英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

above [above 词源字典]: above: [OE] As in the case of about, the a- in above represents on and the -b- element represents by; above (Old English abufan) is a compound based on Old English ufan. This meant both ‘on top’ and ‘down from above’; it is related to over, and is probably descended from a hypothetical West Germanic ancestor *ufana, whose uf- element eventually became modern English up. So in a sense, above means ‘on by up’ or ‘on by over’.
=> by, on, up[above etymology, above origin, 英语词源]
abstruse: abstruse: [16] It is not clear whether English borrowed abstruse from French abstrus(e) or directly from Latin abstrūsus, but the ultimate source is the Latin form. It is the past participle of the verb abstrūdere, literally ‘thrust’ (trūdere) ‘away’ (ab). (Trūdere contributed other derivatives to English, including extrude and intrude, and it is related to threat.) The original, literal meaning of abstruse was ‘concealed’, but the metaphorical ‘obscure’ is just as old in English.
abyss: abyss: [16] English borrowed abyss from late Latin abyssus, which in turn derived from Greek ábussos. This was an adjective meaning ‘bottomless’, from a- ‘not’ and bussós ‘bottom’, a dialectal variant of buthós (which is related to bathys ‘deep’, the source of English bathyscape). In Greek the adjective was used in the phrase ábussos limnē ‘bottomless lake’, but only the adjective was borrowed into Latin, bringing with it the meaning of the noun as well.

In medieval times, a variant form arose in Latin – abysmus. It incorporated the Greek suffix -ismós (English -ism). It is the source of French abîme, and was borrowed into English in the 13th century as abysm (whence the 19th-century derivative abysmal). It began to be ousted by abyss in the 16th century, however, and now has a distinctly archaic air.
acacia: acacia: [16] Acacia comes via Latin from Greek akakía, a word for the shittah. This is a tree mentioned several times in the Bible (the Ark of the Covenant was made from its wood). It is not clear precisely what it was, but it was probably a species of what we now know as the acacia. The ultimate derivation of Greek akakía is obscure too; some hold that it is based on Greek aké ‘point’ (a distant relation of English acid), from the thorniness of the tree, but others suggest that it may be a loanword from Egyptian.
accomplice: accomplice: [15] This word was borrowed into English (from French) as complice (and complice stayed in common usage until late in the 19th century). It comes from Latin complex, which is related to English complicated, and originally meant simply ‘an associate’, without any pejorative associations. The form accomplice first appears on the scene in the late 15th century (the first record of it is in William Caxton’s Charles the Great), and it probably arose through a misanalysis of complice preceded by the indefinite article (a complice) as acomplice. It may also have been influenced by accomplish or accompany.
=> complicated
ache: ache: [OE] Of the noun ache and the verb ache, the verb came first. In Old English it was acan. From it was formed the noun, æce or ece. For many centuries, the distinction between the two was preserved in their pronunciation: in the verb, the ch was pronounced as it is now, with a /k/ sound, but the noun was pronounced similarly to the letter H, with a /ch/ sound.

It was not until the early 19th century that the noun came regularly to be pronounced the same way as the verb. It is not clear what the ultimate origins of ache are, but related forms do exist in other Germanic languages (Low German āken, for instance, and Middle Dutch akel), and it has been conjectured that there may be some connection with the Old High German exclamation (of pain) ah.
acne: acne: [19] It is ironic that acne, that represents a low point in many teenagers’ lives, comes from acme, ‘the highest point’. The Greeks used akme, which literally meant ‘point’, for referring to spots on the face, but when it came to be rendered into Latin it was mistransliterated as acnē, and the error has stuck. (Acme comes, incidentally, from an Indo-European base *ak- ‘be pointed’, and thus is related to acid, edge, and oxygen.)
=> acid, acme, edge, oxygen
acre: acre: [OE] Acre is a word of ancient ancestry, going back probably to the Indo-European base *ag-, source of words such as agent and act. This base had a range of meanings covering ‘do’ and ‘drive’, and it is possible that the notion of driving contributed to the concept of driving animals on to land for pasture. However that may be, it gave rise to a group of words in Indo- European languages, including Latin ager (whence English agriculture), Greek agros, Sanskrit ájras, and a hypothetical Germanic *akraz.

