英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

adder [adder 词源字典]: adder: [OE] In Old English, the term for a snake (any snake, not just an adder) was nǣddre; there are or were related forms in many other European languages, such as Latin natrix, Welsh neidr, and German natter (but there does not seem to be any connection with the natterjack toad). Around the 14th century, however, the word began to lose its initial consonant. The noun phrase including the indefinite article, a nadder, became misanalysed as an adder, and by the 17th century nadder had disappeared from the mainstream language (though it survived much longer in northern dialects).
[adder etymology, adder origin, 英语词源]
advocate: advocate: [14] Etymologically, advocate contains the notion of ‘calling’, specifically of calling someone in for advice or as a witness. This was the meaning of the Latin verb advocāre (formed from vocāre ‘call’, from which English also gets vocation). Its past participle, advocātus, came to be used as a noun, originally meaning ‘legal witness or adviser’, and later ‘attorney’.

In Old French this became avocat, the form in which English borrowed it; it was later relatinized to advocate. The verb advocate does not appear until the 17th century. The word was also borrowed into Dutch, as advocaat, and the compound advocaatenborrel, literally ‘lawyer’s drink’, has, by shortening, given English the name for a sweetish yellow concoction of eggs and brandy.
=> invoke, revoke, vocation
agitate: agitate: [16] Agitate is one of a host of English words descended ultimately from Latin agere (see AGENT). Among the many meanings of agere was ‘drive, move’, and a verb derived from it denoting repeated action, agitāre, hence meant ‘move to and fro’. This physical sense of shaking was present from the start in English agitate, but so was the more metaphorical ‘perturb’.

The notion of political agitation does not emerge until the early 19th century, when the Marquis of Anglesey is quoted as saying to an Irish deputation: ‘If you really expect success, agitate, agitate, agitate!’ In this meaning, a derivative of Latin agitāre has entered English via Russian in agitprop ‘political propaganda’ [20], in which agit is short for agitatsiya ‘agitation’.
=> act, agent
agoraphobia: agoraphobia: [19] Agoraphobia – fear of open spaces or, more generally, of simply being out of doors – is first referred to in an 1873 issue of the Journal of Mental Science; this attributes the term to Dr C Westphal, and gives his definition of it as ‘the fear of squares or open places’. This would be literally true, since the first element in the word represents Greek agorá ‘open space, typically a market place, used for public assemblies’ (the most celebrated in the ancient world was the Agora in Athens, rivalled only by the Forum in Rome).

The word agorá came from ageirein ‘assemble’, which is related to Latin grex ‘flock’, the source of English gregarious. Agoraphobia was not the first of the -phobias. That honour goes to hydrophobia in the mid 16th century. But that was an isolated example, and the surge of compounds based on Greek phóbos ‘fear’ really starts in the 19th century.

At first it was used for symptoms of physical illness (photophobia ‘abnormal sensitivity to light’ 1799), for aversions to other nationalities (Gallophobia 1803; the synonymous Francophobia does not appear until 1887), and for facetious formations (dustophobia, Robert Southey, 1824), and the range of specialized psychological terms familiar today does not begin to appear until the last quarter of the century (CLAUSTROPHOBIA 1879, acrophobia ‘fear of heights’ from Greek akros ‘topmost’ – see ACROBAT – 1892).
=> aggregate, allegory, gregarious, segregate
alder: alder: [OE] Alder is an ancient tree-name, represented in several other Indo-European languages, including German erle, Dutch els, Polish olcha, Russian ol’khá, and Latin alnus (which is the genus name of the alder in scientific classification). Alder is clearly the odd man out amongst all these forms in having a d, but it was not always so; the Old English word was alor, and the intrusive d does not begin to appear until the 14th century (it acts as a sort of connecting or glide consonant between the l and the following vowel, in much the same way as Old English thunor adopted a d to become thunder). The place-name Aldershot is based on the tree alder.
aloud: aloud: [14] Aloud was formed in Middle English from the adjective loud and the prefix a-, as in abroad; it does not appear to have had a direct Old English antecedent *on loud. Its opposite, alow ‘quietly’, did not survive the 15th century.
=> loud
ammunition: ammunition: [17] Ammunition is one of many words which resulted from a mistaken analysis of ‘article’ plus ‘noun’ (compare ADDER). In this case, French la munition ‘the munitions, the supplies’ was misapprehended as l’ammunition, and borrowed thus into English. At first it was used for military supplies in general, and it does not seem to have been until the beginning of the 18th century that its meaning became restricted to ‘bullets, shells, etc’.

