英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

acid [acid 词源字典]: acid: [17] The original notion contained in the word acid is ‘pointedness’. In common with a wide range of other English words (for example acute, acne, edge, oxygen) it can be traced back ultimately to the Indo-European base *ak-, which meant ‘be pointed or sharp’. Among the Latin derivatives of this base was the adjective ācer ‘sharp’.

From this was formed the verb acere ‘be sharp or sour’, and from this verb in turn the adjective acidus ‘sour’. The scientist Francis Bacon seems to have been the first to introduce it into English, in the early 17th century (though whether directly from Latin or from French acide is not clear). Its use as a noun, in the strict technical sense of a class of substances that react with alkalis or bases, developed during the 18th century.
=> acacia, acne, acrid, acute, alacrity, ear, edge, oxygen[acid etymology, acid origin, 英语词源]
address: address: [14] Address originally meant ‘straighten’. William Caxton, for example, here uses it for ‘stand up straight’: ‘The first day that he was washed and bathed he addressed him[self] right up in the basin’ Golden Legend 1483. This gives a clue to its ultimate source, Latin dīrectum ‘straight, direct’. The first two syllables of this seem gradually to have merged together to produce *drictum, which with the addition of the prefix ad- was used to produce the verb *addrictiāre.

Of its descendants in modern Romance languages, Italian addirizzare most clearly reveals its source. Old French changed it fairly radically, to adresser, and it was this form which English borrowed. The central current sense of ‘where somebody lives’ developed in the 17th and 18th centuries from the notion of directing something, such as a letter, to somebody.
=> direct
after: after: [OE] In the first millennium AD many Germanic languages had forms cognate with Old English æfter (Gothic aftra, for example, and Old Norse aptr), but, with the exception of Dutch achter, none survive. It is not clear what their ultimate origin is, but the suffix they share may well be a comparative one, and it is possible that they derive from a Germanic base *af- (represented in Old English æftan ‘from behind’).

It has been suggested that this goes back to Indo-European *ap- (source of Latin ab ‘away, from’ and English of(f)), in which case after would mean literally ‘more off’ – that is, ‘further away’. Nautical aft is probably a shortening of abaft, formed, with the prefixes a- ‘on’ and be- ‘by’, from Old English æftan.
=> of, off
amen: amen: [OE] Amen was originally a Hebrew noun, āmēn ‘truth’ (based on the verb āman ‘strengthen, confirm’), which was used adverbially as an expression of confirmation or agreement. Biblical texts translated from Hebrew simply took it over unaltered (the Greek Septuagint has it, for example), and although at first Old English versions of the gospels substituted an indigenous term, ‘truly’, by the 11th century amen had entered English too.
amphibious: amphibious: [17] The Greek prefix amphimeant ‘both, on both sides’ (hence an amphitheatre [14]: Greek and Roman theatres were semicircular, so two joined together, completely surrounding the arena, formed an amphitheatre). Combination with bios ‘life’ (as in biology) produced the Greek adjective amphibios, literally ‘leading a double life’. From the beginning of its career as an English word it was used in a very wide, general sense of ‘combining two completely distinct or opposite conditions or qualities’ (Joseph Addison, for example, used it as an 18th-century equivalent of modern unisex), but that meaning has now almost entirely given way to the word’s zoological application.

At first, amphibious meant broadly ‘living on both land and water’, and so was applied by some scientists to, for example, seals; but around 1819 the zoologist William Macleay proposed the more precise application, since generally accepted, to frogs, newts, and other members of the class Amphibia whose larvae have gills but whose adults breathe with lungs.
=> biology
apple: apple: [OE] Words related to apple are found all over Europe; not just in Germanic languages (German apfel, Dutch appel, Swedish äpple), but also in Balto-Slavonic (Lithuanian óbuolas, Polish jabtko), and Celtic (Irish ubhall, Welsh afal) languages. The Old English version was æppel, which developed to modern English apple.

