英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

argosy [argosy 词源字典]: argosy: [16] On the face of it argosy, an archaic term for ‘large merchant ship’, gives every appearance of being connected with the Argonauts, members of the crew of the ship Argo who sailed with Jason in quest of the Golden Fleece; but in fact the words are completely unrelated. When English first acquired argosy, from Italian, it was ragusea, which meant literally ‘vessel from Ragusa’ (an important city and seaport on the Dalmatian coast, now known as Dubrovnik). From the hotchpotch of spellings used in English in the 16th and 17th centuries (including ragusye, rhaguse, argosea, and arguze), argosy finally emerged as victor.
[argosy etymology, argosy origin, 英语词源]
barnacle: barnacle: [12] The term barnacle was originally applied to a type of goose, Branta leucopsis, which according to medieval legend grew on trees or on logs of wood. Various fanciful versions of its reproductive cycle existed, among them that it emerged from a fruit or that it grew attached to a tree by its beak, but the most tenacious was that it developed inside small shellfish attached to wood, rocks, etc by the seashore.

Hence by the end of the 16th century the term had come to be applied to these shellfish, and today that is its main sense. The word was originally bernak (it gained its -le ending in the 15th century) and came from medieval Latin bernaca, but its ultimate source is unknown.
bluff: bluff: English has two words bluff, one or perhaps both of them of Dutch origin. The older, ‘hearty’ [17], originally referred to ships, and meant ‘having a flat vertical bow’. This nautical association suggests a Dutch provenance, though no thoroughly convincing source has been found. The sense ‘flat, vertical, (and broad)’ came to be applied to land features, such as cliffs (hence the noun bluff ‘high steep bank’, which emerged in America in the 18th century).

The word’s metaphorical extension to people was at first derogatory – ‘rough, blunt’ – but the more favourable ‘hearty’ had developed by the early 19th century. Bluff ‘deceive’ [19] was originally a US poker term. It comes from Dutch bluffen ‘boast’, the descendant of Middle Dutch bluffen ‘swell up’.
cavalcade: cavalcade: [16] Originally, a cavalcade was simply a ride on horseback, often for the purpose of attack: in James I’s Counterblast to tobacco 1604, for example, we find ‘to make some sudden cavalcade upon your enemies’. By the 17th century this had developed to ‘procession on horseback’, and it was not long after that that the present-day, more general ‘procession’ emerged.

The word comes via French cavalcade from Italian cavalcata, a derivative of the verb cavalcare ‘ride on horseback’. This in turn came from Vulgar Latin *caballicāre, which was based on Latin caballus ‘horse’ (source also of English cavalier and French cheval ‘horse’). In the 20th century, -cade has come to be regarded as a suffix in its own right, meaning ‘procession, show’, and producing such forms as motorcade, aquacade, and even camelcade.
=> cavalier
cesspool: cesspool: [17] Cesspool has no direct etymological connection with pool. It comes from Old French suspirail ‘ventilator, breathing hole’, a derivative of souspirer ‘breathe’ (this goes back to Latin suspīrāre, source of the archaic English suspire ‘sigh’). This was borrowed into English in the early 15th century as suspiral ‘drainpipe’, which in the subsequent two hundred years appeared in a variety of spellings, including cesperalle.

By the early 16th century we find evidence of its being used not just for a pipe to drain matter away, but also for a well or tank to receive matter thus drained (originally any effluent, not just sewage). The way was thus open for a ‘reinterpretation’ of the word’s final element as pool (by the process known as folk etymology), and in the late 17th century the form cesspool emerged.

By analogy, as if there were really a word cess ‘sewage’, the term cesspit was coined in the mid-19th century.
=> suspire
challenge: challenge: [13] The original notion contained in challenge in English was of ‘accusation’. The word comes, via Old French chalenge or calenge, from Latin calumnia ‘false charge, deception’ (source of English calumny [15]). By the early 14th century, the modern, more neutral sense of ‘inviting to a contest’ had emerged, however, and before the end of the 17th century the word’s accusatory connotations had virtually died out.

Latin calumnia probably came from the verb calvī ‘deceive’. This may, via an unrecorded intermediary *calvilla, be related to Latin cavilla ‘raillery’, whose derived verb cavillārī was the source of English cavil [16].
=> calumny
clerk: clerk: [11] Clerk and its relatives cleric and clergy owe their existence ultimately to a Biblical reference, in Deuteronomy xviii 2, to the Levites, members of an Israelite tribe whose men were assistants to the Temple priests: ‘Therefore shall they have no inheritance among their brethren: the Lord is their inheritance’. Greek for ‘inheritance’ is klēros, and so it came about that matters relating to the Christian ministry were denoted in late Greek by the derived adjective klērikós.