By this time, people’s agricultural activities had moved on from herding animals in open country to tilling the soil in enclosed areas, and all of this group of words meant specifically ‘field’. From the Germanic form developed Old English æcer, which as early as 1000 AD had come to be used for referring to a particular measured area of agricultural land (as much as a pair of oxen could plough in one day).
=> act, agent, agriculture, eyrie, onager, peregrine, pilgrim
acrid: acrid: [18] Acrid is related to acid, and probably owes its second syllable entirely to that word. It is based essentially on Latin acer ‘sharp, pungent’, which, like acid, acute, oxygen, and edge, derives ultimately from an Indo-European base *ak- meaning ‘be pointed or sharp’. When this was imported into English in the 18th century, the ending -id was artificially grafted on to it, most likely from the semantically similar acid.
=> acid, acrylic, acute, edge, eglantine, oxygen, paragon
acumen: acumen: [16] Acumen is a direct borrowing from Latin acūmen, which meant both literally ‘point’ and figuratively ‘sharpness’. It derived from the verb acuere ‘sharpen’, which was also the source of English acute. The original pronunciation of acumen in English was /ə_kjūmen/, with the stress on the second syllable, very much on the pattern of the Latin original; it is only relatively recently that a pronunciation with the stress on the first syllable has become general.
=> acute
admire: admire: [16] Admire has rather run out of steam since it first entered the language. It comes originally from the same Latin source as marvel and miracle, and from the 16th to the 18th centuries it meant ‘marvel at’ or ‘be astonished’. Its weaker modern connotations of ‘esteem’ or ‘approval’, however, have been present since the beginning, and have gradually ousted the more exuberant expressions of wonderment. It is not clear whether English borrowed the word from French admirer or directly from its source, Latin admīrārī, literally ‘wonder at’, a compound verb formed from ad- and mīrārī ‘wonder’.
=> marvel, miracle
adolescent: adolescent: [15] The original notion lying behind both adolescent and adult is of ‘nourishment’. The Latin verb alere meant ‘nourish’ (alimentary and alimony come from it, and it is related to old). A derivative of this, denoting the beginning of an action, was alēscere ‘be nourished’, hence ‘grow’. The addition of the prefix ad- produced adolēscere.

Its present participial stem, adolēscent- ‘growing’, passed into English as the noun adolescent ‘a youth’ (the adjective appears not to have occurred before the end of the 18th century). Its past participle, adultus ‘grown’, was adopted into English as adult in the 16th century.
=> adult, alimentary, alimony, coalesce, coalition, proletarian, prolific
advice: advice: [13] Like modern French avis, advice originally meant ‘opinion’, literally ‘what seems to one to be the case’. In Latin, ‘seem’ was usually expressed by the passive of the verb vidēre ‘see’; thus, vīsum est, ‘it seems’ (literally ‘it is seen’). With the addition of the dative first person pronoun, one could express the notion of opinion: mihi vīsum est, ‘it seems to me’.

It appears either that this was partially translated into Old French as ce m’est a vis, or that the past participle vīsum was nominalized in Latin, making possible such phrases as ad (meum) vīsum ‘in (my) view’; but either way it is certain that a(d)- became prefixed to vīs(um), producing a new word, a(d)vis, for ‘opinion’.

It was originally borrowed into English without the d, but learned influence had restored the Latin spelling by the end of the 15th century. As to its meaning, ‘opinion’ was obsolete by the mid 17th century, but already by the late 14th century the present sense of ‘counsel’ was developing. The verb advise [14] probably comes from Old French aviser, based on avis.
=> vision, visit
affluent: affluent: [15] The meaning ‘rich’ is a fairly recent development for affluent; it is first recorded in the mid 18th century. Originally the adjective meant simply ‘flowing’. It came, via Old French, from Latin affluent-, the present participle of affluere, a compound verb formed from the prefix ad- ‘towards’ and fluere ‘flow’ (the source of English fluid, fluent, flux, fluctuate, and many other derivatives).
=> fluctuate, fluent, fluid, flux
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
age: age: [13] Age has undergone considerable transmutations and abbreviations since its beginnings in Latin. Its immediate source in English is Old French aage, which was the product of a hypothetical Vulgar Latin form *aetāticum (the t is preserved in Provençal atge). This was based on Latin aetāt- (stem of aetās), which was a shortening of aevitās, which in turn came from aevum ‘lifetime’.