Apparently from earliest times the word was applied not just to the fruit we now know as the apple, but to any fruit in general. For example, John de Trevisa, in his translation of De proprietatibus rerum 1398 wrote ‘All manner apples that is, “fruit” that are enclosed in a hard skin, rind, or shell, are called Nuces nuts’. The term earth-apple has been applied to several vegetables, including the cucumber and the potato (compare French pomme de terre), and pineapple (which originally meant ‘pine cone’, with particular reference to the edible pine nuts) was applied to the tropical fruit in the 17th century, because of its supposed resemblance to a pine cone.
arm: arm: [OE] The two distinct senses of arm, ‘limb’ and ‘weapon’, both go back ultimately to the same source, the Indo-European base *ar- ‘fit, join’ (which also produced art and article). One derivative of this was Latin arma ‘weapons, tools’, which entered English via Old French armes in the 13th century (the singular form was virtually unknown before the 19th century, but the verb arm, from Latin armāre via Old French armer, came into the language in the 13th century).

The other strand is represented in several European languages, meaning variously ‘joint’, ‘shoulder’, and ‘arm’: Latin armus ‘shoulder’, for example, and Greek harmos ‘joint’. The prehistoric Germanic form was *armaz, from which developed, among others, German, Dutch, Swedish, and English arm.
=> art, article
back: back: [OE] Back goes back to a prehistoric West and North Germanic *bakam, which was represented in several pre-medieval and medieval Germanic languages: Old High German bah, for example, and Old Norse bak. In most of them, however, it has been ousted by relatives of English ridge, originally ‘spine’ (such as German rücken and Swedish rygg), and only English retains back.
=> bacon
barbecue: barbecue: [17] Barbecue originated in the language of the now extinct Taino people of the West Indies. It first emerges in the Haitian creole term barbacoa, which meant simply ‘wooden framework’ (used for other purposes than roasting meat – for example, as a bed). American Spanish adopted the word, and passed it on to English. Compare BUCCANEER.
be: be: [OE] There are four distinct components that go to make up the modern English verb be. The infinitive form be comes ultimately from an Indo-European base *bheu-, *bhu-, which also produced, by other routes, future and physical. Its Germanic descendant was *bu-, which signified on the one hand ‘dwell’ (from which we get booth, bower, byre, build, burly, byelaw, and the final element of neighbour), and on the other hand ‘grow, become’, which led to its adoption as part of the verb expressing ‘being’ (in Old English particularly with the future sense of ‘coming to be’). Am and is go back to the ancient Indo- European verb ‘be’, *es- or *s-, which has contributed massively to ‘be’ verbs throughout all Indo-European languages (third person present singulars Greek esti, Latin est, French est, German ist, Sanskrit ásti, Welsh ys, for example) The Indo-European first and third person singular forms were, respectively, ésmi and ésti.

For the present plural Old English used the related sind(on) (as found in Latin sunt, French sont, and German sind), but this died out in the 12th century, to be replaced by are, which comes from a Germanic base *ar- of unknown origin. From the same source is the now archaic second person singular art. The past tense forms was, were come ultimately from an Indo-European base *weswhich meant ‘dwell, remain’.

Related words in other Indo-European languages include Sanskrit vásati ‘dwell, remain’ and Gothic wisan ‘remain, continue’.
=> booth, bower, build, burly, byelaw, byre
beech: beech: [OE] Like many other tree-names, beech goes back a long way into the past, and is not always what it seems. Among early relatives Latin fāgus meant ‘beech’ (whence the tree’s modern scientific name), but Greek phāgós, for example, referred to an ‘edible oak’. Both come from a hypothetical Indo-European *bhagos, which may be related to Greek phagein ‘eat’ (which enters into a number of English compounds, such as phagocyte [19], literally ‘eating-cell’, geophagy [19], ‘earth-eating’, and sarcophagus).

