quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- husband
- husband: [OE] The Anglo-Saxons used wer ‘man’ (as in werewolf) for ‘husband’, and not until the late 13th century was the word husband drafted in for ‘male spouse’. This had originally meant ‘master of a household’, and was borrowed from Old Norse húsbóndi, a compound formed from hús ‘house’ and bóndi. Bóndi in turn was a contraction of an earlier bóandi, búandi ‘dweller’, a noun use of the present participle of bóa, búa ‘dwell’, This was derived from the Germanic base *bū- ‘dwell’, which also produced English be, boor, booth, bound ‘intending to go’, bower, build, burly, byelaw, byre, and the -bour of neighbour.
The ancient link between ‘dwelling in a place’ and ‘farming the land’ comes out in husbandman [14] and husbandry [14], reflecting a now obsolete sense of husband, ‘farmer’. The abbreviated form hubby dates from the 17th century.
=> be, boor, booth, bower, build, byre, house - relate
- relate: [16] Something that is related to something else is etymologically ‘carried back’ to it. The word is based on relātus, the past participle of Latin referre ‘carry back, refer to’ (source of English refer). (Lātus was not the original past participle of Latin ferre ‘carry’; it was drafted in from tollere ‘raise’, source of English extol and tolerate.) Derivatives in English include relation [14] and relative [14].
=> extol, tolerate - shut
- shut: [OE] Shut comes ultimately from the same prehistoric Germanic base (*skaut-, *skeut-, *skut- ‘project’) that produced English shoot, and its underlying etymological reference is to the ‘shooting’ of a bolt across a door to fasten it. Its immediate West Germanic ancestor was *skuttjan, which also produced Dutch schutten ‘obstruct’. In Old English this became scyttan, which if it had evolved unchecked would have given modern English shit. For reasons of delicacy, perhaps, the West Midlands form shut was drafted into the general language in the 16th century.
=> sheet, shoot, shot, shout, shuttle - 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.