quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- chap



[chap 词源字典] - chap: There are four distinct words chap in English. The oldest, ‘sore on the skin’ [14], originally meant more generally ‘crack, split’, and may be related to Middle Low German kappen ‘chop off’; it seems ultimately to be the same word as chop ‘cut’. Chap ‘jaw’ [16] (as in Bath chaps) is probably a variant of chop (as in ‘lick one’s chops’). Chap ‘fellow’ [16] originally meant ‘customer’; it is an abbreviation of chapman ‘trader’ [OE] (source of the common surname, but now obsolete as an ordinary noun), whose first element is related to English cheap. Chaps ‘leggings’ [19] is short for Mexican Spanish chaparreras, a derivative of Spanish chaparro ‘evergreen oak’; they were named from their use in protecting the legs of riders from the low thick scrub that grows in Mexico and Texas (named with another derivative of chaparro, chaparral). Chaparro itself probably comes from Basque txapar, a diminutive of saphar ‘thicket’.
=> chop; cheap; chaparral[chap etymology, chap origin, 英语词源] - chop




- chop: There are three distinct words chop in English. The oldest [14] originally meant ‘trade, barter’, but it is now found only in the phrase chop and change. It appears to come from Old English cēapian ‘trade’, which is related to English cheap. Chop ‘jaw, jowl’ [15] (now usually in the plural form chops) is of unknown origin; the now archaic chap is a variant. Chop ‘cut’ [16] seems ultimately to be the same word as chap (as in ‘chapped lips’), and may be related to Middle Low German kappen ‘chop off’. The specific noun sense ‘meat cutlet’ dates from the 15th century.
=> chap, cheap - huddle




- huddle: [16] Huddle originally meant ‘hide’ (‘to chop off the head of the sentence, and slyly huddle the rest’, James Bell’s translation of Walter Haddon against Orosius 1581), suggesting that it could well be a derivative of the same base as produced English hide (its form indicates that it would have come via a Low German dialect). But virtually from the first huddling was more than just ‘hiding’ – it was ‘hiding in a heap or among a crowd’; and from this has developed the word’s modern meaning ‘crowd or draw together’.