英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

accord [accord 词源字典]: accord: [12] In its original source, Vulgar Latin *accordāre, accord meant literally ‘heart-toheart’ (from Latin ad ‘to’ and cord-, the stem of cor ‘heart’). It passed into Old French as acorder, and was borrowed comparatively early into English, turning up in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1123. Its general sense of ‘being in agreement’ has been narrowed down in English and other languages to the notion of ‘being in harmony musically’, and either Italian accordare or French accorder provided the basis for German akkordion (from which English got accordion), the musical instrument invented by Buschmann in Berlin in 1822.
=> cordial[accord etymology, accord 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
agnostic: agnostic: [19] Agnostic is an invented word. It was coined by the English biologist and religious sceptic T H Huxley (1825–95) to express his opposition to the views of religious gnostics of the time, who claimed that the world of the spirit (and hence God) was knowable (gnostic comes ultimately from Greek gnōsis ‘knowledge’). With the addition of the Greek-derived prefix a- ‘not’ Huxley proclaimed the ultimate unknowability of God.

The circumstances of the coinage, or at least of an early instance of the word’s use by its coiner, were recorded by R H Hutton, who was present at a party held by the Metaphysical Society in a house on Clapham Common in 1869 when Huxley suggested agnostic, basing it apparently on St Paul’s reference to the altar of ‘the Unknown God’.
blimp: blimp: [20] The original blimp was a sort of small non-rigid military airship used in World War I. Its name is said to have come from its official designation as ‘type B (limp)’ (as opposed to ‘type A (rigid)’). Its rotund flaccidity suggested it in 1934 to the cartoonist David Low (1891– 1963) as a name for a character he had invented, a fat pompous ex-army officer (in full, Colonel Blimp) who was always cholerically airing reactionary views. The British public evidently recognized the character as an all too common type, and his name became a generic one, to the extent of inspiring spin-offs such as blimpish.
bloomer: bloomer: [19] Bloomers, long loose trousers worn by women, were not actually invented by someone called Bloomer – the credit for that seems to go to a Mrs Elizabeth Smith Miller of New York – but their first advocate was Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818–94), a US feminist who strongly promoted their use in the early 1850s as a liberated garment for women. The extent to which this became a cause célèbre can be gauged by the fact that it gave rise to so-called Bloomerism, a movement for ‘rationalizing’ women’s dress; in 1882 Lady Harberton wrote in Macmillan’s Magazine ‘“Bloomerism” still lurks in many a memory’. Bloomer ‘mistake’ is late 19th-century, and apparently originally Australian.

Early commentators derived it, not altogether convincingly, from ‘blooming error’.
camera: camera: [18] Latin camera originally meant ‘vaulted room’ (a sense preserved in the Radcliffe Camera, an 18th-century building housing part of Oxford University library, which has a vaulted roof). It came from Greek kamárā ‘vault, arch’, which is ultimately related to English chimney. In due course the meaning ‘vaulted room’ became weakened to simply ‘room’, which reached English, via Old French chambre, as chamber, and is preserved in the legal Latin phrase in camera ‘privately, in judge’s chambers’.

In the 17th century, an optical instrument was invented consisting of a small closed box with a lens fixed in one side which produced an image of external objects on the inside of the box. The same effect could be got in a small darkened room, and so the device was called a camera obscura ‘dark chamber’. When the new science of photography developed in the 19th century, using the basic principle of the camera obscura, camera was applied to the picture-forming box.
=> chamber, chimney
champagne: champagne: [17] Champagne comes (as does campaign) from late Latin campānia, a derivative of Latin campus ‘open field’ (source of English camp). This passed into Old French as champagne ‘open country’, a word borrowed into English in the 14th century as champaign (now archaic). It came to be applied specifically to a province of northeastern France (an area largely of open rolling countryside) and hence to the wine produced in that area.