This entered English in more recognizable form in medieval, primeval, etc; it is related to Greek aión ‘age’, from which English gets aeon [17], and it can be traced back to the same root that produced (via Old Norse eí) the now archaic adverb ay(e) ‘ever’ (as in ‘will aye endure’).
=> aeon, aye
agog: agog: [15] Agog probably comes from Old French gogue ‘merriment’. It was used in the phrase en gogue, meaning ‘enjoying oneself’ (Randle Cotgrave, in his Dictionarie of the French and English tongues 1611, defines estre en ses gogues as ‘to be frolicke, lustie, lively, wanton, gamesome, all-a-hoit, in a pleasant humour; in a veine of mirth, or in a merrie mood’), and this was rendered into English as agog, with the substitution of the prefix a- (as in asleep) for en and the meaning toned down a bit to ‘eager’.

It is not clear where gogue came from (it may perhaps be imitative of noisy merrymaking), but later in its career it seems to have metamorphosed into go-go, either through reduplication of its first syllable (gogue had two syllables) or through assimilation of the second syllable to the first: hence the French phrase à go-go ‘joyfully’, and hence too English go-go dancers.
albatross: albatross: [17] The word albatross has a confused history. The least uncertain thing about it is that until the late 17th century it was alcatras; the change of the first element to albaseems to have arisen from association of the albatross’s white colour with Latin albus ‘white’. However, which particular bird the alcatras was, and where the word alcatras ultimately came from, are much more dubious.

The term was applied variously, over the 16th to the 19th centuries, to albatrosses, frigate birds, gannets, gulls, and pelicans. Its immediate source was Spanish and Portuguese alcatraz ‘pelican’ (hence Alcatraz, the prison-island in San Francisco Bay, USA, once the haunt of pelicans), which was clearly of Arabic origin, and it has been speculated that it comes from Arabic al qādūs ‘the bucket’, on the premise that the bucket of a water-wheel used for irrigation resembles a pelican’s beak.

Arabic qādūs itself comes from Greek kádos ‘jar’.
albino: albino: [18] Like album, albino comes ultimately from Latin albus ‘white’. It was borrowed into English from the Portuguese, who used it with reference to black Africans suffering from albinism (it is a derivative of albo, the Portuguese descendant of Latin albus).
=> album
alibi: alibi: [18] In Latin, alibi means literally ‘somewhere else’. It is the locative form (that is, the form expressing place) of the pronoun alius ‘other’ (which is related to Greek allos ‘other’ and English else). When first introduced into English it was used in legal contexts as an adverb, meaning, as in Latin, ‘elsewhere’: ‘The prisoner had little to say in his defence; he endeavoured to prove himself Alibi’, John Arbuthnot, Law is a bottomless pit 1727.

But by the end of the 18th century it had become a noun, ‘plea of being elsewhere at the time of a crime’. The more general sense of an ‘excuse’ developed in the 20th century. Another legal offspring of Latin alius is alias. This was a direct 16th-century borrowing of Latin aliās, a form of alius meaning ‘otherwise’.
=> alias, else
alimony: alimony: [17] Alimony is an anglicization of Latin alimōnia, which is based on the verb alere ‘nourish’ (source of alma ‘bounteous’, as in alma mater, and of alumnus). This in turn goes back to a hypothetical root *al-, which is also the basis of English adolescent, adult, altitude (from Latin altus ‘high’), and old.