This passed into ecclesiastical Latin as clēricus, which was originally borrowed into late Old English as cleric or clerc, later reinforced by Old French clerc to give modern English clerk. Its presentday bureaucratic connotations, which emerged in the 16th century, go back to an earlier time when members of the clergy were virtually the only people who could read or write.

However, religious associations have of course been preserved in cleric [17], from ecclesiastical Latin clēricus, and clergy [13], a blend of Old French clergie (a derivative of clerc) and clerge (from the ecclestiastical Latin derivative clēricātus). The compound clergyman is 16th century.
=> cleric, clergy
clock: clock: [14] The clock appears to have been so named because it told the hours by the chiming of a ‘bell’, medieval Latin clocca. The Latin word, which emerged in the 7th century and may have been of Irish origin, probably reached English via Middle Dutch klocke. Besides being applied to time-pieces, it has also lent its name to two garments on account of their supposedly bell-like shape: cloak [13], which comes from the Old French dialect cloke or cloque, and cloche hat [20], from French cloche ‘bell’.
=> cloak, cloche
code: code: [14] ‘System of secret communication signs’ is a relatively recent semantic development of the word code, which emerged in the early 19th century. It derived from an earlier sense ‘system of laws’, which was based on a specific application to various sets of statutes introduced by the Roman emperors. The word itself came from Old French code, a descendant of Latin cōdex, whose meaning ‘set of statutes, book of laws’ derived from a broader sense ‘book’.

This in turn came from an earlier ‘piece of wood coated with wax for writing on’, which was based ultimately on ‘tree trunk’, the word’s original meaning. Codex itself was borrowed into English in the 16th century. Its Latin diminutive form, cōdicillus, produced English codicil [15].
=> codex, codicil
cohort: cohort: [15] Etymologically, cohort is an ‘enclosed yard’. It comes via Old French cohorte from Latin cohors, a compound noun formed from the prefix com- ‘with’ and an element hortwhich also appears in Latin hortus ‘garden’ (source of English horticulture) and is related to English garden, yard, and the second element of orchard.

From the underlying sense of ‘enclosed place’ it came to be applied to a crowd of people in such a place, and then more specifically to an infantry company in the Roman army. Its meaning has spread figuratively in English to ‘band of associates or accomplices’, whose frequent use in the plural led to the misapprehension that a single cohort was an ‘associate’ or ‘accomplice’ – a usage which emerged in American English in the mid 20th century.

The original form of the Latin word is well preserved in cohort, but it has also reached us, more thickly disguised, as court.
=> court, garden, horticulture, orchard, yard
concern: concern: [15] In earliest use, English concern meant ‘distinguish, discern’. This was a reflection of its ultimate source, Latin cernere ‘sift, separate’. In combination with the prefix com- ‘together’ it produced concernere, which in classical times meant specifically ‘mix together preparatory to sifting’. Later, however, the prefix seems to have taken on a more intensive role, with concernere reverting to the same range of senses as cernere.

By the Middle Ages these not only included ‘discern, perceive’ and ‘decide’ (whence English certain, from the past participle of cernere), but had widened considerably to ‘relate to’ – a meaning which emerged in English concern in the 16th century. Connotations of distress or worry began to develop in the late 17th century.
=> certain, discern
crew: crew: [15] The idea originally underlying crew is ‘augmentation’. It comes from Old French creue, which was derived from the verb creistre ‘grow, increase, augment’, a descendant of Latin crēscere ‘grow’. At first in English it denoted a squad of military reinforcements. Soon its meaning had spread to any band of soldiers, and by the end of the 16th century the word was being used for any group of people gathered together with or without a particular purpose. The most familiar modern application, to the people manning a ship, emerged in the latter part of the 17th century.
=> crescent, croissant, increase
cure: cure: [13] The Latin noun cūra ‘care’ has fathered a wide range of English words. On their introduction to English, via Old French, both the noun and the verb cure denoted ‘looking after’, but it was not long before the specific sense ‘medical care’ led to ‘successful medical care’ – that is, ‘healing’ (the Latin verb cūrāre could mean ‘cure’ too, but this sense seems not to have survived into Old French).

