英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

admiral [admiral 词源字典]: admiral: [13] Admirals originally had nothing specifically to do with the sea. The word comes ultimately from Arabic ’amīr ‘commander’ (from which English later also acquired emir [17]). This entered into various titles followed by the particle -al- ‘of’ (’amīr-al-bahr ‘commander of the sea’, ’amīr-al-mūminīn ‘commander of the faithful’), and when it was borrowed into European languages, ’amīr-al- became misconstrued as an independent, free-standing word.

Moreover, the Romans, when they adopted it, smuggled in their own Latin prefix ad-, producing admiral. When this reached English (via Old French) it still meant simply ‘commander’, and it was not until the time of Edward III that a strong naval link began to emerge. The Arabic title ’amīr-al-bahr had had considerable linguistic influence in the wake of Arabic conquests around the Mediterranean seaboard (Spanish almirante de la mar, for instance), and specific application of the term to a naval commander spread via Spain, Italy, and France to England.

Thus in the 15th century England had its Admiral of the Sea or Admiral of the Navy, who was in charge of the national fleet. By 1500 the maritime connection was firmly established, and admiral came to be used on its own for ‘supreme naval commander’.
=> emir[admiral etymology, admiral origin, 英语词源]
aeroplane: aeroplane: [19] The prefix aero- comes ultimately from Greek āér ‘air’, but many of the terms containing it (such as aeronaut and aerostat) reached English via French. This was the case, too, with aeroplane, in the sense of ‘heavier-than-air flying machine’. The word was first used in English in 1873 (30 years before the Wright brothers’ first flight), by D S Brown in the Annual Report of the Aeronautical Society – he refers vaguely to an aeroplane invented by ‘a Frenchman’.

The abbreviated form plane followed around 1908. (An earlier, and exclusively English, use of the word aeroplane was in the sense ‘aerofoil, wing’; this was coined in the 1860s, but did not long survive the introduction of the ‘aircraft’ sense.) Aeroplane is restricted in use mainly to British English (and even there now has a distinctly old-fashioned air). The preferred term in American English is airplane, a refashioning of aeroplane along more ‘English’ lines which is first recorded from 1907.
=> air
ant: ant: [OE] The word ant appears to carry the etymological sense ‘creature that cuts off or bites off’. Its Old English form, æmette, was derived from a hypothetical Germanic compound *aimaitjōn, formed from the prefix *ai- ‘off, away’ and the root *mait- ‘cut’ (modern German has the verb meissen ‘chisel, carve’): thus, ‘the biter’.

The Old English word later developed along two distinct strands: in one, it became emmet, which survived into the 20th century as a dialectal form; while in the other it progressed through amete and ampte to modern English ant. If the notion of ‘biting’ in the naming of the ant is restricted to the Germanic languages (German has ameise), the observation that it and its nest smell of urine has been brought into play far more widely.

The Indo-European root *meigh-, from which ultimately we get micturate ‘urinate’ [18], was also the source of several words for ‘ant’, including Greek múrmēx (origin of English myrmecology ‘study of ants’, and also perhaps of myrmidon [14] ‘faithful follower’, from the Myrmidons, a legendary Greek people who loyally followed their king Achilles in the Trojan war, and who were said originally to have been created from ants), Latin formīca (hence English formic acid [18], produced by ants, and formaldehyde [19]), and Danish myre.

It also produced Middle English mire ‘ant’, the underlying meaning of which was subsequently reinforced by the addition of piss to give pismire, which again survived dialectally into the 20th century.
apprehend: apprehend: [14] The underlying notion in apprehend is of ‘seizing’ or ‘grasping’; it comes ultimately from the Latin verb prehendere ‘seize’ (source also of comprehend, predatory, and prehensile). Latin apprehendere ‘lay hold of’, formed with the prefix ad-, developed the metaphorical meaning ‘seize with the mind’ – that is, ‘learn’; and that was the earliest meaning apprehend had in English when it was borrowed either directly from Latin or via French appréhender: John de Trevisa, for instance, in his translation of De proprietatibus rerum 1398 writes ‘he holds in mind … without forgetting, all that he apprehends’.