If this is so, the name may signify etymologically ‘edible tree’, with reference to its nuts, ‘beech mast’. The Old English word bēce’s immediate source was Germanic *bōkjōn, but this was a derivative; the main form bōkō produced words for ‘beech’ in other Germanic languages, such as German buche and Dutch beuk, and it survives in English as the first element of buckwheat [16], so named from its three-sided seeds which look like beech nuts.

It is thought that book may come ultimately from bōk- ‘beech’, on the grounds that early runic inscriptions were carved on beechwood tablets.
=> book, buckwheat, phagocyte, sarcophagus
behind: behind: [OE] Behind was compounded in Old English times from the prefix bi- ‘by’ and hindan ‘from behind’. This second element, and the related Old English hinder ‘below’, have relatives in other Germanic languages (German hinten and hinter ‘behind’, for example), and are connected with the English verb hinder, but their ultimate history is unclear. Modern English hind ‘rear’ may come mainly from behind.
=> hind, hinder
birch: birch: [OE] Old English bi(e)rce came from a prehistoric Germanic *berkjōn, source also of German birke. The word goes back ultimately to an Indo-European *bhergo, but as is often the case with ancient tree-names, it does not denote the same type of tree in every language in which it has descendants: Latin fraxinus, for example, means ‘ash tree’. It has been speculated that the word is related to bright (whose Indo-European source was *bhereg-), with reference to the tree’s light-coloured bark.

It could also be that the word bark [13] itself is related. The verb birch ‘flog’ (originally with a birch rod or bunch of birch twigs) is early 19th-century.
=> bark, bright
bone: bone: [OE] Somewhat unusually for a basic body-part term, bone is a strictly Germanic word: it has no relatives in other Indo-European languages. It comes from a presumed Germanic *bainam, which also produced for example German bein and Swedish ben. These both mean ‘leg’ as well as ‘bone’, suggesting that the original connotation of *bainam may have been ‘long bone’.
book: book: [OE] Book is widespread throughout the Germanic languages. German has buch, for example, Dutch bock, and Swedish bok. There point to a prehistoric Germanic *bōks, which was probably related to *bōkā ‘beech’, the connection being that the early Germanic peoples used beechwood tablets for writing runic inscriptions on. The original meaning of the word in Old English (bōc) was simply ‘written document or record’, but by the 9th century it had been applied to a collection of written sheets fastened together.
=> beech
branch: branch: [13] Branch comes via Old French branche from late Latin branca ‘paw’, but its ultimate origins are not known. In other Romance languages it retains more of its original Latin sense (Spanish branca ‘claw’, for example, and Romanian brinca ‘hand, paw’). The semantic connection between ‘limb of a tree’ and ‘appendage of a person or animal’ is fairly straightforward (compare BOUGH).
bright: bright: [OE] Bright is a word of ancient origins, going back to Indo-European *bhereg-, which has produced a range of words with the same general meaning in a range of Indo-European languages (for example Sanskrit bhrājate ‘shine’). The Germanic derivative was *berkhtaz, which produced a number of offspring amongst the early Germanic languages, including Old English beorht, Old High German beraht, and Old Norse bjartr, all now lost except English bright.
broad: broad: [OE] Broad’s close relatives are widespread in the Germanic languages (German breit, for example, Dutch breed, and Swedish bred), pointing to a prehistoric Germanic ancestor *braithaz, but no trace of the word is found in any non-Germanic Indo-European language. The original derived noun was brede, which was superseded in the 16th century by breadth. The 20th-century American slang noun use ‘woman’ may come from an obsolete American compound broadwife, short for abroadwife, meaning ‘woman away from her husband’; this was a term applied to female slaves in relation to their new ‘masters’.
=> breadth
camel: camel: [OE] Naturally enough, camel is of Semitic origin: Hebrew has gāmāl, for example, and Arabic jamal. It was a relative of these that was the source of Greek kámēlos, which passed via Latin camēlus into English as early as the mid 10th century. (It replaced a previous Old English olfend, a word – shared by other early Germanic languages – apparently based on the misconception that a camel was an elephant.)
camp: camp: [16] Latin campus meant ‘open field’. It branched out into various more specialized meanings. One of them, for example, was ‘battle field’: this was borrowed into the Germanic languages as ‘battle’ (German has kampf, for instance, as in the title of Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf ‘My struggle’). Another was ‘place for military exercises’, and this seems to have developed, in the word’s passage via Italian campo and French camp, to ‘place where troops are housed’.

