quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- tumble




- tumble: [13] Tumble was borrowed from Middle Low German tummelen, which has other relatives in modern German tummeln ‘bustle, hurry’ and taumeln ‘reel, stagger’. All were formed from a base that also found its way into the Romance languages, producing French tomber ‘fall’ (source of English tumbrel [14], which in Old French denoted a ‘chute’ or ‘cart that could be tipped up’) and Italian tombolare ‘tumble, turn somersaults’ (source of English tombola [19]).
The derivative tumbler [14] originally denoted an ‘acrobat’; the application to a ‘drinking glass’, which emerged in the mid 17th century, comes from the fact that such glasses were originally made with rounded bottoms, so that they could not be put down until they were empty.
=> tombola - glass (n.)




- Old English glæs "glass; a glass vessel," from Proto-Germanic *glasam "glass" (cognates: Old Saxon glas, Middle Dutch and Dutch glas, German Glas, Old Norse gler "glass, looking glass," Danish glar), from PIE *ghel- (2) "to shine," with derivatives referring to bright materials and gold (cognates: Latin glaber "smooth, bald," Old Church Slavonic gladuku, Lithuanian glodus "smooth"). The PIE root also is the ancestor of widespread words for gray, blue, green, and yellow, such as Old English glær "amber," Latin glaesum "amber" (which might be from Germanic), Old Irish glass "green, blue, gray," Welsh glas "blue."
Restricted sense of "drinking glass" is from early 13c. and now excludes other glass vessels. Meaning "a glass mirror" is from 14c. Meaning "glass filled with running sand to measure time" is from 1550s; meaning "observing instrument" is from 1610s. - tumbler (n.)




- mid-14c., "acrobat," agent noun from tumble (v.). Compare Old English tumbere "tumbler, dancer." A fem. form was tumblester (early 15c.), tumbester (late 14c.) "female acrobatic dancer." Meaning "drinking glass" is recorded from 1660s, originally a glass with a rounded or pointed bottom which would cause it to "tumble;" thus it could not be set down until it was empty. As a part of a lock mechanism, from 1670s.