More familiar modern senses, such as ‘arrest’ and ‘understand’, followed in the 16th century. A contracted form of the Latin verb, apprendere, became Old French aprendre, modern French apprendre ‘learn’. This provided the basis for the derivative aprentis ‘someone learning’, from which English gets apprentice [14]; and its past participle appris, in the causative sense ‘taught’, was the source of English apprise [17].

The chief modern meaning of the derived noun apprehension, ‘fear’, arose via the notion of ‘grasping something with the mind’, then ‘forming an idea of what will happen in the future’, and finally ‘anticipation of something unpleasant’.
=> apprentice, comprehend, impregnable, predatory, prehensile
apricot: apricot: [16] The word apricot reached English by a peculiarly circuitous route from Latin. The original term used by the Romans for the apricot, a fruit which came ultimately from China, was prūnum Arminiacum or mālum Arminiacum ‘Armenian plum or apple’ (Armenia was an early source of choice apricots). But a new term gradually replaced these: mālum praecocum ‘early-ripening apple’ (praecocus was a variant of praecox, from which English gets precocious). Praecocum was borrowed by a succession of languages, making its way via Byzantine Greek beríkokkon and Arabic al birqūq ‘the apricot’ to Spanish albaricoque and Portuguese albricoque.

This was the source of the English word, but its earliest form, abrecock, shows that it had already acquired the initial abrof French abricot, and the final -t followed almost immediately. Spellings with p instead of b are also found in the 16th century.
=> precocious
arbour: arbour: [14] Despite its formal resemblance to, and semantic connections with, Latin arbor ‘tree’, arbour is not etymologically related to it. In fact, its nearest English relative is herb. When it first came into English it was erber, which meant ‘lawn’ or ‘herb/flower garden’. This was borrowed, via Anglo-Norman, from Old French erbier, a derivative of erbe ‘herb’.

This in turn goes back to Latin herba ‘grass, herb’ (in the 16th century a spelling with initial h was common in England). Gradually, it seems that the sense ‘grassy plot’ evolved to ‘separate, secluded nook in a garden’; at first, the characteristic feature of such shady retreats was their patch of grass, but their seclusion was achieved by surrounding trees or bushes, and eventually the criterion for an arbour shifted to ‘being shaded by trees’.

Training on a trellis soon followed, and the modern arbour as ‘bower’ was born. The shift from grass and herbaceous plants to trees no doubt prompted the alteration in spelling from erber to arbour, after Latin arbor; this happened in the 15th and 16th centuries.
=> herb
associate: associate: [14] Latin socius meant ‘companion’ (it is related to English sequel and sue), and has spawned a host of English words, including social, sociable, society, and socialism. In Latin, a verb was formed from it, using the prefix ad- ‘to’: associāre ‘unite’. Its past participle, associātus, was borrowed into English as an adjective, associate; its use as a verb followed in the 15th century, and as a noun in the 16th century.
=> sequel, social, society, sue
awkward: awkward: [14] When awkward was coined, in Scotland and northern England, it meant ‘turned in the wrong direction’. Middle English had an adjective awk, which meant ‘the wrong way round, backhanded’, and hence ‘perverse’, and with the addition of the suffix -ward this became awkward. Awk itself was adopted from Old Norse afugr, which is related to German ab ‘away’ and English off. Awkward followed a similar semantic path to awk, via ‘perverse, illadapted’ to ‘clumsy’.
=> off
because: because: [14] Because originated in the phrase by cause, which was directly modelled on French par cause. At first it was always followed by of or by a subordinate clause introduced by that or why: ‘The Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified’, St John’s Gospel, 7:39, 1611. But already by the end of the 14th century that and why were beginning to be omitted, leaving because to function as a conjunction, a move which would perhaps have exercised contemporary linguistic purists as much as ‘The reason is because …’ does today. The abbreviated form ’cause first appears in print in the 16th century.
=> cause
brief: brief: [14] Brief comes via Old French bref from Latin brevis ‘short’, which is probably related to Greek brakhús ‘short’, from which English gets the combining form brachy-, as in brachycephalic. Latin produced the nominal derivative breve ‘letter’, later ‘summary’, which came into English in the 14th century in the sense ‘letter of authority’ (German has brief simply meaning ‘letter’).