The notion of ‘looking after’ now scarcely survives in cure itself, but it is preserved in the derived nouns curate [14] (and its French version curé [17]), who looks after souls, and curator [14]. The Latin adjective cūriōsus originally meant ‘careful’, a sense preserved through Old French curios into English curious [14] but defunct since the 18th century.

The secondary sense ‘inquisitive’ developed in Latin, but it was not until the word reached Old French that the meaning ‘interesting’ emerged. Curio [19] is an abbreviation of curiosity [14], probably modelled on Italian nouns of the same form. Curette [18] and its derivative curettage [19] were both formed from the French verb curer, in the sense ‘clean’.

Other English descendants of Latin cūra include scour, secure, and sinecure.
=> curate, curious, scour, secure, sinecure
doff: doff: [14] Doff, don [14], and the now obsolete dout [16] and dup [16], contractions respectively of ‘do off, on, out, and up’, preserve the ancient meaning of do, ‘put, place’. They were standard Middle English forms, but gradually fell out of the mainstream language into dialect (from which dout and dup never emerged). Sir Walter Scott, however, included doff and don, in their specific sense ‘remove or put on clothing’, in his long list of medieval lexical revivals (‘My experience has been in donning steel gauntlets on mailed knights’, Fair Maid of Perth 1828), and they have survived as archaisms ever since.
drain: drain: [OE] The underlying meaning of drain seems to be ‘making dry’. It comes ultimately from *draug-, the same prehistoric Germanic base as produced English drought and dry, and in Old English it meant ‘strain through a cloth or similar porous medium’. There then follows a curious gap in the history of the word: there is no written record of its use between about 1000 AD and the end of the 14th century, and when it reemerged it began to give the first evidence of its main modern meaning ‘draw off a liquid’.
=> drought, dry
eerie: eerie: [13] Eerie seems to come ultimately from Old English earg ‘cowardly’, a descendant of prehistoric Germanic *arg-, although the connection has not been established for certain. It emerged in Scotland and northern England in the 13th century in the sense ‘cowardly, fearful’, and it was not until the 18th century that it began to veer round semantically from ‘afraid’ to ‘causing fear’. Burns was one of the first to use it so in print: ‘Be thou a bogle by the eerie side of an auld thorn’. In the course of the 19th century its use gradually spread further south to become general English.
exploit: exploit: [14] Latin explicāre (source of English explicate and explicit) meant ‘unfold’. A Vulgar Latin descendant of its past participle was *explictum ‘something unfolded’, which passed into Old French as exploit or esplait. In the process, the original sense of ‘unfolding’ had developed through ‘bringing out, development’ and ‘advantage, success’ to ‘achievement’.

In the case of the English noun, it is the latter meaning which has survived, and in fact originally the verb too denoted ‘achieve, accomplish’. This seems to have died out in the 18th century, however, and when the verb reappears in the 19th century it is closer to the earlier ‘develop’ in meaning, particularly as applied to ‘getting the most out of’ natural resources. The modern derogatory sense ‘use for one’s own selfish ends’ emerged from this.
=> explicit, fold, ply
fancy: fancy: [15] Ultimately, fancy is the same word as fantasy [15], from which it emerged by a process of contraction and gradually became differentiated in meaning. Both go back originally to the Greek verb phaínein ‘show’ (source also of English diaphanous and phenomenon). From it was derived phantázein ‘make visible’, which produced the noun phantasíā ‘appearance, perception, imagination’ and its associated adjective phantastikós ‘able to make visible’ (and also incidentally phántasma, from which English gets phantasm and phantom).

The noun passed into English via Latin phantasia and Old French fantasie, bringing with it the original Greek senses and also some others which it had picked up on the way, including ‘caprice’. The semantic split between fantasy, which has basically taken the road of ‘imagination’, and fancy, which has tended more to ‘capricious preference’, was more or less complete by about 1600.