The word munition itself was borrowed into English from French in the 16th century. It originally meant ‘fortification’, and came from the Latin noun mūnītiō; this was a derivative of the verb munīre, ‘defend, fortify’, which in turn was based on the noun moenia ‘walls, ramparts’ (related to mūrus ‘wall’, the source of English mural).

Also from munīre, via medieval Latin mūnīmentum, comes muniment [15], a legal term for ‘title deed’; the semantic connection is that a title deed is a means by which someone can ‘defend’ his or her legal right to property.
=> muniment, munition, mural
apartheid: apartheid: [20] Apartheid is a direct borrowing from Afrikaans apartheid, literally ‘separateness’, which is a compound based on Dutch apart and the suffix -heid (related to English -hood). The first record of its use in Afrikaans is in 1929, but it does not appear in English-language contexts until 1947.
around: around: [14] Around was formed in Middle English from the prefix a- ‘on’ and the noun round (perhaps influenced by the Old French phrase a la reonde ‘in the round, roundabout’). It was slow to usurp existing forms such as about – it does not occur in Shakespeare or the 1611 translation of the Bible – and it does not seem to have become strongly established before the end of the 17th century. The adverb and preposition round may be a shortening of around.
=> round
arrange: arrange: [14] Arrange is a French formation: Old French arangier was a compound verb formed from the prefix a- and the verb rangier ‘set in a row’ (related to English range and rank). In English its first, and for a long time its only meaning was ‘array in a line of battle’. Shakespeare does not use it, and it does not occur in the 1611 translation of the Bible. It is not until the 18th century that it becomes at all common, in the current sense ‘put in order’, and it has been speculated that this is a reborrowing from modern French arranger.
=> range, rank
arrive: arrive: [13] When speakers of early Middle English ‘arrived’, what they were literally doing was coming to shore after a voyage. For arrive was originally a Vulgar Latin compound verb based on the Latin noun rīpa ‘shore, river bank’ (as in the English technical term riparian ‘of a river bank’; and river comes from the same source). From the phrase ad rīpam ‘to the shore’ came the verb *arripāre ‘come to land’, which passed into English via Old French ariver. It does not seem to have been until the early 14th century that the more general sense of ‘reaching a destination’ started to establish itself in English.
=> riparian, river
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.
asset: asset: [16] Originally, to have assets was simply to have ‘enough’ – as in French assez. The Anglo-Norman legal phrase aver asetz signified ‘have enough money to meet one’s debts’, and eventually asetz, later assets, passed from the general meaning ‘enough’ to the particular ‘financial resources’ (the final -s caused it to be regarded as a plural noun, but the analogical singular asset does not appear until the 19th century).

Anglo-Norman asetz itself goes back via Old French asez to Vulgar Latin *assatis, formed from the Latin phrase ad satis ‘to enough’ (satis is the source of English satisfy and satiate, and is related to sad).
=> sad, satiate, satisfy
attain: attain: [14] Unlike contain, maintain, obtain, and the rest of a very long list of English words ending in -tain, attain does not come from Latin tenēre ‘_hold’. Its source is Latin tangere ‘touch’ (as in English tangible and tangent). The addition of the prefix ad- ‘to’ produced attingere ‘reach’, which passed via Vulgar Latin *attangere and Old French ataindre into English.
=> tangent, tangible
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).
bag: bag: [13] English acquired bag from Old Norse baggi ‘bag, bundle’, but it does not appear in any other Germanic language, which suggests that it may have been borrowed at some point from a non-Germanic language. Forms such as Old French bague, Italian baga, and Portuguese bagua show that it existed elsewhere. A derivative of the Old French word was bagage, from which in the 15th century English got baggage; and Italian baga may have led, by a doubling of diminutive suffixes, to bagatella ‘insignificant property, trifle’, which entered English in the 17th century via French bagatelle (although this has also been referred to Latin bacca ‘berry’ – see BACHELOR).
=> bagatelle, baggage
ban: ban: [OE] Ban is one of a widespread group of words in the European languages. Its ultimate source is the Indo-European base *bha-, which also gave English fame (from a derivative of Latin fārī ‘speak’) and phase (from Greek phāsis). The Germanic offshoot of the Indo- European base, and source of the English word, was *bannan, which originally probably meant simply ‘speak, proclaim’.