The notion of an ‘abbreviation’ or ‘summary’ followed in the next century, and the modern legal sense ‘summary of the facts of a case’ developed in the 17th century. This formed the basis of the verbal sense ‘inform and instruct’, which is 19th-century. Briefs ‘underpants’ are 20th-century. The musical use of the noun breve began in the 15th century when, logically enough, it meant ‘short note’.

Modern usage, in which it denotes the longest note, comes from Italian breve. Other derivatives of brief include brevity [16], introduced into English via Anglo-Norman brevete; abbreviate [15], from late Latin abbreviāre (which is also the source, via Old French abregier, of abridge [14]); and breviary ‘book of church services’ [16], from Latin breviārium.
=> abbreviate, abridge, brevity
bulimia: bulimia: [19] The condition now called ‘bulimia’ – in which bouts of overeating are followed by bouts of purging – was recognized and so named in the 1970s. The word used to name it, however, is much more ancient than that. It goes back to Greek boulimia, which meant ‘ravenous hunger’ (it was formed from limos ‘hunger’, with the prefix bou-; this may well have been adapted from bous ‘ox’, in which case the word would have meant literally ‘the hunger of an ox’).

It originally came into English, via medieval Latin, in the late 14th century, and for many hundred years its standard form was bulimy. It was applied to a sort of hunger so extreme that it could be categorized as an illness.
character: character: [14] The ultimate source of character is Greek kharaktér, a derivative of the verb kharássein ‘sharpen, engrave, cut’, which in turn came from kharax ‘pointed stake’. Kharaktér meant ‘engraved mark’, and hence was applied metaphorically to the particular impress or stamp which marked one thing as different from another – its ‘character’. The word came into English via Latin charactēr and Old French caractere. Characteristic followed in the 17th century.
=> gash
commit: commit: [14] Etymologically, commit simply means ‘put together’. It comes from Latin committere, a compound verb formed from the prefix com- ‘together’ and the verb mittere ‘put, send’ (whence English missile and mission). It originally meant literally ‘join, connect’, but then branched out along the lines of ‘put for safety, entrust’ (the force of com- here being more intensive than collective) and ‘perpetrate’ (exactly how this sense evolved is not clear).

The whole range of meanings followed the Latin verb into English, although ‘put together’ was never more than an archaism, and died out in the 17th century. Of derivatives based on the Latin verb’s past participial stem commiss-, commission entered English in the 14th century and commissionaire (via French) in the 18th century. Medieval Latin commissārius produced English commissary [14] and, via French, Russian commissar, borrowed into English in the 20th century.
=> commissar, committee, missile, mission
croquet: croquet: [19] Old Norse krókr ‘hook’ (source of English crook) was borrowed into Old French as croc. This formed the basis of a diminutive, crochet, literally ‘little hook’, which has passed into English in various guises over the centuries. First to arrive was crotchet [14], applied to musical notes from their hooked shape. Crocket ‘curling ornamental device’ followed in the 17th century, via the Old Northern French variant croquet. Crochet itself, in the ‘knitting’ sense, arrived in the 19th century.