English got the word from French. Camp ‘mannered, effeminate’ [20] is presumably a different word, but its origins are obscure. Latin campus itself was adopted in English in the 18th century for the ‘grounds of a college’. It was originally applied to Princeton university in the USA.
=> campaign, champion, decamp, scamp
can: can: [OE] English has two distinct words can. The verb ‘be able to’ goes back via Old English cunnan and Germanic *kunnan to an Indo- European base *gn-, which also produced know. The underlying etymological meaning of can is thus ‘know’ or more specifically ‘come to know’, which survived in English until comparatively recently (in Ben Jonson’s The Magnetick Lady 1632, for example, we find ‘She could the Bible in the holy tongue’).

This developed into ‘know how to do something’, from which we get the current ‘be able to do something’. The past tense could comes ultimately from prehistoric Germanic *kuntha, via Old English cūthe (related to English uncouth) and late Middle English coude; the l is a 16th-century intrusion, based on the model of should and would. (Canny [16] is probably a derivative of the verb can, mirroring a much earlier but parallel formation cunning.) Can ‘container’ appears to come from a prehistoric Germanic *kannōn-.
=> canny, cunning, ken, know, uncouth
capon: capon: [OE] Capon, a ‘castrated male chicken’, is probably literally a ‘cut cockerel’. The word comes via Anglo-Norman capun from Latin capō, which is probably ultimately derived from a word for ‘cut’ – Greek kóptein, for example – the underlying reference of course being to the cutting off of the unfortunate bird’s testicles.
carpet: carpet: [14] Originally, carpet was simply a sort of rough cloth, and medieval Latin carpīta, for example, was sometimes used for a garment made from it. In earliest English use it was a ‘table-cloth’ or ‘bed-spread’, and it was not until the 15th century that the specialized ‘floorcovering’ began to establish itself. The word itself entered English via either Old French carpite or medieval Latin carpīta, which was derived from carpīre, an alteration of Latin carpere ‘pluck’ (related to English harvest).

The underlying notion seems to be that such cloth was originally made from ‘plucked’ fabric, that is, fabric which had been unravelled or shredded.
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
chin: chin: [OE] Chin has relatives throughout the Germanic languages (German has kinn, for instance, and Dutch kin) and is also represented in words for ‘lower jaw’, ‘mouth’, ‘cheek’, etc in other Indo-European languages (Greek gnáthos ‘jaw’, for example, which gave English prognathous ‘having projecting jaws’). All go back to a prehistoric Indo-European source *genw-.
=> prognathous
cider: cider: [14] Despite its seeming roots in the appleproducing English countryside, cider is a very ancient word, which has come a long way to reach us. Hebrew shēkhār meant ‘any strong drink in general’. It crops up in several places in the Bible, and was adopted by Greek and Latin translators as, respectively, sīkéra and sīcera. The Latin form was borrowed into Old French, where it became sisdre and eventually sidre.

By now it was being applied more specifically to drink made from apples, and it had that meaning when it was borrowed into English. However, its biblical associations were still sufficiently strong for it to retain its original meaning in certain contexts: for example, in 1382 John Wyclif translated Luke 1:15 (‘he shall drink neither wine nor strong drink’) as ‘he shall not drink wine and cider’.