This gradually developed through ‘proclaim with threats’ to ‘put a curse on’, but the sense ‘prohibit’ does not seem to have arisen until as late as the 19th century. The Germanic base *bann- was borrowed into Old French as the noun ban ‘proclamation’. From there it crossed into English and probably mingled with the cognate English noun, Middle English iban (the descendant of Old English gebann).

It survives today in the plural form banns ‘proclamation of marriage’. The adjective derived from Old French ban was banal, acquired by English in the 18th century. It originally meant ‘of compulsory military service’ (from the word’s basic sense of ‘summoning by proclamation’); this was gradually generalized through ‘open to everyone’ to ‘commonplace’.
=> banal, bandit, banish, contraband, fame, phase
belch: belch: [OE] Belch first appears in recognizable form in the 15th century, but it can scarcely not be related to belk ‘eructate’, which goes back to Old English bealcan and survived dialectally into the modern English period. Belch itself may derive either from an unrecorded variant of bealcan, *belcan (with the c here representing a /ch/ sound), or from a related Old English verb belcettan ‘eructate’.

But whichever route it took, its ultimate source was probably a Germanic base *balk-or *belk-, from which German got bölken ‘bleat, low, belch’. Belch was originally a perfectly inoffensive word; it does not seem to have been until the 17th century that its associations began to drag it down towards vulgarity.
bin: bin: [OE] Old English had the word bine or binne (it meant ‘manger’), but it is not clear where it got it from. Perhaps the most likely source is a word, *benna, in the Celtic language of the pre- Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain (Welsh has ben ‘cart’). But it may also have come from medieval Latin benna, which gave French benne ‘large basket’. In English, the modern sense ‘storage container’ does not fully emerge until the 14th century.
birch: birch: [OE] Old English bi(e)rce came from a prehistoric Germanic *berkjōn, source also of German birke. The word goes back ultimately to an Indo-European *bhergo, but as is often the case with ancient tree-names, it does not denote the same type of tree in every language in which it has descendants: Latin fraxinus, for example, means ‘ash tree’. It has been speculated that the word is related to bright (whose Indo-European source was *bhereg-), with reference to the tree’s light-coloured bark.

It could also be that the word bark [13] itself is related. The verb birch ‘flog’ (originally with a birch rod or bunch of birch twigs) is early 19th-century.
=> bark, bright
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.
blatant: blatant: [16] Blatant appears to have been coined, or at least introduced, by the poet Edmund Spenser. In the Faerie Queene 1596 he describes how ‘unto themselves they [Envy and Detraction] gotten had a monster which the blatant beast men call, a dreadful fiend of gods and men ydrad [dreaded]’. This ‘blatant beast’ was an allegorical representation of calumny. In the 17th century the word came to be applied to offensively voluble people, but the main modern sense, ‘offensively conspicuous’, does not seem to have developed until the late 19th century.

If the word was Spenser’s own introduction, it is not clear where he got it from. The likeliest candidate seems to be Latin blatīre ‘babble, gossip’, of imitative origin.
blaze: blaze: There are three distinct words blaze in English. The commonest, meaning ‘fire, flame’ [OE], comes from a prehistoric Germanic *blasōn. Its original signification was ‘torch’ (in the sense, of course, of a burning piece of wood or bunch of sticks), but by the year 1000 the main current meaning was established. The precise source of blaze ‘light-coloured mark or spot’ [17] is not known for certain, but there are several cognate forms in other Germanic languages, including Old Norse blesi and German blässe; perhaps the likeliest candidate as far as blaze is concerned is Middle Low German bles.