And in the mid 19th century croquet, apparently a dialectal variant of French crochet, was applied to the lawn game with balls and mallets newly introduced from Ireland to Britain. Old French croc was also the ancestor of encroach.
=> crook, crotchet, encroach, lacrosse
damn: damn: [13] Damn comes via Old French damner from Latin damnāre, a derivative of the noun damnum. This originally meant ‘loss, harm’ (it is the source of English damage), but the verb damnāre soon spread its application to ‘pronounce judgment upon’, in both the legal and the theological sense. These meanings (reflected also in the derived condemn) followed the verb through Old French into English, which dropped the strict legal sense around the 16th century but has persisted with the theological one and its more profane offshoots.
=> condemn, damage, indemnity
dash: dash: [13] Dash is probably of Scandinavian origin – Danish daske ‘beat’ has been compared – but whether it was a borrowing or a home- grown word, it was no doubt formed in imitation of rapid impulsive violent movement. Its original sense in English was ‘hit, smash’ (now rather eclipsed, put preserved in such phrases as ‘dash someone’s hopes’). ‘Move quickly and violently’ followed in the 14th century, and the noun sense ‘stroke of a pen’ in the 16th century (this probably gave rise to the use of the word as a euphemism for damned, from the replacement of that word in print with a dash).
drudge: drudge: [15] No one is quite sure where drudge comes from. It is first recorded, as a noun, towards the end of the 15th century, and the verb followed about fifty years later. One possible source may be the Middle English verb drugge ‘pull laboriously’, a possible relative of English drag; another suggestion is the Old English verb drēogan ‘work’.
fabric: fabric: [15] Latin faber was a term for an artisan who worked with hard materials – a carpenter, for example, or a smith (it probably came from a prehistoric Indo-European base meaning ‘fit things together’). From it was derived fabrica, which denoted the trade such a man followed, the place where he worked, or in general terms the product of his work – in the case of a carpenter, a ‘building’.

And ‘building’ was the original sense of the word in English when it acquired it via French fabrique: ‘He had neuer studye in newe fabrykes ne buyldynges’, William Caxton, Golden Legend 1483. Remnants of the usage survive in the current sense ‘walls, roof, and floor of a building’. It was not until the mid 18th century that the underlying notion of ‘manufactured material’ gave rise to the word’s main present-day meaning ‘textile’.

Derivatives include fabricate [18], from Latin fabricāre, and forge.
=> forge
file: file: The file for smoothing and rubbing [OE] and the file for storing things in [16] are quite different words. The former comes from a prehistoric Germanic *fikhalā (source also of German feile and Dutch vijl), which goes back ultimately to Indo-European *pik-, *peik-, denoting ‘cut’. The latter, on the other hand, comes from Old French fil, a descendant of Latin filum ‘thread’, which was applied to a piece of string or wire suspended from two points and used for hanging documents and records on for easy reference.

As methods of document storage and retrieval became more sophisticated, the word file followed them. The later file ‘(military) column’, first recorded at the end of the 16th century, probably represents a reborrowing from French, but it is ultimately the same word. Fillet [14] originated as a diminutive form of Latin filum.
=> filigree, fillet
funeral: funeral: [14] Latin fūnus, a word of uncertain origin, meant ‘funeral’ and, probably secondarily, ‘corpse’. From it was derived the adjective fūnerālis, which English acquired via Old French in the 14th century. The noun funeral followed in the 16th century; it came from the same ultimate source, of course, but by a slightly different route – from medieval Latin fūnerālia via Old French funeraille.
garage: garage: [20] As the motor-car age got under way at the start of the 20th century, a gap opened up in the lexicon for a word for ‘car-storage place’. English filled it in 1902 by borrowing French garage. The first references to it show that the term (station was an early alternative) was originally applied to large commercially run shelters housing many vehicles – the equivalent more of modern multi-storey car parks than of garages (the Daily Mail, for example, on 11 January 1902, reports the ‘new “garage” founded by Mr Harrington Moore, hon. secretary of the Automobile Club … The “garage”, which is situated at the City end of Queen Victoria-street, has accommodation for 80 cars’, and Alfred Harmsworth, in Motors 1902, wrote of ‘stations or “garages” where a number of cars can be kept’).