The original sense ‘nourishment, sustenance’ has now died out, but the specialized ‘support for a former wife’ is of equal antiquity in English. The -mony element in the word represents Latin -mōnia, a fairly meaning-free suffix used for forming nouns from verbs (it is related to -ment, which coincidentally was also combined with alere, to form alimentary), but in the later 20th century it took on a newly productive role in the sense ‘provision of maintenance for a former partner’. Palimony ‘provision for a former non-married partner’ was coined around 1979, and in the 1980s appeared dallymony ‘provision for somebody one has jilted’.
=> adult, altitude, alumnus, old
allege: allege: [14] Allege is related to law, legal, legislation, legation, and litigation. Its original source was Vulgar Latin *exlitigāre, which meant ‘clear of charges in a lawsuit’ (from ex- ‘out of’ and litigāre ‘litigate’). This developed successively into Old French esligier and Anglo- Norman alegier, from where it was borrowed into English; there, its original meaning was ‘make a declaration before a legal tribunal’.

Early traces of the notion of making an assertion without proof can be detected within 50 years of the word’s introduction into English, but it took a couple of centuries to develop fully. The hard g of allegation suggests that though it is ultimately related to allege, it comes from a slightly different source: Latin allēgātiō, from allēgāre ‘adduce’, a compound verb formed from ad- ‘to’ and lēgāre ‘charge’ (source of English legate and legation).
=> law, legal, legation, legislation, litigation
amok: amok: [17] Amok is Malayan in origin, where it is an adjective, amoq, meaning ‘fighting frenziedly’. Its first brief brush with English actually came in the early 16th century, via Portuguese, which had adopted it as a noun, amouco, signifying a ‘homicidally crazed Malay’. This sense persisted until the late 18th century, but by then the phrase run amok, with all its modern connotations, was well established, and has since taken over the field entirely. The spelling amuck has always been fairly common, reflecting the word’s pronunciation.
anger: anger: [12] The original notion contained in this word was of ‘distress’ or ‘affliction’; ‘rage’ did not begin to enter the picture until the 13th century. English acquired it from Old Norse angr ‘grief’, and it is connected with a group of words which contain connotations of ‘constriction’: German and Dutch eng (and Old English enge) mean ‘narrow’, Greek ánkhein meant ‘squeeze, strangle’ (English gets angina from it), and Latin angustus (source of English anguish) also meant ‘narrow’. All these forms point back to an Indo-European base *angg- ‘narrow’.
=> angina, anguish
antelope: antelope: [15] Antelope comes from medieval Greek antholops. In the Middle Ages it was applied to an outlandish but figmentary beast, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘haunting the banks of the Euphrates, very savage, hard to catch, having long saw-like horns with which they cut in pieces and broke all “engines” and even cut down trees’. The term was subsequently used for a heraldic animal, but it was not until the early 17th century that it was applied, by the naturalist Edward Topsell, to the swift-running deerlike animal for which it is now used.
anvil: anvil: [OE] Etymologically, an anvil is ‘something on which you hit something else’. The Old English word was anfīlte, which came from a prehistoric West Germanic compound formed from *ana ‘on’ and a verbal component meaning ‘hit’ (which was also the source of English felt, Latin pellere ‘hit’, and Swedish dialect filta ‘hit’). It is possible that the word may originally have been a loan-translation based on the Latin for ‘anvil’, incūs; for this too was a compound, based on in ‘in’ and the stem of the verb cūdere ‘hit’ (related to English hew).
=> appeal
apogee: apogee: [17] In its original, literal sense, a planet’s or satellite’s apogee is the point in its orbit at which it is furthest away from the Earth; and this is reflected in the word’s ultimate source, Greek apógaios or apógeios ‘far from the Earth’, formed from the prefix apo- ‘away’ and gē ‘earth’ (source of English geography, geology, and geometry).

From this was derived a noun, apógaion, which passed into English via Latin apogeum or French apogée. The metaphorical sense ‘culmination’ developed in the later 17th century. The opposite of apogee, perigee [16], contains the Greek prefix peri- ‘around’, in the sense ‘close around’, and entered English at about the same time as apogee.
=> geography, perigee
appraise: appraise: [15] Originally, appraise meant simply ‘fix the price of’. It came from the Old French verb aprisier ‘value’, which is ultimately a parallel formation with appreciate; it is not clear whether it came directly from late Latin appretiāre, or whether it was a newly formed compound in Old French, based on pris ‘price’. Its earliest spellings in English were thus apprize and apprise, and these continued in use down to the 19th century, with the more metaphorical meaning ‘estimate the worth of’ gradually coming to the fore.