There are references to ‘brisk Champagne’ and ‘sparkling Champagne’ in English from the 1660s and 1670s, but it was not until about two hundred years ago that modern champagne, produced by secondary fermentation in bottle, was invented (according to legend, by the monk Dom Perignon).
=> camp, campaign, champion
comment: comment: [15] In Latin, a commentum was originally ‘something invented or devised’. It was derived from the verb comminiscī ‘devise, contrive by thought’, a compound formed from the prefix com- ‘with’ and a base *men- (this also produced Latin mens and mentiō, source respectively of English mental and mention). It was used in the 7th century by the Spanish theologian Isidore in the sense ‘interpretation, annotation’, and it was with that meaning rather than the original ‘contrivance’ that the word passed eventually into English.
=> mental, mention, mind
dredge: dredge: English has two distinct words dredge, neither with a particularly well-documented past. Dredge ‘clear mud, silt, etc from waterway’ [16] may be related in some way to the 15thcentury Scottish term dreg-boat, and similarities have been pointed out with Middle Dutch dregghe ‘drag-net’, although if the two are connected, it is not clear who borrowed from whom.

It has also been suggested that it is related ultimately to drag. Dredge ‘sprinkle with sugar, flour, etc’ [16] is a verbal use based on a now obsolete noun dredge, earlier dradge, which meant ‘sweet’. This was borrowed from Old French dragie (its modern French descendant gave English dragée [19]), which may be connected in some way to Latin tragēmata and Greek tragémata ‘spices, condiments’ (these Latin and Greek terms, incidentally, may play some part in the obscure history of English tracklements ‘condiments to accompany meat’ [20], which the English food writer Dorothy Hartley claimed to have ‘invented’ on the basis of an earlier – but unrecorded – dialect word meaning more generally ‘appurtenances’).
=> dragée
dynamic: dynamic: [19] Greek dūnamis (a word of unknown origin) meant ‘strength’. It was used by the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel in 1867 to form the name of the new explosive he had invented, dynamite. From it was derived the adjective dunamikós ‘powerful’, which French adopted in the 17th century as dynamique, and English acquired it in the early 19th century. Related to dúnamis was the verb dúnasthai ‘be strong’ or ‘be able’; from this was derived the noun dunasteíā ‘power, domination’, source, via French or late Latin, of English dynasty [15].

Part of the same word family is dynamo [19], short for dynamo-electric machine, a term coined in 1867 by the electrical engineer Werner Siemens.
=> dynamite, dynasty
Fahrenheit: Fahrenheit: [18] The ‘pre-metrication’ temperature scale takes its name from its inventor, the German physicist Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit (1686-1736). Not only did he develop the idea of a scale in which ice melts at 32º and water boils at 212º, he also invented the mercury thermometer.
fax: fax: [20] Fax is a sleeper of a word. The technology of facsimile telegraphy, by which a document is scanned and its image transmitted via a telegraphic link, had been around since the 1870s, but the word fax was not invented for it (in the USA, by the simple expedient of removing the end of facsimile) until the 1940s. Even then, faxes were not widely known about outside the world of commerce, and it was only in the 1970s that the technology, and with it the word (by now a verb as well as a noun), became an everyday phenomenon. Facsimile [17], incidentally, is simply a lexicalization of Latin fac simile ‘make similar’.
fiction: fiction: [14] Fiction is literally ‘something made or invented’ – and indeed that was the original meaning of the word in English. It seems always to have been used in the sense ‘story or set of “facts” invented’ rather than of some concrete invention, however, and by the end of the 16th century it was being applied specifically to a literary genre of ‘invented narrative’. The word comes via Old French from Latin fictiō, a derivative of the verb fingere ‘make, shape’, from which English also gets effigy, faint, feign, figure, and figment.
=> effigy, faint, feign, figure, figment
figure: figure: [13] Figure comes via Old French from Latin figūra ‘form, shape, figure’, a derivative of the same base (*fig-) as produced fingere ‘make, shape’ (whence English effigy, faint, feign, and fiction). Many of the technical Latin uses of the word, including ‘geometric figure’, are direct translations of Greek skhéma, which also meant literally ‘form, shape’, but the sense ‘numerical symbol’ is a later development. Also from the base *fig- was derived Latin figmentum ‘something created or invented’, from which English gets figment [15].
=> effigy, faint, feign, fiction, figment
hobbit: hobbit: [20] The name of these small furry-footed human-like creatures was invented by their creator, J.R.R. Tolkien, and first appeared in public in The Hobbit (1937). It probably simply occurred to him as a pleasing- and appropriatesounding name, but with typical linguistic thoroughness he later worked up a detailed etymological rationale for it: in their own language, he claimed, hobbits were called kuduk; this was a worn-down version of an original kûd-dûkan, which meant literally ‘holedweller’; in Old English, ‘hole-dweller’ would have been holbytla, which in modern English could plausibly have become eroded to hobbit.
hot dog: hot dog: [19] This term for a cooked sausage or frankfurter in a bun has its origins in the mid- 19th-century use of dog as an American slang term for a sausage (perhaps an allusion to the sausage’s often dubious contents). By the 1890s hot dog was Yale University slang for a cooked sausage bought at a fast-food stall, and by 1900 it was in widespread use for the whole deal, bun and all. Since then it has never looked back. (The widely repeated story that the term was invented by the US cartoonist ‘Tad’ Dorgan in the early 1900s is quite untrue.)
invent: invent: [15] Invent originally meant ‘find’ (‘Since that Eve was procreated out of Adam’s side, could not such newels [novelties] in this land be invented’, wrote the anonymous author of a 15th-century song). It was based on invent-, the past participial stem of Latin invenīre ‘come upon, find’, a compound verb formed from the prefix in- ‘on’ and venīre ‘come’.

