quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- genius
- genius: [16] Latin genius originally meant ‘deity of generation and birth’. It came ultimately from the Indo-European base *gen- ‘produce’ (source of English gene, generate, genitive, etc), probably via a derivative *gnjos. It broadened out considerably in meaning, initially to ‘attendant spirit’, the sense in which English originally acquired it (French took it over as génie, a word which, because of its phonetic and semantic similarity to Arabic jinn, 18th-century translators of the Arabian nights eagerly adopted into English as genie).
The main modern English sense, ‘person of outstanding intellectual ability’, which dates from the 17th century, goes back to a comparatively rare Latin ‘intellectual capacity’. Genial [16] comes from Latin geniālis, a derivative of genius, which again originally meant ‘of generation and birth’ (a sense which survived into English: ‘And thou, glad Genius! in whose gentle hand the bridal bower and genial bed remain’, Edmund Spenser, Epithalamion 1595).
It later developed in Latin to ‘pleasant, festive’.
=> general - epithalamium (n.)
- "bridal song," 1590s (earlier in nativized form epithalamy, 1580s), from Latin epithalamium, from Greek epithalamion "a bridal song," noun use of adjective meaning "of or for a bridal, nuptial," from epi "at, upon" (see epi-) + thalamos "bridal chamber, inner chamber" (see thalamus). Related: Epithalamic.
- prothalamion (n.)
- "song sung before a wedding," 1590s, coined as a poem title by Edmund Spenser (based on epithalamion) from Greek pro- "before" (see pro-) + thalamos "bridal chamber" (see thalamus). Sometimes Latinized as prothalamium.