英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

anachronism: anachronism: [17] The Greek prefix anameant ‘up’, and hence, in terms of time, ‘back’; Greek khrónos meant ‘time’ (as in English chronicle): hence Greek anakhronismós ‘reference to a wrong time’. From the point of view of its derivation it should strictly be applied to the representation of something as happening earlier than it really did (as if Christ were painted wearing a wristwatch), but in practice, ever since the Greek term’s adoption into English, it has also been used for things surviving beyond their due time.
=> chronicle
artesian: artesian: [19] In the 18th century drillings made in Artois (a former northern French province roughly corresponding to the modern Pas-de- Calais) produced springs of water which rose spontaneously to the surface, without having to be pumped. The name of the province, in its erstwhile form Arteis, was bestowed on the phenomenon, and has been so used ever since.
barricade: barricade: [17] 12 May 1588 was known as la journée des barricades ‘the day of the barricades’, because in the course of disturbances in Paris during the Huguenot wars, large barrels (French barriques) filled with earth, cobblestones, etc were hauled into the street on that day to form barricades – and the term has stuck ever since. Barrique itself was borrowed from Spanish barrica ‘cask’, which was formed from the same stem as that from which English gets barrel [14]. It has been speculated that this was Vulgar Latin *barra ‘bar’, on the basis that barrels are made of ‘bars’ or ‘staves’.
=> bar, barrel
bear: bear: [OE] The two English words bear ‘carry’ and bear the animal come from completely different sources. The verb, Old English beran, goes back via Germanic *ber- to Indo-European *bher-, which already contained the two central meaning elements that have remained with its offspring ever since, ‘carry’ and ‘give birth’. It is the source of a very large number of words in the Indo-European languages, including both Germanic (German gebären ‘give birth’, Swedish börd ‘birth’) and non-Germanic (Latin ferre and Greek phérein ‘bear’, source of English fertile and amphora [17], and Russian brat ‘seize’).

And a very large number of other English words are related to it: on the ‘carrying’ side, barrow, berth, bier, burden, and possibly brim; and on the ‘giving birth’ side, birth itself and bairn ‘child’ [16]. Borne and born come from boren, the Old English past participle of bear; the distinction in usage between the two (borne for ‘carried’, born for ‘given birth’) arose in the early 17th century.

Etymologically, the bear is a ‘brown animal’. Old English bera came from West Germanic *bero (whence also German bär and Dutch beer), which may in turn go back to Indo- European *bheros, related to English brown. The poetic name for the bear, bruin [17], follows the same semantic pattern (it comes from Dutch bruin ‘brown’), and beaver means etymologically ‘brown animal’ too.
=> amphora, bairn, barrow, berth, bier, born, burden, fertile, fortune, paraphernalia, suffer; brown
boycott: boycott: [19] The word boycott sprang into general use in the year 1880, to describe the activities of the Irish Land League. This was an organization set up in 1879 by the Irish nationalist Michael Davitt to press for agrarian reforms, rent reductions, etc. Those who did not agree with its aims, it subjected to an organized campaign of ostracism. One of the first to suffer from this was one Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832–97), a British estate manager in County Mayo. Hence ‘to boycott’, which became a buzzword of the early 1880s, was quickly adopted by other European languages, and has remained in current use ever since.
demagogue: demagogue: [17] A demagogue is literally a ‘leader of the people’. The word represents Greek demagōgós, a compound formed from demos ‘common people’ and agōgós ‘leader’. (This was derived from ágein ‘drive, lead’, a verb related to Latin agere ‘do’, and hence to its host of English descendants, from act to prodigal.) In ancient Greece the term was applied particularly to a set of unofficial leaders drawn from the common people who controlled the government of Athens in the 4th century BC, and whose irresponsible rule (as their critics saw it) has given demagogue a bad name ever since.
=> act, agent
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.
Oscar: Oscar: [20] The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood has been awarding these golden statuettes annually since 1928, but at first they were not called Oscars. That name is said to have come about in 1931, when Margaret Herrick, a former secretary of the Academy, reputedly remarked that the Art Deco figurine reminded her of her ‘Uncle Oscar’ (Oscar Pierce, an American wheat and fruit grower). The name evidently struck a chord, and has been used ever since.
raid: raid: [15] Raid and road are doublets – that is to say, they have a common ancestor, but have diverged over the centuries. In this case the ancestor was Old English rād ‘riding’, hence ‘hostile incursion on horse-back’, a relative of ride. South of the border this developed to road, and lost its predatory connotations (although they are preserved in inroads), but in Scottish English it became raid. This had more or less died out by the end of the 16th century, but Sir Walter Scott revived it at the beginning of the 19th century, and it has gone from strength to strength ever since.
=> ride, road
restaurant (n.): 1821, from French restaurant "a restaurant," originally "food that restores," noun use of present participle of restaurer "to restore or refresh," from Old French restorer (see restore).
In 1765 a man by the name of Boulanger, also known as "Champ d'Oiseaux" or "Chantoiseau," opened a shop near the Louvre (on either the rue des Poulies or the rue Bailleul, depending on which authority one chooses to believe). There he sold what he called restaurants or bouillons restaurants--that is, meat-based consommés intended to "restore" a person's strength. Ever since the Middle Ages the word restaurant had been used to describe any of a variety of rich bouillons made with chicken, beef, roots of one sort or another, onions, herbs, and, according to some recipes, spices, crystallized sugar, toasted bread, barley, butter, and even exotic ingredients such as dried rose petals, Damascus grapes, and amber. In order to entice customers into his shop, Boulanger had inscribed on his window a line from the Gospels: "Venite ad me omnes qui stomacho laboratis et ego vos restaurabo." He was not content simply to serve bouillon, however. He also served leg of lamb in white sauce, thereby infringing the monopoly of the caterers' guild. The guild filed suit, which to everyone's astonishment ended in a judgment in favor of Boulanger. [Jean-Robert Pitte, "The Rise of the Restaurant," in "Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present," English editor Albert Sonnenfeld, transl. Clarissa Botsford, 1999, Columbia University Press]
Italian spelling ristorante attested in English by 1925.
time zone (n.): by 1885, from time (n.) + zone (n.). As in Britain and France, the movement to regulate time nationally came from the railroads.
Previous to 1883 the methods of measuring time in the United States were so varied and so numerous as to be ludicrous. There were 50 different standards used in the United States, and on one road between New York and Boston, whose actual difference is 12 minutes, there were three distinct standards of time. Even small towns had two different standards one known as "town" or local time and the other "railroad" time.

... At noon on November 18, 1883, there was a general resetting of watches and clocks all over the United States and Canada, and the four great time zones, one hour apart, into which the country was divided came into being. So smoothly did the plan work that the general readjustment was accomplished without great difficulty and it has worked satisfactorily ever since. ["Railroad Trainman," 1909]