It was not long, however, before individual houses got more personalized garages, and the application to an establishment where vehicle repairs are carried out and fuel sold soon followed. The French word garage itself is a derivative of the verb garer, which originally meant ‘dock ships’. It comes from Old French garer ‘protect, defend’, a loanword from Old High German warōn (to which English ward, warn, and the -ware of beware are related).
=> beware, ward, warn
gingerbread: gingerbread: [13] The idea that gingerbread does not much resemble bread is entirely justified by the word’s history. For originally it was gingebras (a borrowing from Old French), and it meant ‘preserved ginger’. By the mid-14th century, by the process known as folk etymology (the substitution of a more for a less familiar form), -bread had begun to replace -bras, and it was only a matter of time (the early 15th century, apparently) before sense followed form. The expression ‘take the gilt off the gingerbread’ (not recorded before the late 19th century) comes from the fact that formerly gingerbread was often decorated with gold leaf.
gulf: gulf: [14] Gulf comes from Greek kólphos, which meant originally ‘bosom’. It was later extended metaphorically to denote ‘bag’, and also ‘trough between waves’, and these senses (the latter modified to ‘abyss’) followed it through Vulgar Latin *colphus, Italian golfo, and French golphe into English. The derivative engulf, based on the sense ‘abyss’, dates from the mid-16th century.
hierarchy: hierarchy: [14] Greek hierós meant ‘sacred, holy’. Combined with -arkhēs ‘ruling’ (as in English archbishop) it produced hierárkhēs ‘chief priest’. A derivative of this, hierarkhíā, passed via medieval Latin hierarchia and Old French ierarchie into Middle English as ierarchie (the modern spelling was introduced on the basis of the Latin form in the 16th century).

At first the word was used in English for the medieval categorization of angels (into cherubs and seraphs, powers and dominions, etc), and it was not until the early 17th century that it was applied to the clergy and their grades and ranks. The metaphorical use for any graded system soon followed.
hyacinth: hyacinth: [16] Greek huákinthos denoted a plant with deep red flowers which according to legend sprang from the blood of Hyacinthus, a beautiful youth whom Apollo loved but accidentally killed. It probably came from some pre-Hellenic Mediterranean language, and was remodelled in Greek on the basis of Hyacinthus’s name. It is not clear what sort of plant the original hyacinth was, but by the time the word reached English (via Latin hyacinthus and French hyacinthe) it had been adopted for the bluebell and its immediate relatives.

Greek huákinthos was also used for a variety of precious stone, probably originally the sapphire. This meaning too followed the word into English, but is now little used, having been taken over by jacinth [13] – itself a descendant of Latin hyacinthus.
=> jacinth
ingenuous: ingenuous: [16] Etymologically, ingenuous means ‘inborn’. English acquired it from Latin ingenuus, which was composed of the prefix inand the element *gen-, denoting ‘production, birth’. This was originally used for ‘born in a particular place, native, not foreign’, but it soon began to take on connotations of ‘freeborn, not a slave’, and hence ‘of noble birth’.