Its original form survived for a while, too, as sicar, which did not disappear from English until the 17th century.
cob: cob: [15] Cob has a bizarre range of meanings – ‘nut’, ‘horse’, ‘male swan’, ‘loaf’, ‘ear of maize’ – but a distillation of them points back to an original ‘head, or something similarly rounded’ (cobnuts and cobloaves, for example, are spherical, and the male swan is the ‘chief’ or ‘leader’). It is therefore tempting to see a connection with the now obsolete cop ‘top, head’ (probably represented in cobweb), and even with Latin caput ‘head’.
=> cobble
craft: craft: [OE] The original notion contained in the word craft is that of ‘strength’ (that is the meaning of its relatives in other Germanic languages, such as German and Swedish kraft). Old English croeft had that sense too (it had largely died out by the 16th century), but it had also developed some other meanings, which are not shared by its Germanic cognates: ‘skill’, for example (in a bad as well as a good sense, whence crafty) and ‘trade’ or ‘profession’.

Much later in origin, however (17th-century in fact), is the sense ‘ship’. It is not clear how this developed, but it may have been a shortening of some such expression as ‘vessel of the sailor’s craft’ (that is, ‘trade’). The word’s Germanic stem was *krab- or *kraf-, which some have seen also as the source of crave [OE].
=> crave
crumb: crumb: [OE] Relatives of crumb are fairly widespread in the Germanic languages – German has krume, for example, and Dutch kruim – and it is represented in some non- Germanic Indo-European languages, such as Greek grūméā and even Albanian grime. As these forms indicate, the b is not original (the Old English word was cruma); it first appeared in the 16th century, but crum remained an accepted spelling well into the 19th century. The derivative crumble appeared in the 16th century.
=> crumble
crystal: crystal: [OE] The prehistoric Indo-European base *kru- produced several words denoting ‘hard outer surface’, including English crust, Old High German hrosa ‘crust’, and Old Norse hrúthr ‘crust’. In some cases they reflect a hardening caused by freezing: Old High German hrosa, for example, also meant ‘ice’, and Greek krúos meant ‘frost’.

From this was derived krustaímein ‘freeze’, which in turn formed the basis of krústallos ‘ice’. When Old English first acquired the word, via Latin crystallum and Old French cristal, it still meant ‘ice’, a sense which survived until the 16th century, although losing ground all the time to the metaphorical extension ‘clear mineral’.
=> crust
demerit: demerit: [14] A demerit may be virtually the opposite of a merit, but the word was not formed, as might be supposed, by adding the prefix de-, denoting oppositeness or reversal, to merit. Its distant ancestor was Latin demeritum, from the verb demereri ‘deserve’, where the de- prefix meant not ‘opposite of’ but ‘completely’ (as it does too in, for example, denude and despoil).

Add this de- to mereri ‘deserve’ and you get ‘deserve thoroughly’. However, at some point in the Middle Ages the prefix began to be reinterpreted as ‘opposite’, and medieval Latin demeritum came to mean ‘fault’ – the sense that reached English via French démérite.
devil: devil: [OE] English acquired devil in the 8th century via late Latin diabolus from Greek diábolos, which originally meant ‘slanderer’. It was a derivative of diabállein ‘slander’, a compound verb literally meaning ‘throw across’, formed from diá ‘across’ and bállein ‘throw’ (whence English ballistics). The Greek word has reached most European languages: for example French diable, Italian diavolo, German teufel, Dutch duivel, Swedish djāvul, and Russian djavol. It has also given English diabolical [16], and indeed diabolo [20], a game played by spinning a top (named from a variant of Italian diavolo) on a string.
=> ballistics, diabolical
dope: dope: [19] Dope originated in the USA, where it was borrowed from Dutch doop ‘sauce’. This was a derivative of the verb doopen ‘dip’, which is related to English dip. It was at first used as a general colloquialism for any thick semi-liquid preparation, whether used as a food or, for example, as a lubricant, but during the 19th century some specific strands began to emerge: notably ‘drug’, and in particular ‘opium’, and ‘varnish painted on the fabric of an aircraft’.