The quasi- Greek spelling phantasy was introduced in the 16th century, and has persisted for the noun, although the contemporary phantastic for the adjective has now died out. The Italian form fantasia was borrowed in the 18th century for a fanciful musical composition. (Fancy and fantasy have no etymological connection with the superficially similar fanatic, incidentally, which comes ultimately from Latin fānum ‘temple’.)
=> diaphanous, fantasy, pant, phantom
gag: gag: [15] Middle English gaggen meant ‘strangle, suffocate’, so the word started out with strong connotations that seem to have become submerged in local dialects as it came to be used more commonly in the milder sense ‘obstruct someone’s mouth’. In the 20th century, however, they have re-emerged in the intransitive sense ‘choke’. It is not clear how the 19th-century noun sense ‘joke’ is connected, if at all. As for the word’s source, it is generally said to have originated as an imitation of someone retching or choking.
gore: gore: English has three separate words gore, two of them perhaps ultimately related. Gore ‘blood’ [OE] originally meant ‘dung, shit’, or more generally ‘filth, dirt, slime’, and related words in other languages, such as Dutch goor ‘mud, filth’, Old Norse gor ‘slime’, and Welsh gôr ‘pus’, round out a semantic picture of ‘unpleasant semi-liquid material’, with frequent specific application to ‘bodily excretions’.

It was from this background that the sense ‘blood’, and particularly ‘coagulated blood’, emerged in the mid-16th century. Gore ‘triangular piece of cloth, as let into a skirt’ [OE] comes from Old English gāra ‘triangular piece of land’ (a sense preserved in the London street-name Kensington Gore). This was related to Old English gār ‘spear’ (as in garlic; see GOAD), the semantic connection being that a spearhead is roughly triangular. Gore ‘wound with horns’ [14] originally meant simply ‘stab, pierce’; it too may come ultimately from gār ‘spear’, although there is some doubt about this.
=> garlic
gravy: gravy: [14] To begin with, the word gravy signified a sort of spiced stock-based sauce served with white meat; it was not until the 16th century that its modern sense ‘meat juices’ or ‘sauce made from them’ emerged. Its origins are problematical. It is generally agreed that its v represents a misreading of an n in the Old French word, grané, from which it was borrowed (modern v was written u in medieval manuscripts, and was often very hard to distinguish from n); but what the source of grané was is not clear.

The favourite candidate is perhaps grain (source of English grain), as if ‘sauce flavoured with grains of spice’, but graine ‘meat’ has also been suggested.
=> grain
guinea: guinea: [17] Guinea first emerged as the name of a section of the West Africa continent in the late 16th century (its origins are not known, but presumably it was based on an African word). In 1663 the Royal Mint began to produce a gold coin valued at 20 shillings ‘for the use of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading with Africa’. It had the figure of an elephant on it.

Straightaway it became known as a guinea, both because its use was connected with the Guinea coast and because it was made from gold obtained there. And what is more, the coins soon came to be much in demand for domestic use: on 29 October 1666 Samuel Pepys recorded ‘And so to my goldsmith to bid him look out for some gold for me; and he tells me that Ginnys, which I bought 2000 of not long ago, and cost me but 18½d. change, will now cost me 22d., and but very few to be had at any price.

However, some more I will have, for they are very convenient – and of easy disposal’. Its value fluctuated, and was not fixed at 21 shillings until 1717. The last one was minted in 1813, but guinea as a term for the amount 21 shillings stayed in use until the early 1970s, when the decimalization of British currency dealt it the deathblow. The guinea pig [17], incidentally, comes from South America, and its name probably arose from a confusion between Guinea and Guiana, on the northern coast of South America.
hair: hair: [OE] No general Indo-European term for ‘hair’ has come down to us. All the ‘hair’-words in modern European languages are descended from terms for particular types of hair – hair on the head, hair on other parts of the body, animal hair – or for single hairs or hair collectively, and indeed many retain these specialized meanings: French cheveu, for instance, means ‘hair of the head’, whereas poil denotes ‘body hair’ or ‘animal hair’.

In the case of English hair, unfortunately, it is not clear which of these categories originally applied, although some have suggested a connection with Lithuanian serys ‘brush’, which might indicate that the prehistoric ancestor of hair was a ‘bristly’ word. The furthest back in time we can trace it is to West and North Germanic *khǣram, source also of German, Dutch, and Danish haar and Swedish hår.

The slang use of hairy for ‘difficult’ is first recorded in the mid 19th century, in an erudite context that suggests that it may have been inspired by Latin horridus (source of English horrid), which originally meant (of hair) ‘standing on end’. Its current use, in which ‘difficult’ passes into ‘dangerous’, seems to have emerged in the 1960s, and was presumably based on hair-raising, which dates from around 1900.