The verbal usage, as in ‘blaze a trail’ (that is, by making conspicuous marks on trees) originated in the mid 18th century. The related German adjective blass ‘pale’, which originally meant ‘shining’, points up the fact that ultimately these two words blaze are related, the primeval sense ‘shining’ having diverged on the one hand through ‘pale’, on the other through ‘glowing, burning’.

The third blaze, ‘proclaim’ [14], as in ‘blaze abroad’, is now seldom encountered. It originally meant ‘blow a trumpet’, and comes ultimately from the Indo-European base *bhlā- (source of blow). Its immediate source in English was Middle Dutch blāsen. Despite its formal and semantic similarity, it does not appear to have any connection with blazon [13], which comes from Old French blason ‘shield’, a word of unknown origin.

A blazer [19] got its name from being a brightly coloured jacket (from blaze meaning ‘fire, flame’). It originated among English university students in the late 19th century. According to a correspondent in the Daily News 22 August 1889, the word was originally applied specifically to the red jackets worn by members of the ‘Lady Margaret, St John’s College, Cambridge, Boat Club’.

But by the 1880s its more general application had become widely established: in the Durham University Journal of 21 February 1885 we read that ‘the latest novelty … for the river is flannels, a blazer, and spats’.
=> blow
blend: blend: [13] Old English had a verb blendan, but it meant ‘make blind’ or ‘dazzle’. Modern English blend appears to come from blend-, the present stem of Old Norse blanda ‘mix’ (a relative of Old English blandan ‘mix’). The ultimate source of this is not clear, but it does not seem to be restricted to Germanic (Lithuanian has the adjective blandus ‘thick’ in relation to soup), so it may not be too far-fetched to suggest a link with blind, whose Indo-European ancestor *bhlendhos meant among other things ‘confused’.
bloat: bloat: [13] Bloat has a confused and uncertain history. It seems first to have appeared on the scene in the 13th century as an adjective, blout, meaning ‘soft, flabby’, a probable borrowing from Old Norse blautr ‘soft from being cooked with liquid’. This occurs only once, and does not resurface until the early 17th century, in Hamlet as it happens, as blowt: ‘Let the blowt king tempt you again to bed’.

This appears to be the same word as turns up slightly later in the century as bloat, its meaning showing signs of changing from ‘flabby’ to ‘puffed up’. Then in the 1660s we encounter bloated ‘puffed up, swollen’, which paved the way for the verb bloat, first recorded in the 1670s. It is not clear whether bloater [19] comes from the same source. Its linguistic ancestor is the bloat herring [16], which may perhaps have been given its name on the grounds that herrings preserved by light smoking are plumper than those fully dried.
bounce: bounce: [13] Bounce is something of a mystery word. When it first appears in Middle English it means ‘hit’, and it does not acquire its modern sense ‘rebound’ until the late 16th century. There are similar words in other Germanic languages, such as Dutch bons ‘thump’, but there is no reason to suppose that any of them is actually the source of the English word. Many etymologists incline to the view that bounce is an independent onomatopoeic formation.
bramble: bramble: [OE] Bramble has several cognates in other Germanic languages, but as with many plant-names it does not always refer to the same plant. Old High German brāmma, for instance, is a ‘wild rose’; Old Saxon hiopbrāmio is a ‘hawthorn bush’; and then there is English broom. All come from a prehistoric Germanic *brāemoz ‘thorny bush’. In the case of bramble, Old English originally had brēmel, but the medial -b- had developed before the end of the Old English period. The bird-name brambling [16] is probably derived from it.
=> broom
brogue: brogue: [16] A brogue was originally a rudimentary sort of shoe worn in the more wild and woolly Celtic corners of the British Isles; the term does not seem to have been applied to today’s ‘stout country walking shoe’ until the early 20th century. The word, Irish and Scots Gaelic brōg, comes from Old Norse brók ‘leg covering’, which is related to English breeches; the relationship between ‘leg covering’ and ‘foot covering’ is fairly close, and indeed from the 17th to the 19th century brogue was used for ‘leggings’.