The effects of the former led to its use in the sense ‘fool’, and to the coinage of the adjective dopey, first recorded in the 1890s. The sense ‘information’ dates from around 1900.
=> deep, dip
draught: draught: [12] Draught and draft are essentially the same word, but draft (more accurately representing its modern English pronunciation) has become established since the 18th century as the spelling for ‘preliminary drawing or plan’, ‘money order’, and (in American English) ‘conscription’. The word itself probably comes from an unrecorded Old Norse *drahtr, an abstract noun meaning ‘pulling’ derived from a prehistoric Germanic verb *dragan (source of English drag and draw).

Most of its modern English meanings are fairly transparently descended from the idea of ‘pulling’: ‘draught beer’, for example, is ‘drawn’ from a barrel. Of the less obvious ones, ‘current of air’ is air that is ‘drawn’ through an opening; the game draughts comes from an earlier, Middle English sense of draught, ‘act of drawing a piece across the board in chess and similar games’; while draft ‘provisional plan’ was originally ‘something drawn or sketched’.
=> draft, drag, draw
drive: drive: [OE] As far as is known, drive is an exclusively Germanic word. It and its relatives German treiben, Dutch drijven, Swedish driva, Danish drive, and Gothic dreiban point to a prehistoric Germanic ancestor *drīban. Its base also produced English drift and drove [OE]. The central modern sense of drive, ‘drive a car’, comes from the earlier notion of driving a horse, ox, etc by pushing it, whipping it, etc from behind, forcing it onwards, but in most other modern European languages the verb for ‘driving a vehicle’ denotes basically ‘leading’ or ‘guiding’ (French conduire, for example, or German lenken).
=> drift, drove
drop: drop: [OE] Drop, droop, and drip are closely related. Droop [13] was borrowed from Old Norse drūpa, which came from a Germanic base *drūp-. A variant of this, *drup-, produced Middle Danish drippe, the probable source of English drip [15], and a further variant, *drop-, lies behind Old English dropa, ancestor of modern English drop.

All three go back ultimately to a prehistoric Indo-European *dhreub-, source of Irish drucht ‘dew’. The English noun originally meant ‘globule of liquid’, and its related verb ‘fall in drops’. The main modern transitive sense, ‘allow to fall’, developed in the 14th century, giving English a single word for the concept of ‘letting fall’ not shared by, for example, French and German, which have to use phrases to express it: respectively, laisser tomber and fallen lassen.
=> drip, droop
ear: ear: Ear for hearing and ear of corn seem in some way to belong together, but in fact they are two quite distinct words etymologically. Ear for hearing [OE] is an ancient term that goes right back to the Indo-European roots of the language. Its ancestor is the base *aus-, whose underlying signification was perhaps ‘perception’ (a variant, *au-, produced Greek aisthánomai ‘perceive’).

This lies behind the term for ‘ear’ in the majority of European languages: French oreille, for example, Italian orecchio, Spanish oreja, Romanian ureche, Irish ó, Russian and Polish ucho, and modern Greek autí. Its Germanic descendant, *auzon, produced German ohr, Dutch oor, Gothic ausō, Swedish öra, and English ear.