It is fascinatingly foreshadowed by harsh, which is a derivative of hair and originally meant ‘hairy’.
homily: homily: [14] Etymologically, a homily is a discourse addressed to a ‘crowd of people’. The word comes via Old French omelie and late Latin homīlia from Greek homīlíā ‘discourse’. This was a derivative of hōmílos ‘crowd’, originally a compound noun formed from homou ‘together’ and ílē ‘crowd’. Its moral connotations emerged in the original Greek.
hotel: hotel: [17] Ultimately, hotel and hospital are the same word, but they have diverged widely over the centuries. Both go back to medieval Latin hospitāle ‘place where guests are received, hospice’, but this developed in two different ways in Old French. One branch led with little change to English hospital, but a reduced form hostel also emerged (borrowed by English as hostel [13]).

Its modern French descendant is hôtel, from which English gets hotel (originally used in the sense ‘large residence’, as in the French hôtel de ville ‘town hall’, but since the 18th century increasingly restricted to its present-day sense). Other contributions made to English by Old French hostel are the derivatives hostelry [14] and ostler [13], originally (as hosteler) ‘someone who receives guests’ but since the 14th century used for someone who looks after horses at an inn.
=> hospital, host, hostel, hostelry, ostler
implement: implement: [15] The idea underlying implement is of ‘filling up’. It comes ultimately from Latin implēre, a compound verb formed from the intensive prefix in- and plēre ‘fill’ (as in English complete). This originally meant ‘fill up’, and hence ‘fulfil’, but in post-classical times, under the influence of implicāre (source of English employ) it came to mean ‘use, employ’, and so the derived plural noun implēmenta denoted ‘things used, equipment’.

It was originally used in the plural in English too, and it was not until the 16th century that the singular ‘tool’ emerged. The original Latin sense ‘fulfil’ is preserved much more closely in the verb implement, which was an independent and considerably later introduction, first recorded in Scottish English in the 19th century. (From the same source come English complement and supplement.)
=> complement, complete, supplement
introduce: introduce: [16] Introduce means etymologically ‘lead inside’. It was borrowed from Latin intrōdūcere ‘lead in’, a compound verb formed from the prefix intrō- ‘in, inside’ and dūcere ‘lead’ (source of English duct, duke, educate, produce, etc). Of its main secondary meanings, ‘use for the first time, originate’ emerged in Latin but ‘make known personally to others’ seems to have been a later development.
=> duct, duke, educate, produce
jazz: jazz: [20] Words of unknown origin always attract speculation, and it is hardly surprising that such an unusual and high-profile one as jazz (first recorded in 1913) should have had more than its fair share (one of the more ingenious and colourful theories is that it comes from the nickname of one Jasbo Brown, an itinerant black musician along the Mississippi – Jasbo perhaps being an alteration of Jasper).

Given that the word emerged in Black English (probably originally in the sense ‘copulation’), it is not surprising that attempts have been made to link it with some West African language, and picture it crossing the Atlantic with the slave ships, but there is no convincing evidence for that (the scenario seems to have got started with a 1917 article in the New York Sun, which was purely the invention of a press agent).
jeans: jeans: [19] Jeans of the sort we would recognize today – close-fitting working trousers made of hard-wearing, typically blue cloth – emerged in America in the mid-19th century. But their antecedents have to be sought in a far distant place. The first known reference to trousers called jeans actually comes from mid-19thcentury England: ‘Septimus arrived flourishin’ his cambric, with his white jeans strapped under his chammy leather opera boots’, R S Surtees, Handley Cross 1843.

Why the name jeans? Because they were made of jean, a sort of tough twilled cotton cloth. This was short for jean fustian, a term first introduced into English in the mid-16th century, in which the jean represented a modification of Janne, the Old French name of the Italian city of Genoa. So jean fustian was ‘cotton fabric from Genoa’, so named because that was where it was first made.
jettison: jettison: [15] Etymologically, to jettison something is to ‘throw’ it overboard. Like jet, as in ‘jet engine’, the word comes from Latin jactāre ‘throw’. The abstract noun derived from this was jactātiō, which entered English via Anglo-Norman getteson. It was used for the ‘action of throwing cargo overboard, especially in order to lighten a ship’, but it was not converted to its familiar modern role, as a verb, until as recently as the 19th century. The contracted form jetson, later jetsam, emerged in the 16th century, and later came to be used for such jettisoned material washed ashore.
=> jet, jctsam
jewel: jewel: [13] Originally, jewel meant ‘costly adornment made from precious stones or metals’ – a sense now largely restricted to the collective form jewellery [14]. The main modern sense ‘gem’ emerged towards the end of the 16th century. The word comes from Anglo-Norman juel, but exactly where that came from is not known for certain. It is generally assumed to be a derivative of jeu ‘game’, which came from Latin jocus (source of English jocular, joke, etc).
=> jeopardy, jocular, joke
kill: kill: [13] The Old English verbs for ‘kill’ were slēan, source of modern English slay, and cwellan, which has become modern English quell. The latter came from a prehistoric Germanic *kwaljan, which it has been suggested may have had a variant *kuljan that could have become Old English *cyllan. If such a verb did exist, it would be a plausible ancestor for modern English kill.