It is not clear whether brogue ‘Irish accent’ [18] is the same word; if it is, it presumably comes from some such notion as ‘the speech of those who wear brogues’.
=> breeches
brown: brown: [OE] In Old English, brown meant, rather vaguely, ‘dark’; it does not seem to have become a definite colour word until the 13th century. It comes from West and North Germanic *brūnaz, which probably goes back ultimately to the same Indo-European source (*bheros) as bear, etymologically the ‘brown [that is, dark] animal’. An additional meaning of brown in Old and Middle English, shared also by related words such as Old High German brūn, was ‘shining, glistening’, particularly as applied to weapons (it survives in fossilized form in the old ballad Cospatrick, recorded in 1802: ‘my bonny brown sword’); Old French took it over when it borrowed brun from Germanic, and it is the basis of the verb burnir ‘polish’, from which English gets burnish [14].

Another contribution made by French brun to English is the feminine diminutive form brunette [17]. An earlier Old French variant burnete had previously been borrowed by English in the 12th century as burnet, and since the 14th century has been applied to a genus of plants of the rose family. The term burnet moth is first recorded in 1842.
=> bear, brunette, burnish
bunting: bunting: Bunting ‘bird’ [13] and bunting ‘flags’ [18] are presumably two distinct words, although in neither case do we really know where they come from. There was a now obsolete English adjective bunting, first recorded in the 16th century, which meant ‘plump, rounded, short and thick’ (could a subliminal memory of it have been in Frank Richards’s mind when he named Billy Bunter?).

Perhaps the small plump bird, the bunting, was called after this. The adjective probably came from an obsolete verb bunt, which meant (of a sail) ‘swell, billow’, but since we do not know where that came from, it does not get us very much further. As for bunting ‘flags’, the word originally referred to a loosely woven fabric from which they were made, and it has been conjectured that it came from the English dialect verb bunt ‘sift’, such cloth having perhaps once been used for sifting flour.
bust: bust: There are two different words bust in English. The one meaning ‘break’ [18] is simply an alteration of burst. Bust ‘sculpture of head and chest’ [17] comes via French buste from Italian busto ‘upper body’, of uncertain origin (Latin had the temptingly similar bustum ‘monument on a tomb’, but this does not seem to fit in with the word’s primary sense ‘upper body’).

In English, application of the word to the human chest probably developed in the 18th century (one of the earliest examples is from Byron’s Don Juan 1819: ‘There was an Irish lady, to whose bust I ne’er saw justice done’), although as late as the early 19th century it could still be used with reference to men’s chests, and had not become particularized to female breasts: ‘His naked bust would have furnished a model for a statuary’, Washington Irving, A tour on the prairies 1835.
cameo: cameo: [15] The immediate source of modern English cameo was Italian cameo or cammeo. No one is too sure where it ultimately came from, but it has always been assumed that it had some sort of Oriental source – perhaps Arabic qamaā’īl ‘flower buds’. The original form of the word in English was cameu, which came from Old French camahieu; the Italianate cameo does not appear until the late 17th century.
carry: carry: [14] For such a basic and common word, carry has a surprisingly brief history. It does not go back to some prehistoric Indo-European root, but was formed less than 1000 years ago in Anglo-Norman or Old Northern French, on the basis of carre or car (immediate source of English car). The verb carier thus meant literally ‘transport in a wheeled vehicle’. This sense was carried over into English, and though it has since largely given way to the more general ‘convey’, it is preserved in the derivative carriage, in such expressions as ‘carriage paid’.
=> car, carriage
caviare: caviare: [16] Caviare is of Turkish origin; it comes from Turkish khāvyār. It spread from there to a number of European languages, including Italian caviale and French caviar, many of which contributed to the rather confusing diversity of forms in 16th-, 17th-, and early 18th-century English: cavialy, cavery, caveer, gaveare, etc. By the mid-18th century caviare or caviar had become the established spellings. Ironically, although caviare is quintessentially a Russian delicacy, Russian does not have the word caviare; it uses ikrá.
chip: chip: [OE] Old English cipp meant ‘share-beam of a plough’ (a sense paralleled in related forms in other Germanic languages, such as Dutch kip ‘plough-beam’ and Old Norse keppr ‘stick’). This seems a far cry from the modern use of chip, for which there is no evidence before the 14th century, and in fact our noun chip may be a new formation based on the verb chip, which goes back to Old English -cippian ‘cut’ (found only in compounds).