The etymological sense of ear of corn [OE] is ‘spike’ of corn. The word comes from a prehistoric Germanic *akhuz, which goes back ultimately to the Indo-European base *ak- ‘be pointed or sharp’ (ultimate source of English acid, acne, acute, eager, edge, and oxygen).
=> acid, acne, acute, eager, edge, oxygen
eat: eat: [OE] Eat is a very ancient and basic verb. It goes back to Indo-European *ed- ‘eat’ (distant ancestor of English tooth), which produced the basic word for ‘eat’ in most European languages, apart from French, Italian, Romanian, and the Celtic languages: Greek édein, for example, Latin edere (source of English comestible [15], from Latin comedere ‘eat up’, and of obese [17]), and Russian jest’. Its Germanic descendant was *etan (ultimate source of English etch), which produced German essen, Dutch eten, Swedish öta, and English eat (and also lies behind English fret).
=> comestible, etch, fret, obese, tooth
elegy: elegy: [16] Greek élegos originally signified simply ‘song’ (Aristophanes, for example, used it for the song of a nightingale in his play Birds). It is not clear where it came from, although it has been speculated that the Greeks may have borrowed it from the Phrygians, an Indo- European people of western and central Asia Minor, and that originally it denoted ‘flute song’ (the long-held derivation from Greek e e légein ‘cry woe! woe!’ is not tenable). Later on it came to mean specifically ‘song of mourning’, and its adjective derivative elegeíā passed as a noun via Latin and French into English.
elk: elk: [OE] The Indo-European base *ol-, *elproduced a number of names for deerlike animals – Greek élaphos ‘stag’, for example, and Welsh elain ‘hind’, not to mention English eland. In its Germanic descendants, two main lines of development are evident: its extensions *olk- and *elk- produced respectively Germanic *algiz (whence Old Norse elgr) and Germanic *elkho(n)- (whence Old English colh).

It is not actually entirely clear which of these two is represented by modern English elk, which is first unequivocally recorded in the late 15th century. It is formally possible that it could be a survival of the Old English word, with its final /kh/ sound changed to /k/, but the long gap in the written record between Old English eolh and Middle English elk suggests that it could be an Old Norse borrowing.
=> eland
equestrian: equestrian: [17] Equestrian was adapted from Latin equester, an adjective derived from eques ‘horseman’. Eques in turn was based on equus ‘horse’ (source of English equine [18]). This was the Latin descendant of *ekwos, the prehistoric Indo-European term for ‘horse’, which was once found in all the daughter languages of Indo- European except for the Slavic branch: Old English had eoh, for example, Old Irish ech, Sanskrit avás, and ancient Greek híppos (source of English hippodrome and hippopotamus).

It is a remarkable circumstance, however, that over the past thousand years equus and its relatives have (other than in derivatives such as equine) died out, to be replaced by secondary terms such as French cheval (from Latin caballus, probably a non-Indo-European borrowing), German pferd (from late Latin paraverēdus ‘extra post-horse’, source also of English palfrey), and English horse.
=> equine, hippopotamus
errand: errand: [OE] Despite the passing similarity, errand has no etymological connection with err and error. It comes from a prehistoric Germanic *ǣrundjam, which meant ‘message’ – a sense which in fact survived in English until as recently as the 18th century (Miles Coverdale, for example, in his 1535 translation of 1 Samuel 11:5 wrote ‘So they told him the errand of the men of Jabesh’ – where the Authorized Version has ‘tidings’).

The main modern meaning, ‘task one goes to perform’, developed in the 13th century (in American English it has latterly gained specific connotations of ‘shopping’). The source of the Germanic word is not known, but it is no doubt related to Swedish ärende and Danish ærinde ‘errand, message, business’.
excuse: excuse: [13] Etymologically, excuse means ‘free of accusation’. It comes via Old French from Latin excūsāre, a compound verb formed from the prefix ex-, denoting removal, and causa ‘cause’ – but ‘cause’ in the sense not of something that produces a result, but of ‘legal action, accusation’ (a meaning preserved in English ‘cause list’, for example) Originally, the s of both the noun and the verb was pronounced /z/; the /s/ of the modern English noun arose by analogy with such nouns as use and abuse.
=> accuse, cause
expedition: expedition: [15] The Latin verb expedīre originally had the rather mundane meaning ‘free one’s feet’ – from a snare, for example It was formed from the prefix ex- ‘out’ and pēs ‘foot’ (source of English pedal, pedestrian, etc and related to English foot). Its literal meaning was soon lost sight of, progressing via ‘extricate, liberate’ to ‘bring out, make ready’ and ‘put in order, arrange, set right’.