When this first appeared in early Middle English it was used for ‘hit’, but the meanings ‘hit’ and ‘kill’ often coexist in the same word (slay once meant ‘hit’ as well as ‘kill’, as is shown by the related sledgehammer); the sense ‘deprive of life’ emerged in the 14th century.
knot: knot: [OE] The word knot goes back ultimately to a prehistoric Germanic *knūdn-, whose underlying meaning was ‘round lump’. This only emerged in the English word (in such senses as ‘point from which a branch has grown’) in the Middle English period, but it can be seen in knoll [OE], which is a derivative of the same base (the related German knolle means ‘lump’). Knob [14] may be related too, although this has never been conclusively demonstrated.

The Germanic form diversified into English and Dutch knot, German knoten, Swedish knut, and Danish knode (whose Old Norse ancestor knútr was borrowed into Russian as knut ‘whip’, acquired by English as knout [18]). Knit [OE], which originally meant ‘tie in knots’, was derived in prehistoric West Germanic from knot.
=> knit
lace: lace: [13] Lace originally meant ‘noose’ or ‘snare’, and its underlying semantic connections are not with ‘string’ or ‘thread’ but with ‘entrapment’ or ‘enticement’. Its ultimate source was Latin laqueus ‘noose’, which was related to the verb lacere ‘lure, deceive’ (source of English delicious and elicit). This passed into Vulgar Latin as *lacium, which in due course diversified into Italian laccio, Spanish lazo (source of English lasso [19]), and French lacs.

It was the latter’s Old French predecessor, laz or las, that gave English lace. The sense ‘noose’ had died out by the early 17th century, but by then it had already developed via ‘string, cord’ to ‘cord used for fastening clothes’. ‘Open fabric made of threads’ emerged in the mid-16th century. Latch [14] is thought to be distantly related.
=> delicious, elicit, lasso, latch
language: language: [13] Like English tongue, Latin lingua ‘tongue’ was used figuratively for ‘language’; from it English gets linguist [16] and linguistic [19]. In the Vulgar Latin spoken by the inhabitants of Gaul, the derivative *linguāticum emerged, and this became in due course Old French langage, source of English language. (The u in the English word, which goes back to the end of the 13th century, is due to association with French langue ‘tongue’.)
=> linguistic
lap: lap: English now has three distinct words lap, but probably two of them are ultimately related. Lap ‘upper legs of a seated person’ [OE] originally meant ‘flap of a garment’, and it goes back to a prehistoric Germanic source which also produced German lappen ‘rag, cloth, flap, lobe’, and which may lie behind label [14]. It seems likely that lap in the sense ‘folds of a garment’ was the basis of the Middle English verb lap, which meant ‘wrap’, and hence ‘extend beyond’.

