful," Gothic sels "good, kindhearted"), from PIE *sele- "of good mood; to favor," from root *sel- (2) "happy, of good mood; to favor" (cognates: Latin solari "to comfort," Greek hilaros "cheerful, gay, merry, joyous").
This is one of the few instances in which an original long e (ee) has become shortened to i. The same change occurs in breeches, and in the American pronunciation of been, with no change in spelling. [Century Dictionary]
The word's considerable sense development moved from "happy" to "blessed" to "pious," to "innocent" (c. 1200), to "harmless," to "pitiable" (late 13c.), "weak" (c. 1300), to "feeble in mind, lacking in reason, foolish" (1570s). Further tendency toward "stunned, dazed as by a blow" (1886) in knocked silly, etc. Silly season in journalism slang is from 1861 (August and September, when newspapers compensate for a lack of hard news by filling up with trivial stories). Silly Putty trademark claims use from July 1949.
transfiguration (n.): late 14c., from Latin transfigurationem (nominative transfiguratio) "a change of form," noun of action from past participle stem of transfigurare (see transfigure). In English, originally "the change in appearance of Christ before his disciples" (Matt. xvii:2; Mark ix:2,3). The non-Christian sense is first recorded 1540s.
transform (v.): mid-14c., "change the form of" (transitive), from Old French transformer (14c.), from Latin transformare "change in shape, metamorphose," from trans- "across" (see trans-) + formare "to form" (see form (v.)). Intransitive sense "undergo a change of form" is from 1590s. Related: Transformed; transforming.
walk (v.): "travel on foot," c. 1200, a merger of two verbs, 1. Old English wealcan "to toss, roll, move round" (past tense weolc, past participle wealcen), and 2. wealcian "to roll up, curl," from Proto-Germanic *welk- (cognates: Old Norse valka "to drag about," Danish valke "to full" (cloth), Middle Dutch walken "to knead, press, full" (cloth), Old High German walchan "to knead," German walken "to full"), perhaps ultimately from PIE root *wel- (3) "to turn, roll" (see volvox).

The shift in sense is perhaps from a colloquial use of the Old English word or via the sense of "to full cloth" (by treading on it), though this sense does not appear until after the change in meaning. In 13c. it is used of snakes and the passage of time, and in 15c. of wheeled carts. "Rarely is there so specific a word as NE walk, clearly distinguished from both go and run" [Buck]. Meaning "to go away" is recorded from mid-15c. Transitive meaning "to exercise a dog (or horse)" is from late 15c.; meaning "to escort (someone) in a walk" is from 1620s. Meaning "move (a heavy object) by turning and shoving it in a manner suggesting walking" is by 1890. To walk it off, of an injury, etc., is from 1741. Related: Walked; walking.
willow (n.): Old English welig "willow," from Proto-Germanic *wel- (cognates: Old Saxon wilgia, Middle Dutch wilghe, Dutch wilg), probably from PIE *wel- (3) "to turn, roll," with derivatives referring to curved, enclosing objects, cognate with Greek helix (see volvox). The change in form to -ow (14c.) paralleled that of bellow and fellow. The more typical Germanic word for the tree is represented by withy.
heritor: "A proprietor of a heritable object", Late Middle English: from Anglo-Norman French heriter, based on Latin hereditarius (see hereditary). The spelling change in the 16th century was by association with words ending in -or¹.
habile: "Deft; skilful", Late Middle English: variant of able. The spelling change in the 16th and 17th cents was due to association with French habile and Latin habilis.
poleaxe: "another term for battleaxe (sense 1)", Middle English: related to Middle Dutch pol(l)aex, Middle Low German pol(l)exe (see poll, axe). The change in the first syllable was due to association with pole¹; the first element poll- may have referred to a special head of the axe or to the head of an enemy.
enantiodromia: "The tendency of things to change into their opposites, especially as a supposed governing principle of natural cycles and of psychological development", Early 20th century: from Greek, literally 'running in opposite ways'.