The notion of ‘freeing’ something, enabling it to go forward without hindrance, is reflected in the verb’s English descendant expedite [17]. It also survives in the derived noun expedition, as ‘promptness, dispatch’; in the main, however, this has taken a different semantic route, via ‘sending out a military force’ to ‘long organized journey for a particular purpose’.
=> expedite, foot, pedal, pedestrian
explode: explode: [16] The use of explode to mean ‘burst with destructive force’ is a comparatively recent, late 19th-century development. The Latin verb explōdere, from which it comes, signified something quite different – ‘drive off the stage with hisses and boos’ (it was a compound formed from the prefix ex- ‘out’ and plaudere ‘clap’, source of English applaud and plaudits).

From this developed the figurative sense ‘reject, disapprove’, which was how the word was used when it was first taken over into English: ‘Not that I wholly explode Astrology; I believe there is something in it’, Thomas Tryon, Miscellanea 1696 (the modern notion of ‘exploding a theory’ is descended from this usage). In the 17th century, however, the Latin verb’s original sense was reintroduced, and it survived into the 19th century: ‘In the playhouse when he doth wrong, no critic is so apt to hiss and explode him’, Henry Fielding, Tom Jones 1749.

Towards the end of the 17th century we find the first traces of a metaphorical use that combines the notion of ‘driving out, expelling’ with ‘loud noise’ (‘the effects of Lightning, exploded from the Clouds’, Robert Plot, Natural History of Staffordshire 1679), but it was not to be for more than a century that the meaning element ‘drive out’ was replaced by the ‘burst, shatter’ of present-day English explode (Dr Johnson makes no mention of it in his Dictionary 1755, for example) Today the notion of ‘bursting violently’ is primary, that of ‘loud noise’ probably secondary, although still present.
=> applause, plaudits
extreme: extreme: [15] Etymologically, extreme is the latinate equivalent of the native English utmost. It comes via Old French extreme from Latin extrēmus ‘farthest, last, excessive’, which began life as a superlative form based on Latin ex ‘out’ – hence originally ‘most out, utmost’. The underlying notion of ‘furthest outlying’ still survives in, for example, the use of extremities for the ‘hands’ or ‘feet’.
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
feature: feature: [14] Feature comes ultimately from Latin factūra, a derivative of the verb facere ‘do, make’ which meant literally ‘making, formation’. Elements of this original sense remained when the word reached English via Old French faiture – when John Dymmok wrote in 1600 of ‘horses of a fine feature’, for example, he was referring to their shape or general conformation – but already a semantic narrowing down to the ‘way in which the face is shaped’ had taken place.

This meaning was then distributed, as it were, to the individual components of the face, and hence (in the 17th century) to any distinctive or characteristic part.
=> difficult, fact, factory, fashion, feasible, feat
fiend: fiend: [OE] Fiend seems originally to have meant ‘hated person’. It was formed in prehistoric times from the past participle of a Germanic verb meaning ‘hate’ (represented in historic times by, for example, Old English fēon, Old High German fiēn, and Gothic fijan). In Old English its meaning had progressed to ‘enemy’ (which is what its German relative feind still means). Then towards the end of the first millennium AD we see evidence of its being applied to the ‘enemy’ of mankind, the Devil. From there it was a short step to an ‘evil spirit’ in general, and hence to any ‘diabolically wicked person’.
fiscal: fiscal: [16] Latin fiscus originally denoted a ‘small rush basket’, used for example for keeping olives in. Evidently, though, the main purpose to which it was put was as a purse, for it soon acquired the figurative sense ‘public purse, public revenue’. Hence the adjective fiscālis ‘of the imperial treasury’, which passed into English via French fiscal.