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dreary [dreary 词源字典]: dreary: [OE] In Old English, dreary (or drēorig, as it then was) meant ‘dripping with blood, gory’, but its etymological connections are with ‘dripping, falling’ rather than with ‘blood’. It goes back to a West Germanic base *dreuz-, *drauz- which also produced Old English drēosna ‘drop, fall’, probably the ultimate source of drizzle [16] and drowsy.

The literal sense ‘bloody’ disappeared before the end of the Old English period in the face of successive metaphorical extensions: ‘dire, horrid’; ‘sad’ (echoed in the related German traurig ‘sad’); and, in the 17th century, the main modern sense ‘gloomy, dull’. Drear is a conscious archaism, created from dreary in the 17th century.
=> drizzle, drowsy[dreary etymology, dreary origin, 英语词源]
enamel: enamel: [14] The underlying meaning element in enamel is ‘melting’. It comes ultimately from a prehistoric Germanic base *smalt- (source of English schmaltz ‘sentimentality’ [20], borrowed via Yiddish from German schmalz ‘fat, dripping’), and related Germanic forms produced English smelt, melt, and malt. Old French acquired the Germanic word and turned it into esmauz; this in turn was re-formed to esmail, and Anglo-Norman adopted it as amail.

This formed the basis, with the prefix en- ‘in’, of a verb enamailler ‘decorate with enamel’. English borrowed it, and by the mid-15th century it was being used as a noun for the substance itself (the noun amel, a direct borrowing from Anglo-Norman, had in fact been used in this sense since the 14th century, and it did not finally die out until the 18th century).

Its application to the substance covering teeth dates from the early 18th century.
=> malt, melt, schmaltz, smelt
stalactite: stalactite: [17] A stalactite is etymologically something that ‘drips’. The word was coined in modern Latin as stalactītēs, based on Greek stalaktós ‘dripping’, a derivative of the verb stalássein ‘drip’. Also derived from stalássein was stalagmós ‘dropping’, which formed the basis of stalagmite [17].
dreary (adj.): Old English dreorig "sad, sorrowful," originally "cruel, bloody, blood-stained," from dreor "gore, blood," from (ge)dreosan (past participle droren) "fall, decline, fail," from Proto-Germanic *dreuzas (cognates: Old Norse dreyrigr "gory, bloody," and more remotely, German traurig "sad, sorrowful"), from PIE root *dhreu- "to fall, flow, drip, droop" (see drip (v.)).

The word has lost its original sense of "dripping blood." Sense of "dismal, gloomy" first recorded 1667 in "Paradise Lost," but Old English had a related verb drysmian "become gloomy."
drip (v.): c. 1300, perhaps from Middle Danish drippe, from Proto-Germanic *drup- (cognates: Dutch druipen, German triefen), from PIE root *dhreu-. Related to droop and drop. Old English had cognate drypan "to let drop," dropian "fall in drops," and dreopan "to drop." Related: Dripped; dripping.
gut-bucket (adj.): in reference to jazz, "earthy," by 1929, supposedly originally a reference to the buckets which caught the drippings, or gutterings, from barrels. Which would connect it to gutter (v.).
masto-: before vowels mast-, word-forming element meaning "breast," from comb. form of Greek mastos "woman's breast," from madan "to be wet, to flow," from PIE *mad- "wet, moist, dripping" (cognates: Latin madere "be moist;" Albanian mend "suckle;" see mast (n.2)).
soap (n.): Old English sape "soap, salve" (originally a reddish hair dye used by Germanic warriors to give a frightening appearance), from Proto-Germanic *saipon "dripping thing, resin" (cognates: Middle Low German sepe, West Frisian sjippe, Dutch zeep, Old High German seiffa, German seife "soap," Old High German seifar "foam," Old English sipian "to drip"), from PIE *soi-bon-, from root *seib- "to pour out, drip, trickle" (cognates: Latin sebum "tallow, suet, grease").

Romans and Greeks used oil to clean skin; the Romance language words for "soap" (cognates: Italian sapone, French savon, Spanish jabon) are from Late Latin sapo "pomade for coloring the hair" (first mentioned in Pliny), which is a Germanic loan-word, as is Finnish saippua. The meaning "flattery" is recorded from 1853.
stalactite (n.): "hanging formation of carbonite of lime from the roof of a cave," 1670s, Englished from Modern Latin stalactites (used 1654 by Olaus Wormius), from Greek stalaktos "dripping, oozing out in drops," from stalassein "to trickle," from PIE root *stag- "to seep, drip, drop" (cognates: German stallen, Lithuanian telziu "to urinate") + noun suffix -ite (1). Related: Stalactic; stalactitic.
Pinguicula: "A genus comprising the butterworts (family Lentibulariaceae), which are small insectivorous bog plants with a slender flower stalk arising from a rosette of thick yellowish-green greasy leaves; (also pinguicula) a plant of this genus, a butterwort", Late 16th cent.; earliest use found in John Gerard (c1545–1612), herbalist. From post-classical Latin pinguicula, use as noun (short for planta pinguicula) of feminine of classical Latin pinguiculus rather fat (from pinguis fat + -culus), apparently after early modern German smalzchrawt, lit. ‘dripping weed, fat weed’, so named on account of its greasy leaves. Compare French grassette.