quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- adamant




- adamant: [14] In Greek, adamas meant ‘unbreakable, invincible’. It was formed from the verb daman ‘subdue, break down’ (which came from the same source as English tame) plus the negative prefix a-. It developed a noun usage as a ‘hard substance’, specifically ‘diamond’ or ‘very hard metal’, and this passed into Latin as adamāns, or, in its stem form, adamant-. Hence Old French adamaunt, and eventually English adamant.
=> diamond, tame - adamant (adj.)




- late 14c., "hard, unbreakable," from adamant (n.). Figurative sense of "unshakeable" first recorded 1670s. Related: Adamantly; adamance.
- adamant (n.)




- mid-14c., from Old French adamant and directly from Latin adamantem (nominative adamas) "adamant, hardest iron, steel," also figuratively, of character, from Greek adamas (genitive adamantos) "unbreakable, inflexible" metaphoric of anything unalterable, also the name of a hypothetical hardest material, perhaps literally "invincible," from a- "not" + daman "to conquer, to tame" (see tame (adj.)), or else a word of foreign origin altered to conform to Greek.
Applied in antiquity to a metal resembling gold (Plato), white sapphire, magnet (by Ovid, perhaps via confusion with Latin adamare "to love passionately"), steel, emery stone, and especially diamond (see diamond). "The name has thus always been of indefinite and fluctuating sense" [Century Dictionary]. The word was in Old English as aðamans "a very hard stone." - adamantine (adj.)




- c. 1200, from Latin adamantinus "hard as steel, inflexible," from Greek adamantinos, from adamas (see adamant (n.)).
- Rhadamanthus (n.)




- 1580s, from Latinized form of Greek Rhadamanthos, one of the judges of the lower world (son of Zeus and Europa); used allusively of inflexible judges. Related: Rhadamantine.
- Rhadamanthine




- "Showing stern and inflexible judgement", Mid 17th century: from Rhadamanthus + -ine1.