Here again, though, the record is incomplete; for the post-Old English verb does not turn up until the late 15th century, and then in the very specialized sense ‘cut the crust off bread’. The more general meaning ‘cut’ appears in the 17th century, but the modern ‘break off a small fragment’ is as late as the 18th century. All in all, a picture confused by lack of evidence. But probably the basic etymological sense that underlies all later usage is ‘cut off’ or ‘piece cut off’ (the early noun senses representing ‘branch or bough cut off a tree’). ‘Small piece of fried potato’ dates from the 1860s. (Old French borrowed the word as chipe, and a variant of this, chiffe ‘rag’, is the ultimate source of English chiffon [18].)
=> chiffon
clever: clever: [13] Clever is rather a mystery word. There is one isolated instance of what appears to be the word in an early 13th-century bestiary, where it means ‘dextrous’, and the connotations of ‘clutching something’ have led to speculation that it may be connected with claw. It does not appear on the scene again until the late 16th century, when its associations with ‘agility’ and ‘sprightliness’ may point to a link with Middle Dutch klever, of similar meaning. The modern sense ‘intelligent’ did not develop until the 18th century.
comply: comply: [17] Like accomplish, complete, complement, and compliment, comply comes from Latin complēre ‘fill up, finish’. It was originally acquired in the 14th century, via Old French complire, but does not seem to have survived, and the sudden explosion in its use in the early 17th century represents a new borrowing, from Italian complire. Italian had the word from Spanish cumplir, in which the meaning ‘be courteous’ had developed. This passed into English, and though long defunct, seems to have been the basis of the modern English sense ‘be amenable or obedient’. Compliant [17] is an English development.
=> complete, compliant, compliment
convalesce: convalesce: [15] Latin valēre meant ‘be strong or healthy’ (from it English gets valiant, valid, valour, and value). Derived from it was valēscere ‘grow strong’, which, with the addition of the intensive prefix com- produced convalēscere, source of English convalesce. It was quite a commonly used word in Scottish English from earliest times, but does not seem to have established itself south of the border until the 19th century.
=> valiant, valid, valour, value
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
country: country: [13] Etymologically, the meaning of country is virtually ‘surroundings’. It originated in medieval Latin contrātus ‘lying on the opposite side’, an adjective formed from the proposition contrā ‘against, opposite’. This was used in the phrase terra contrāta ‘land opposite or before one, spread out around one’, and soon broke free to act as a noun in its own right.

In Old French it became cuntree, the form in which it was borrowed into English. Its original notion of ‘area of land’ had quickly become narrowed down to ‘district controlled or occupied by a particular people’, hence ‘nation’, but its use for ‘rural areas as opposed to cities’ does not seem to have developed until the 16th century. The compound countryside originated in Scotland and northern England, probably in the 17th century.
cringe: cringe: [13] Like crank, cringe appears to come ultimately from a prehistoric Germanic base *krank- whose original meaning was ‘bend’ or ‘curl up’. This produced an Old English verb crincan ‘fall in battle, yield’ (the association of ‘curling up’ and ‘dying’ is obvious), probable ancestor of modern English crinkle [14]. Crincan does not itself seem to be the source of cringe, which until the 16th century was usually spelled crenge or crench; to explain these eforms it is necessary to postulate *crencean, an unrecorded Old English causative derivative of crincan, meaning ‘cause to curl up’.
=> crank, crinkle
crowd: crowd: [OE] The notion underlying crowd is of ‘pushing’ or ‘pressing’ (a semantic element shared by throng and of course by the now obsolete use of press for ‘crowd’, and echoed in such current expressions as ‘there’s quite a crush in here’). The Old English verb crūdan meant simply ‘press’, and of its relatives Middle Dutch crūden meant ‘press, push’ and Middle High German kroten meant ‘oppress’. Old English also had a noun croda ‘crowd’, but this does not seem to be the direct ancestor of the modern English noun, which does not appear until as late as the 16th century, as a derivative of the verb.
cuttlefish: cuttlefish: [11] The cuttlefish probably gets its name from its resemblance to a bag when its internal shell is removed. Its earliest recorded designation is cudele (the compound cuttlefish does not appear until the 16th century), which is generally taken to be a derivative of the same base as produced cod ‘pouch’ (as in codpiece and peascod). In the 16th century the variant scuttlefish arose, perhaps partly with reference to the creature’s swift movements.
=> cod
decimate: decimate: [17] Decimate is a cause célèbre amongst those who apparently believe that words should never change their meanings. The original general signification of its Latin source, the verb decimāre, was the removal or destruction of one tenth (it was derived from Latin decem ‘ten’), and it may perhaps strike the 20th century as odd to have a particular word for such an apparently abstruse operation.