From this come both the verb overlap [18] and the noun lap [18], whose modern meaning ‘one circuit of a course’ emerged in the 19th century. Lap ‘lick up’ [OE] comes from a prehistoric Germanic base *lap-, which was related to Latin lambēre ‘lick’ (source of English lambent [17], and possibly responsible also for lamprey and limpet).
=> label; lambent
large: large: [12] Latin largus, a word of unknown origin, meant ‘abundant’ and also ‘generous’. It retained the latter meaning when it came into English via Old French large (‘the poor King Reignier, whose large style agrees not with the leanness of his purse’, Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI 1593), but this now survives only in the derivative largesse [13]. ‘Abundant’, on the other hand, has provided the basis of the main modern English meaning ‘of great size’, which emerged in the 15th century.
launch: launch: English has two separate words launch. The verb, ‘propel’ [14], is related to lance. Lances are propelled by throwing, and so the derived Old French verb lancier was used for ‘throw’. English acquired it via the Anglo- Norman form launcher. The sense ‘put a boat into the water’ emerged at the end of the 14th century. From the same source came modern French élancer ‘throw out’, whose derivative élan was acquired by English in the 19th century. Launch ‘boat’ [17] comes via Portuguese lancha from a Malay word related to lancharan ‘boat’.
=> élan, lance
lawn: lawn: English has two words lawn. ‘Grassy area’ [16] is ultimately the same word as land. It is an alteration of an earlier laund ‘glade’, which came from Old French launde ‘heath’, a borrowing from the same prehistoric Germanic source as produced English land. Lawn was originally used for ‘glade’ too, and it was not until the 18th century that its present-day meaning emerged. Lawn ‘fine linen or cotton’ [15] probably comes from Laon, the name of a town in northern France where linen was formerly manufactured.
=> land
leave: leave: [OE] English has two distinct words leave. The noun, meaning ‘permission’, comes from a prehistoric West Germanic *laubā, which was derived from a root meaning ‘pleasure, approval’ (other English words from the same source include believe and love). It passed semantically through ‘be well disposed to’ to ‘trust’ (a sense preserved in the related believe, and also in the cognate German glauben ‘believe’), and from there to ‘permit’.

The verb leave ‘go away’ comes from a prehistoric Germanic *laibjan ‘remain’. It has been speculated that this is related ultimately to various Indo-European words for ‘sticky substances’ or ‘stickiness’ (Sanskrit lipta- ‘sticky’, for instance, and Greek lípos ‘grease’, source of English lipid [20]), and that its underlying meaning is ‘remaining stuck’, hence ‘staying in a place’.

The sense ‘remain’ survived into English, but it died out in the 16th century, leaving as its legacy the secondary causative sense ‘cause to remain’. The apparently opposite sense ‘go away’, which emerged in the 13th century, arose from viewing the action of the verb from the point of view of the person doing the leaving rather than of the thing being left. The related German bleiben, which incorporates the prefix bi-, still retains the sense ‘remain’.

Other related English words, distant and close respectively, are eclipse and eleven.
=> believe, love; eclipse, eleven, lipid, twelve
litter: litter: [13] The word litter has come a long way semantically since it was born, from ‘bed’ to ‘rubbish scattered untidily’. It goes back ultimately to Latin lectus ‘bed’, a distant relative of English lie and source of French lit ‘bed’ (which forms the final syllable of English coverlet [13], etymologically ‘bed-cover’). From lectus was derived medieval Latin lectāria, which passed into English via Old French litiere and Anglo-Norman litere ‘bed’.

This original sense was soon extended in English to a ‘portable conveyance or stretcher’, which still survives, just, as an archaism, but the word’s main modern sense, which first emerged fully in the 18th century, derives from the notion of scattering straw over the floor for bedding.
=> coverlet
locomotive: locomotive: [17] Locomotive denotes etymologically ‘moving by change of place’. It is an anglicization of modern Latin locōmōtīvus, a compound formed from locus ‘place’ and mōtīvus ‘causing to move’ (source of English motive). Originally it was used strictly as an adjective, and it was not until the early 19th century that the present-day noun use (which began life as an abbreviation of locomotive engine) emerged.
lorry: lorry: [19] The first record we have of the word lorry is from the northwest of England in the early 1830s, when it denoted a ‘low wagon’ (it was often used for railway wagons). The modern application to a motor vehicle emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. It is not clear where it came from, although it has been speculated that it was based on the personal name Laurie (perhaps someone called Laurie invented the vehicle). Another possibility is some connection with the Northern dialect verb lurry ‘pull’.
lump: lump: [13] The origins of lump are obscure. It presumably emerged from an imperfectly recorded medieval Germanic substratum of words for ‘coarse or shapeless things’ (also represented perhaps by Low German lump ‘coarse, heavy’ and Dutch lomp ‘rag’), but where this began is not known. The lump of like it or lump it [19] is a different word, of even more mysterious ancestry.
mail: mail: English has two extant words mail. The one meaning ‘post’ [13] goes back via Old French to Old High German malha, which meant ‘bag, pouch’. That indeed was what the word originally denoted in English (and modern French malle is still used for a ‘bag’). It was not until the 17th century that a specific application to a ‘bag for carrying letters’ emerged, and this was followed in the next century by the ‘letters, etc so carried’. Mail ‘chain-armour’ [14] comes via Old French maille ‘mesh’ from Latin macula, which originally meant ‘spot, stain’ (hence English immaculate [15], etymologically ‘spotless’), but was transferred to the ‘holes in a net’, from their appearance of being spots or marks.