The sense ‘devise’, which developed via ‘discover’, actually existed in the Latin verb, but English did not take it on board until the 16th century. The derivative inventory [16] was borrowed from medieval Latin inventōrium ‘list’, an alteration of late Latin inventārium, which originally meant a ‘finding out’, hence an ‘enumeration’.
=> adventure, inventory
kaleidoscope: kaleidoscope: [19] Greek kalós meant ‘beautiful’ (it was related to Sanskrit kalyāna ‘beautiful’). It has given English a number of compound words: calligraphy [17], for instance, etymologically ‘beautiful writing’, callipygian [18], ‘having beautiful buttocks’, and callisthenics [19], literally ‘beauty and strength’. The Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster used it, along with Greek eidos ‘shape’ and the element -scope denoting ‘observation instrument’, to name a device he invented in 1817 for looking at rotating patterns of coloured glass – a ‘beautiful-shape viewer’.
=> calligraphy, callisthenics
knickers: knickers: [19] The use of the word knickers for ‘women’s underpants’ dates back to the 1880s: a writer in the magazine Queen in 1882 recommended ‘flannel knickers in preference to flannel petticoat’, and Home Chat in 1895 was advertising ‘serge knickers for girls from twelve to sixteen’. Over the decades, of course, the precise application of the term has changed with the nature of the garment, and today’s legless briefs are a far cry from the knee-length ‘knickers’ of the 1880s.

They got their name because of their similarity to the original knickers, which were knee-length trousers for men (The Times in 1900 reported the ‘Imperial Yeomanry … in their well-made, loosely-fitting khaki tunics and riding knickers’). And knickers itself was short for knickerbockers, a term used for such trousers since the 1850s. This came from Diedrich Knickerbocker, a fictitious Dutch-sounding name invented by the American writer Washington Irving for the ‘author’ of his History of New York 1809.