Metaphorical transference to qualities thought characteristic of the nobility – uprightness, candour, straightforwardness, etc – soon followed, and that was the word’s semantic slant when English acquired it. By the 17th century, however, it had started to slide towards ‘artlessness, innocence’ (a sense reflected in ingénue, borrowed from French in the 19th century).
=> gene, general, generate, genital, ingénue
instrument: instrument: [13] Instrument comes from the same source as instruct: the Latin verb instruere ‘build, prepare, equip, teach’. From it was derived the noun instrūmentum, which meant ‘tool, equipment’. When introduced into English via Old French at the end of the 13th century it was used for a ‘musical instrument’, but the more general ‘implement’ and the metaphorical ‘means’ soon followed in the 14th century.
=> construct, destroy, instruct, structure
khaki: khaki: [19] Khaki is part of the large linguistic legacy of British rule in India. In Urdu khākī means ‘dusty’, and is a derivative of the noun khāk ‘dust’ (a word of Persian origin). It seems first to have been used with reference to the colour of military uniforms in the Guide Corps of the Indian army in the late 1840s. The term followed the colour when it was more widely adopted by the British army for camouflage purposes during the South African wars at the end of the 19th century.
lot: lot: [OE] Lot goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *khlut-, which appears to have denoted the use of objects to make decisions by chance (Old English hlot was used for such an object). The first inklings of the modern range of senses did not emerge until the 18th century, when lot began to be used for a ‘set of things’. ‘Large number, many’ followed in the 19th century. The Germanic word was borrowed into the Romance languages, and of its descendants English has acquired allot [16] (from Old French) and lotto [18] (from Italian). Lottery [16] comes from the Dutch derivative loterij.
=> allot, lottery, lotto
lynch: lynch: [19] This verb for ‘punishing someone without an official trial’ owes its existence to one William Lynch, a planter and justice of the peace of Pittsylvania, Virginia, USA, who at the beginning of the 19th century took it upon himself to set up unofficial tribunals to try suspects. His rough and ready method of administering justice was termed Lynch’s law, later lynch law, and the verb followed in the 1830s.
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
major: major: [16] Latin mājor ‘larger’ was the comparative form of magnus ‘large’, from which English gets magnitude, magnum etc (in early Latin it was *māgjōs). English originally acquired it as an adjective. Its noun use, for an army officer, followed in the 17th century. This represented a borrowing from French major, which was short for sergeant-major (in those days, ‘sergeant major’ was a more elevated rank than it is today). The derivative majority [16] comes via French majorité from medieval Latin mājōritās. Mayor comes from Latin mājor, routed via Old French.
=> magnitude, magnum, mayor
master: master: [OE] The Latin word for ‘master, chief’ was magister (which is generally assumed to have been based on the root of Latin magis ‘more’ and magnus ‘big’, source of English magnify, magnitude, etc). Its more obvious English descendants include magistrate and magisterial, and indeed English originally acquired magister itself in the 10th century in the form mægister, but over the years (partly under the influence of Old French maistre) this developed to master.

The feminine counterpart mistress [14] was borrowed from Old French maistresse, a form maintained in English for some time. The alteration of mais- to mis- began in the 15th century, due probably to the weakly-stressed use of the word as a title (a phenomenon also responsible for the emergence of mister [16] from master). The abbreviated miss followed in the 17th century.
=> magistrate, magnitude, magnum, miss, mister, mistress
merge: merge: [17] Merge comes from Latin mergere, which meant ‘dive, plunge’ (it was also the source of English emerge [16], which etymologically means ‘rise out of a liquid’, immerse [17], and submerge [17]). Merge was originally used for ‘immerse’ in English too, and the modern meaning ‘combine into one’ did not emerge fully until as recently as the 20th century. It arose from the notion of one thing ‘sinking’ into another and losing its identity; in the 1920s this was applied to two business companies amalgamating, and the general sense ‘combine’ followed from it.
=> emerge, immerse, submerge
method: method: [16] Method comes via French méthode and Latin methodus from Greek méthodos, which meant ‘pursuit’. It was a compound noun formed from the prefix metá- ‘after’ and hodós ‘way, journey’ (found also in English episode, exodus, and period). ‘Pursuit’ of a particular objective gradually developed into a ‘procedure for attaining it’, the meaning which the word had when it reached English. The derivative methodist [16], originally simply ‘someone who followed a particular method’, was first applied to the followers of John Wesley in the 18th century.
=> episode, exodus, period
moult: moult: [14] The etymological meaning of moult is simply ‘change’. It comes (via an assumed but never recorded Old English *mūtian) from a prehistoric Germanic verb borrowed from Latin mūtāre ‘change’ (source of English mutate). The extreme semantic narrowing down from ‘change’ to ‘change a coat of feathers’ is shown too in the related mews, which originally denoted ‘cages for moulting hawks’. The spelling with l, which started to appear in the 16th century, is due to association with words such as fault, whose l at that time was generally not pronounced. When it began to be, moult followed suit.
=> mews, mutate
mountain: mountain: [13] Latin mōns ‘mountain’ could well go back ultimately to a variant of the base *min- ‘jut’ which produced English eminent, imminent, menace, and prominent. English acquired it originally direct from Latin as a noun, mount [OE], which is now used only in the names of mountains. The verb mount followed in the 14th century, via Old French munter.