The word maquis, made familiar in English during World War II as a term for the French resistance forces, means literally ‘scrub, undergrowth’ in French. It was borrowed from Italian macchia, a descendant of Latin macula, whose literal sense ‘spot’ was applied metaphorically to ‘bushes dotted over a hillside’. English once had a third word mail, meaning ‘payment, tax’ [12].

It was borrowed from Old Norse mál ‘speech, agreement’. It now survives only in blackmail [16].
=> immaculate, maquis
marzipan: marzipan: [19] The word marzipan has long puzzled etymologists. An elaborate theory was formulated in the early 20th century that traced it back to Arabic mawthabān ‘king who sits still’. That was applied by the Saracens to a medieval Venetian coin with a figure of the seated Christ on it. A series of fairly implausible semantic changes led from ‘coin’ via ‘box’ to ‘confectionery’, while the form of the word supposedly evolved in Italian to marzapane.

This turns out to be completely wide of the mark (not surprisingly), but the truth seems scarcely less remarkable. In Burma (now Myanmar) there is a port called Martaban, which was renowned in the Middle Ages for the jars of preserves and fruits exported from there to Europe. The name of the place came to be associated with its products, and in Italian, as marzapane, it denoted a type of sweetmeat (-pane for -ban suggests that some people subconsciously connected the word with Italian pane ‘bread’). Marzapane and its relatives in other languages (such as early modern French marcepain) entered English in the 16th century, and from the confusion of forms the consensus spelling marchpane emerged.

This remained the standard English word for ‘marzipan’ until the 19th century, when marzipan was borrowed from German; this was an alteration of Italian marzapane, based on the misconception that it came from Latin marci pānis ‘Mark’s bread’.
match: match: There are two unrelated words match in English, of which the older is ‘counterpart’ [OE]. This goes back to an Old English gemæcca ‘mate’, whose ancestry can be traced to a prehistoric *gamakjon, a word based on the collective prefix *ga- and *mak- ‘fit’ (source of English make). Its etymological meaning is thus ‘fitting well together’.

The use of the word as a verb emerged in the 14th century. Match ‘ignitable stick’ [14] originally meant ‘wick’. It comes via Old French meiche from Latin myxa ‘lamp nozzle’. The first record of its modern use for ‘ignitable stick’ comes from 1831 (the synonymous lucifer is exactly contemporary, but had virtually died out by the end of the 19th century).
=> make
mint: mint: [OE] English has two completely unconnected words mint. The ‘money factory’ comes ultimately from Latin monēta ‘mint, money’ (source also of English money). It was borrowed into prehistoric West Germanic as *munita, which in due course produced Old English mynet. This denoted ‘coin’ (as its modern German relative münze still does), and it was not until the 15th century that the modern sense ‘place where money is made’ emerged. Mint the plant originated in Greek mínthē, and reached English via Latin mentha (source of menthol [19], a German coinage) and prehistoric West Germanic *minta.
=> money; menthol
mischief: mischief: [13] Etymologically, mischief is something that ‘happens amiss’. The word comes from Old French meschef, a derivative of the verb meschever ‘meet with misfortune’. This was a compound verb formed from the prefix mis- ‘wrongly, amiss’ and chever ‘happen’ (which came ultimately from Latin caput ‘head’, and etymologically meant ‘come to a head’). It still meant ‘misfortune’ when English acquired it; in the 14th century the sense ‘harm, damage’ emerged, but the more trivial modern sense ‘naughtiness’ did not develop until the 18th century.
mistake: mistake: [13] Mistake originally meant literally ‘take in error, take the wrong thing’. It was borrowed from Old Norse mistaka, a compound verb formed from the prefix mis- ‘wrongly’ and taka ‘take’. This sense survived in English for some time (‘to be ever busy, and mistake away the bottles and cans … before they be but half drunk of’, Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair 1614), but gradually through the late Middle English period the notion of ‘error’ came to the fore (it was already present in the Old Norse verb, which was used reflexively for ‘go wrong’, and was probably reinforced by Old French mesprendre, literally ‘take wrongly’, which was also used for ‘err’).

The noun use, ‘error’, emerged in the 17th century.
=> take