The reason for the application seems to have been that the original knickerbockers resembled the sort of kneebreeches supposedly worn by Dutchmen.
leotard: leotard: [19] The leotard commemorates the French trapeze artist Jules Léotard (1830–70), who wore such a garment when he was performing. He was one of the foremost circus acrobats of his day, and a pioneer of aerial stunts: he performed the first mid-air somersault, and invented the ‘flying trapeze’ (he became known as the ‘Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze’, from George Leybourne’s song (1860) of that name), but fate has decreed that his name should be passed down to posterity in the form of a one-piece exercise garment.
lorry: lorry: [19] The first record we have of the word lorry is from the northwest of England in the early 1830s, when it denoted a ‘low wagon’ (it was often used for railway wagons). The modern application to a motor vehicle emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. It is not clear where it came from, although it has been speculated that it was based on the personal name Laurie (perhaps someone called Laurie invented the vehicle). Another possibility is some connection with the Northern dialect verb lurry ‘pull’.
mackintosh: mackintosh: [19] The rubberized material from which this waterproof coat was originally made was invented in the early 1820s by the British chemist Charles Macintosh (1766–1843). His name (misspelled with a k) is first recorded as being applied to the coat in 1836. The abbreviated form mac (or occasionally mack) dates from around the turn of the 20th century.
margarine: margarine: [19] Margarine was invented in 1869 by the French food technologist Hippolyte Mège-Mouries. Its name was based on margaric acid, a term coined by the French biochemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul for a fatty acid which he believed to be one of the constituents of animal fats (the earliest margarine was made from clarified beef fat). He derived it from Greek margarítēs ‘pearl’ (source also of English marguerite [19], and of the names Margaret and Margot), an allusion to the pearly lustre of the acid crystals. The abbreviation marge dates from the 1920s.
=> marguerite
martinet: martinet: [17] The word martinet comes from the name of Jean Martinet, a 17th-century French army officer who invented a system of drill. Indeed, it was as the term for this new drill that martinet was first used in English (‘What, d’ye find fault with Martinet? … ’tis the best exercise in the World’, William Wycherley, The Plain-Dealer 1676); not until the 18th century did the figurative sense ‘rigid disciplinarian’ emerge.
nerd: nerd: [20] It seems likely that nerd, a term for a dull, socially inept or otherwise obnoxious person that appeared in US slang in the early 1950s, was inspired by a whimsical creature called a ‘nerd’ that was invented by the American children’s author ‘Dr Seuss’ (Theodore Seuss Geisel (1904–91)) and introduced by him in his book If I Ran the Zoo (1950): ‘And then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!’ In thinking up the word he may have been influenced by Mortimer Snerd, the name of a dummy used by the American ventriloquist Edgar Bergen.
panjandrum: panjandrum: [18] Panjandrum is an invented word, coined in 1755 by the English actor and playwright Samuel Foote (1720–77) to test the memory of the actor Charles Macklin, who claimed to be able to memorize and repeat anything said to him (it was one of several inventions in the same vein that Foote put to him: ‘And there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the Grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top’). It does not seem to have been taken up as a general comical term for a ‘pompous highranking person’ until the 19th century.
panorama: panorama: [18] The word panorama was coined in the late 1780s by an Irish artist called Robert Barker for a method he had invented for painting a scene on the inside of a cylinder in such a way that its perspective would seem correct to someone viewing it from inside the cylinder. He put his invention into practice in 1793 when he opened his ‘Panorama’, a large building in Leicester Square, London where the public could come and gaze at such all-encompassing scenes. By the early years of the 19th century the word (formed from the prefix pan- ‘all’ and Greek hórāma ‘view’, a derivative of horān ‘see’) had acquired all its modern extended meanings.
saccharin: saccharin: [19] Medieval Latin saccharum ‘sugar’ belonged to the same word-family as the ancestor of English sugar. Its original contribution to English was the adjective saccharine ‘sugary’ [17]; and in the late 1870s the German chemist Fahlberg used it in coining the term saccharin for the new sweetening substance he had invented. English borrowed it in the mid 1880s.
=> sugar
shrapnel: shrapnel: The term shrapnel commemorates the name of General Henry Shrapnel (1761–1842), a British artillery officer who in the course of the Peninsular War, at the beginning of the 19th century, invented an exploding shell that sent bullets flying in all directions
siren: siren: [14] The Seirēnes were sea nymphs who, according to Greek mythology, sat on rocks luring impressionable sailors to their doom with the sweetness of their singing. Latin took the word over as sīrēna, and it passed into English via Old French sereine. The term was applied to an acoustical instrument invented in 1819 by Cagniard de la Tour, that produced musical sounds and was used for measuring the frequency of sound waves, and it was this that formed the basis of its later use (in the 1870s) for a device for giving loud warning signals.
snooker: snooker: [19] The most widely canvassed theory of the origins of the term snooker is that it is an adaptation of late 19th-century army slang snooker ‘new cadet’ (‘These embryo generals were called by the somewhat sneering terms of “snookers” or “last-joined”,’ Routledge’s Every Boy’s Annual 1872). The game was invented, as a diversion perhaps from the monotony of billiards, by British army officers serving in India in the 1870s, and the story goes that the term snooker was applied to it by Colonel Sir Neville Chamberlain (1856–1944), at that time a subaltern in the Devonshire Regiment stationed in Jubbulpore, in allusion to the inept play of one of his brother officers.