Latin mōns had a derived adjective montānus ‘mountainous’, which was adapted in Vulgar Latin to the noun *montānea ‘mountainous area’. This made its way into Old French as montaigne, by which time it meant simply ‘mountain’ – whence English mountain. Amount [13] comes ultimately from the Latin phrase ad montem ‘to the mountain’, hence ‘upwards’; and paramount [16] in turn derives from an Old French phrase par amont ‘by above’, hence ‘superior’.
=> amount, eminent, imminent, menace, mount, paramount, prominent, tantamount
note: note: [13] Latin nota had a remarkably wide range of meanings. Its original sense was ‘sign, mark’, but already in classical times it had broadened out semantically to include ‘alphabetical character’, ‘shorthand sign’, ‘brief letter’, ‘musical note’, and ‘characteristic quality’. Many of these followed it via Old French note into English, where they were supplemented by ‘distinction, reputation’, perhaps inspired by the derived adjective notable [14]. From the same source came notary [14], etymologically a ‘shorthand-writer’.
ombudsman: ombudsman: [20] The word ombudsman, denoting an ‘investigator of public complaints’, was introduced into English from Swedish, and was first used as a quasi-official term in the 1960s: New Zealand was the first Englishspeaking country to introduce such a post, in 1962, and Britain followed four years later. The Swedish word is a descendant of Old Norse umbothsmathr, literally ‘administration-man’; and umboth was originally a compound of um ‘about’ and both ‘command’ (a relative of English bid).
=> bid
past: past: [13] Past originated simply as a variant spelling of passed, the past participle of pass. The earliest unequivocal examples of it are as a preposition, but its adjectival use followed in the 14th century, and by the 16th century it was being employed as a noun too (the past).
=> pass
print: print: [13] Latin premere meant ‘press’ (its past participial stem press- underlies English press). It passed into Old French as preindre, whose past participle formed the basis of a noun preinte ‘impression, impressed mark’ – source of English print. The verb first used for the activity of ‘printing books’ was the derived imprint [14] (‘Because this said book is full of wholesome wisdom … I have purposed to imprint it’, William Caxton, Game and Play of the Chess 1474), but print soon followed at the beginning of the 16th century.
=> press
promenade: promenade: [16] Promenade was borrowed from French. It was a derivative of se promener ‘go for a walk’, which came from late Latin prōmināre ‘drive forward’. This was a compound verb formed from the prefix prō- ‘forward’ and mināre ‘drive’. It was originally used in English for a ‘leisurely walk’; ‘place for walking’ followed in the mid-17th century, but it does not seem to have been applied specifically to a ‘walk-way by the sea’ until the end of the 18th century. The abbreviation prom dates from the early 20th century. The term promenade concert originated in the 1830s.
puberty: puberty: [14] Latin pūber denoted ‘adult’, and hence, by implication, ‘covered in hair’. Both strands of meaning have followed the word into English: ‘adulthood’ by way of the derivative pūbertās, source of English puberty, and ‘hairiness’ in pubescent [17], which means ‘downy’ as well as ‘having reached puberty’. And the two are combined in pubic ‘relating to the region of the groin where hair begins to grow at puberty’ [19].
score: score: [11] The etymological notion underlying score is of ‘cutting’ – for it is related to English shear. It was borrowed from Old Norse skor, which went back to the same prehistoric Germanic base – *skur-, *sker- ‘cut’ – that produced shear (not to mention share, shore, and short). It had a range of meanings, from ‘notch’ to ‘record kept by cutting notches’, but it was specifically the ‘number twenty’ (presumably originally ‘twenty recorded by cutting notches’) that English at first took over.

