quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- 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- anecdote: [17] In Greek, anékdotos meant ‘unpublished’.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 The use of the plural anékdota by the 6th-century Byzantine historian Procopius as the title of his unpublished memoirs of the life of the Emperor Justinian, which revealed juicy details of court life, played a major part in the subsequent use of Latin anecdota for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 - diploma
- diploma: [17] Etymologically, a diploma is a ‘folded paper’. It comes via Latin diplōma from Greek díplōma; this was a derivative of the verb diploun ‘fold’, which in turn came from diplous ‘double’ (a distant cousin of English double). Since official letters tended to be folded over, díplōma eventually came to mean ‘document, especially one issued by the government’ – the sense in which the word was acquired by English.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the use of the derived Latin adjective diplōmaticus ‘relating to official documents’ with specific reference to the field of international relations led eventually to its French descendant, diplomatique, coming to mean ‘relating to international relations’. English acquired the word as diplomatic in the 18th century.
=> double - fiddle
- fiddle: [OE] Like its distant cousin violin, fiddle comes ultimately from the name of a Roman goddess of joy and victory. This was Vītula, who probably originated among the pre-Roman Sabine people of the Italian peninsula. A Latin verb was coined from her name, vītulārī, meaning ‘hold joyful celebrations’, which in post-classical times produced the noun vītula ‘stringed instrument, originally as played at such festivals’.
In the Romance languages this went on to give viola, violin, etc, but prehistoric West and North Germanic borrowed it as *fithulōn, whence German fiedel, Dutch vedel, and English fiddle. In English, the word has remained in use for the instrument which has developed into the modern violin, but since the 16th century it has gradually been replaced as the main term by violin, and it is now only a colloquial or dialectal alternative.
The sense ‘swindle’ originated in the USA in the mid-to-late 19th century.
=> violin - forum
- forum: [15] Originally Latin forum denoted an ‘out-of-doors place’ – it was related to forīs ‘outof- doors, outside’ and to forēs ‘door’, a distant cousin of English door. It came to be used for any outdoor open space or public place, and in particular for a market place (the most famous of which was the one in Rome, where public assemblies, tribunals, etc were held). Other English words from the same source are foreign, forest, and forensic ‘of legal proceedings’ [17] (from Latin forēnsis ‘of a forum as a place of public discussion’).
=> door, foreign, forensic, forest