The ancestry of snooker ‘new cadet’, however, remains a mystery.
spinet: spinet: [17] A spinet is a sort of small harpsichord. English acquired the term via early modern French espinette from Italian spinetta, and one version of its origin is that it came from the name of one Giovanni Spinetti, a Venetian who supposedly invented the instrument at the beginning of the 16th century. A more prosaic story is that it was a diminutive form of spina ‘thorn’ (a relative of English spine), the allusion being to the plucking of the strings with thornlike quills.
tennis: tennis: [14] The earliest recorded English forms of the word tennis include tenetz, teneys, and tenes. These suggest that it probably came from tenez, the imperative plural of Old French tenir ‘hold’, hence ‘receive’, supposedly shouted by the server to his opponent as a warning to get ready to receive the ball. The word originally referred, of course, to what is now known as real tennis (in which the real does simply mean ‘real’; it has no connection, as is often claimed, with obsolete English real ‘royal’); it was first applied to the newly invented outdoor game in 1874, in the compound lawn tennis, and this was soon shortened to simply tennis.
=> tenant
tractor: tractor: [17] Tractor is one of a large family of English words that come from tractus, the past participle of Latin trahere ‘pull’ (others include abstract [14], attract, contract, detract [15], distract [14], extract [15], retract, subtract, trace, tract [14], tractable [16], traction [17], trait, treat, treatise, and treaty). Tractor itself was originally used in English for a device, invented by the 18th-century American doctor Elisha Perkins, for ‘pulling’ across the surface of the skin, which was supposed to relieve rheumatic pains.

It was not applied to a ‘vehicle for pulling loads’ until the end of the 19th century. From Latin trahere itself come English retreat and train; and drag may go back to the same ultimate source.
=> abstract, attract, contract, detract, distract, extract, retract, retreat, subtract, trace, tract, train, trait, treat, treaty
accordion (n.): 1831, from German Akkordion, from Akkord "musical chord, concord of sounds, be in tune" (compare Italian accordare "to attune an instrument"); ultimately from same source as English accord (v.), with suffix on analogy of clarion, etc. Invented 1829 by piano-maker Cyrill Demian (1772-1847) of Vienna.
agnostic (n.): 1870, "one who professes that the existence of a First Cause and the essential nature of things are not and cannot be known" [Klein]; coined by T.H. Huxley (1825-1895), supposedly in September 1869, from Greek agnostos "unknown, unknowable," from a- "not" + gnostos "(to be) known" (see gnostic). Sometimes said to be a reference to Paul's mention of the altar to "the Unknown God," but according to Huxley it was coined with reference to the early Church movement known as Gnosticism (see Gnostic).
I ... invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic,' ... antithetic to the 'Gnostic' of Church history who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant. [T.H. Huxley, "Science and Christian Tradition," 1889]
The adjective is first recorded 1870.
ampersand (n.): 1837, contraction of and per se and, meaning "(the character) '&' by itself is 'and' " (a hybrid phrase, partly in Latin, partly in English). The symbol is based on the Latin word et "and," and comes from an old Roman system of shorthand signs (ligatures), attested in Pompeiian graffiti, but not (as sometimes stated) from the Tironian Notes, which was a different form of shorthand, probably invented by Cicero's companion Marcus Tullius Tiro, which used a different symbol, something like a reversed capital gamma, to indicate et.