It does, however, arise out of two very specific procedures in the ancient world: the exaction of a tax of one tenth (for which indeed English has the ultimately related word tithe), and the practice in the Roman army of punishing a body of soldiers guilty of some crime such as mutiny by choosing one in ten of them by lot to be put to death. Modern English does not perhaps have much use for a verb with such specialized senses, but the general notion of impassive and indiscriminate slaughter implied in the Roman military use led, apparently as early as the mid- 17th century, to the modern sense ‘kill or destroy most of’.
=> decimal, ten
dig: dig: [13] The origins of dig are not altogether clear. It does not appear to have existed in Old English, although it has been speculated that there was an Old English verb *dīcigian, never recorded, derived from dīc ‘ditch’ (the standard Old English verbs for ‘dig’ were delfan and grafan, whence modern English delve and grave). Another theory is that it was borrowed from Old French diguer ‘make a dyke, hollow out the earth’. This was a derivative of the noun digue ‘dyke’, which itself was borrowed from a Germanic source that also produced Old English dīc (and indeed modern English dyke).
=> ditch, dyke
dog: dog: [11] Dog is one of the celebrated mystery words of English etymology. It appears once in late Old English, in the Prudentius glosses, where it translates Latin canis, but its use does not seem to have proliferated until the 13th century, and it did not replace the native hound as the main word for the animal until the 16th century. It has no known relatives of equal antiquity in other European languages, although several borrowed it in the 16th and 17th centuries for particular sorts of ‘dog’: German dogge ‘large dog, such as a mastiff’, for instance, French dogue ‘mastiff’, and Swedish dogg ‘bulldog’.
dot: dot: [OE] The underlying meaning of dot seems to be ‘small lump or raised mark’. In Old English (in which there is only a single record of its use) it meant ‘head of a boil’, and it could well be related to English tit ‘nipple’. The word disappears from written texts between the 11th and the 16th centuries, and resurfaces in the sense ‘small lump’. The modern meaning ‘small roundish mark’ does not appear until the 17th century. Dottle ‘unburnt tobacco in the bottom of a pipe’ [15] is a diminutive form of dot.
=> dottle, tit
dull: dull: [13] Dull originally meant ‘slow-witted’. It was borrowed from Middle Low German dul, a descendant of the prehistoric Germanic adjective *dulaz, which also produced German toll and Old English dol ‘stupid’ (the Old English adjective does not seem to have survived beyond the 10th century). The modern meaning ‘boring’ developed in the 15th century. The now littleused dullard [15] is a derivative (reflecting the adjective’s original sense), as also is probably dolt [16].
=> dolt
dump: dump: [14] Dump is probably of Scandinavian origin – Danish and Norwegian have the similar dumpe and dumpa, which mean ‘fall suddenly’ – although Dutch dompen ‘immerse, topple’ is another candidate that has been put forward. Either way, there does not seem to be any direct connection with the dumps [16], which was probably originally a metaphorical use of Dutch domp ‘haze’, in the sense ‘miasma of depression’. Nor has any relationship been established with the obsolete noun dump ‘lump’ [18], which appears to have close ties with dumpling [16] and dumpy [16], although whether as source or descendant (by backformation) is a debatable point.