The other senses followed, perhaps as a result of reborrowing, in the 14th century, but the main modern meaning, ‘number of points made in a game’ (originally as recorded by cutting notches), is a purely English development of the 18th century. Roughly contemporary is ‘written music’, which is said to come from the linking together of related staves with a single common bar line or ‘score’ (in the sense ‘mark’).

The verb score ‘mark with lines’ was borrowed in the 14th century from Old Norse skora.
=> share, shear, shirt, short, skirt
scout: scout: [14] Etymologically, a scout is someone who ‘listens’. For the word goes back ultimately to Latin auscultāre ‘listen’, a derivative of the same base that produced Latin auris ‘ear’ (source of English aural [19] and distantly related to English ear). This passed into Old French as escouter ‘listen’ (its modern descendant is écouter), which English adopted as the verb scout, meaning ‘look about, spy’. The noun, from the French derivative escoute, followed in the 15th century.
=> aural, ear
sequin: sequin: [17] When English first adopted sequin, it was the name of a coin. Its ultimate ancestor was Arabic sikkah, which denoted a die from which coins were minted (in Anglo-Indian English from the 17th to the 19th century, a sicca was a newly minted rupee). Italian took the word over as zecca, and created a diminutive form zecchino, referring to a gold coin.

The original application was specifically to a Venetian coin, but this subsequently broadened out, and the term was also used for a Turkish coin (alternatively known as a sultanin). In French, zecchino became sequin, which is the form in which English acquired it. The word might well have followed the coin into oblivion, but in the late 19th century it managed to get itself applied to the small round shiny pieces of metal applied to clothing, and its continued existence was guaranteed.
stereo: stereo: [19] Greek stereós meant ‘solid’. The earliest English compound noun formed from it was stereometry [16], a mathematical term denoting the measurement of solid or threedimensional objects. This was followed by stereographic [17], stereotype [18] (coined in French and originally used for a ‘solid’ printing block; the metaphorical ‘unvaried or conventional image’ emerged in the middle of the 19th century), stereoscope [19] (a viewer for producing ‘solid’ or three-dimensional images), and stereophonic ‘producing three-dimensional sound’ [20]. Stereo was used in the 19th century as an abbreviation for stereotype and stereoscopic; its use for stereophonic dates from the early 1950s.
=> stare, stork
stroke: stroke: The verb stroke [OE] and the noun stroke [13] are different words, but they come ultimately from the same source – the prehistoric Germanic base *strīk-, *straik- ‘touch lightly’ (from which English also gets streak and strike). The verb has stayed very close semantically to its source, whereas the noun has followed the same path as its corresponding verb strike.
=> streak, strike
trade: trade: [14] Trade originally meant ‘way, track’. Not until the 16th century did the modern sense ‘buying and selling’ emerge, via ‘regular path followed by someone’ and ‘business pursued by someone’. Etymologically, it amounts to a ‘trodden’ path; for it was borrowed from Middle Low German trade ‘track’, which goes back ultimately to the prehistoric Germanic base *trad-, *tred-, source also of English tread and trot.
=> tread, trot
ullage: ullage: [15] Ullage denotes the amount of unfilled space in a wine bottle or barrel. It goes back ultimately to Latin oculus ‘eye’ (a distant relative of English eye), in the metaphorical sense ‘bung-hole of a barrel’. As the word passed into Old French as oeil, this meaning followed it, and it formed the basis of a varb ouiller ‘fill up a barrel to the bung-hole’. From this was derived ouillage, which English acquired via Anglo-Norman ulliage as ullage.
=> eye, ocular