This Tironian symbol was maintained by some medieval scribes, including Anglo-Saxon chroniclers, who sprinkled their works with a symbol like a numeral 7 to indicate the word and. In old schoolbooks the ampersand was printed at the end of the alphabet and thus by 1880s had acquired a slang sense of "posterior, rear end, hindquarters."
autoharp (n.): 1882, name on a patent taken out by Charles F. Zimmermann of Philadelphia, U.S.A., for an improved type of harp, an instrument considerably different from the modern autoharp, actually a chord zither, which was invented about the same time by K.A. Gütter of Markneukirchen, Germany, who called it a Volkszither.
bakelite (n.): type of plastic widely used early 20c., 1909, from German Bakelit, named for Belgian-born U.S. physicist Leo Baekeland (1863-1944), who invented it. Originally a proprietary name, it is formed by the condensation of a phenol with an aldehyde.
Banting (n.): system for weight loss through diet control, named for William Banting (1797-1878), English undertaker who invented it, tested it himself, and promoted it in his 1863 booklet "Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public." Although the word is a surname, it was used like a verbal noun in -ing. ("She is banting").
baseball (n.): in the modern sense, 1845, American English, from base (n.) + ball (n.1). Earlier references, such as in Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey," refer to the game of "rounders," of which baseball is a more elaborate variety. Legendarily invented 1839 by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, N.Y. Base was used for "start or finish line of a race" from 1690s; and the sense of "safe spot" found in modern children's game of tag can be traced to 14c. (the sense in baseball is from 1868).
BASIC: computer language, 1964, initialism (acronym) for Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code; invented by Hungarian-born U.S. computer scientist John G. Kemeny (1926-1992) and U.S. computer scientist Thomas E. Kurtz (b.1928).
basketball (n.): 1892, American English, from basket + ball (n.1). The game was invented 1891 by James A. Naismith (1861-1939), physical education instructor in Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.
behemoth (n.): late 14c., huge biblical beast (Job xl:15), from Latin behemoth, from Hebrew b'hemoth, usually taken as plural of intensity of b'hemah "beast." But the Hebrew word is perhaps a folk etymology of Egyptian pehemau, literally "water-ox," the name for the hippopotamus.
Long before Jumbo was dreamed of, a hippo was exhibited by George K. Bailey, who invented the tank on wheels now used so generally in the circuses. The beast was advertised as "the blood sweating Behemoth of Holy Writ," and he made several men rich. [Isaac F. Marcosson, "Sawdust and Gold Dust," in "The Bookman," June 1910]
Bessemer: in reference to the process for decarbonizing and desiliconizing pig iron by passing air through the molten metal, 1856, named for engineer and inventor Sir Harry Bessemer (1813-1898) who invented it.
Biedermeier: 1854, from German, from Gottlieb Biedermeier, name of a fictitious writer of stodgy poems (invented by Ludwig Eichrodt as a satire on bourgeois taste); the name applied to styles prevalent in Germany 1815-48; also "conventional, bourgeois."
blurb (n.): used by U.S. scholar Brander Matthews (1852-1929) in 1906 in "American Character;" popularized 1907 by U.S. humorist Frank Gelett Burgess (1866-1951). Originally mocking excessive praise printed on book jackets.
Gelett Burgess, whose recent little book, "Are You a Bromide?" has been referred to above, then entertained the guests with some characteristic flashes of Burgessian humor. Referring to the word "blurb" on the wrapper of his book he said: "To 'blurb' is to make a sound like a publisher. The blurb was invented by Frank A. Munsey when he wrote on the front of his magazine in red ink 'I consider this number of Munsey's the hottest pie that ever came out of my bakery.' ... A blurb is a check drawn on Fame, and it is seldom honored.["] ["Publishers' Weekly," May 18, 1907]
brilliant (adj.): 1680s, from French brilliant "sparkling, shining" present participle of briller "to shine" (16c.), from Italian brillare "sparkle, whirl," perhaps from Vulgar Latin *berillare "to shine like a beryl," from berillus "beryl, precious stone," from Latin beryllus (see beryl). In reference to diamonds (1680s) it means a flat-topped cut invented 17c. by Venetian cutter Vincenzo Peruzzi.
browser (n.): 1845, "animal which browses," agent noun from browse (v.). In the computer sense by 1982.
The first browser was invented at PARC by Larry Tesler, now a designer at Apple Computer. Tesler's first Smalltalk browser was a tree-structured device. It enabled programmers to hunt quickly for items in a Smalltalk dictionary. ["InfoWorld" magazine, vol. v., no. 4, Jan. 24, 1983]
Buffalo: city in western New York state, U.S., of disputed origin (there never were buffalo thereabouts), perhaps from the name of a native chief, or a corruption of French beau fleuve "beautiful river." Buffalo wings finger food so called because the recipe was invented in Buffalo (1964, at Frank & Teressa's Anchor Bar on Main Street).