From the 16th century onwards, however, it seems that association with the word praise (which is quite closely related etymologically) has been at work, and by the 19th century the form appraise was firmly established. Apprise ‘inform’, with which appraise is often confused (and which appears superficially to be far closer to the source pris or pretium ‘price’), in fact has no etymological connection with it.

It comes from appris, the past participle of French apprendre ‘teach’ (closely related to English apprehend).
=> appreciate, price
approve: approve: [14] The Latin source of approve, approbāre, was a derivative of probāre, source of English prove. Probāre originally meant ‘test something to find if it is good’ (it was based on Latin probus ‘good’) and this became extended to ‘show something to be good or valid’. It was this sense that was taken up by approbāre and carried further to ‘assent to as good’. When English acquired the word, via Old French aprover, it still carried the notion of ‘demonstrating’, but this was gradually taken over exclusively by prove, and the senses ‘sanction’ and ‘commend’, present since the beginning, established their primacy.
=> probity, prove
April: April: [14] Aprīlis was the name given by the Romans to the fourth month of the year. It is thought that the word may be based on Apru, an Etruscan borrowing of Greek Aphrō, a shortened version of Aphroditē, the name of the Greek goddess of love. In that case Aprīlis would have signified for the Romans ‘the month of Venus’. English acquired the word direct from Latin, but earlier, in the 13th century, it had borrowed the French version, avril; this survived, as averil, until the 15th century in England, and for longer in Scotland. The term April fool goes back at least to the late 17th century.
=> aphrodite
aquamarine: aquamarine: [19] Aquamarine means literally ‘sea water’ – from Latin aqua marīna. Its first application in English was to the precious stone, a variety of beryl, so named because of its bluish-green colour. The art critic John Ruskin seems to have been the first to use it with reference to the colour itself, in Modern Painters 1846. (The French version of the word, aiguemarine, was actually used in English somewhat earlier, in the mid 18th century, but it did not long survive the introduction of the Latin version.) Latin aqua ‘water’ has of course contributed a number of other words to English, notably aquatic [15] (from Latin aquāticus), aqualung (coined around 1950), aquarelle [19] (via Italian acquerella ‘water colour’), aquatint [18] (literally ‘dyed water’), aqueduct [16] (from Latin aquaeductus), and aqueous [17] (a medieval Latin formation); it is related to Old English ēa ‘water’ and īg ‘island’, and is of course the source of French eau, Italian acqua, and Spanish agua.
archipelago: archipelago: [16] Originally, archipelago was a quite specific term – it was the name of the Aegean Sea, the sea between Greece and Turkey. Derivationally, it is a compound formed in Greek from arkhi- ‘chief’ and pélagos ‘sea’ (source of English pelagic [17] and probably related to plain, placate, and please). The term ‘chief sea’ identified the Aegean, as contrasted with all the smaller lagoons, lakes, and inlets to which the word pélagos was also applied.

An ‘Englished’ form of the word, Arch-sea, was in use in the 17th century, and in sailors’ jargon it was often abbreviated to Arches: ‘An island called Augusto near Paros, in the Arches’, Sir T Roe, Negotiations 1626. A leading characteristic of the Aegean Sea is of course that it contains a large number of islands, and from the 16th century onwards we see a strong and steady move towards what is now the word’s main meaning, ‘large group of islands’.

The immediate source of the English word was Italian arcipelago, and some etymologists have speculated that rather than coming directly from Greek arkhipélagos, this may have been a sort of folk-etymological resuscitation of it based on a misunderstanding of Greek Aigaion pelagos ‘Aegean Sea’.
=> pelagic
arduous: arduous: [16] Latin arduus, the source of English arduous, originally meant ‘high, steep’ (it is related to Greek orthós ‘straight, upright, correct’, as in English orthodox); the sense ‘difficult, laborious’ was a later metaphorical development. (The word has no connection with ardour, which comes ultimately from Latin ardēre ‘burn’; see ARSON.)
=> orthodox
arise: arise: [OE] Arise is a compound verb with cognate forms in many other Germanic languages (Gothic, for instance, had urreisan). The prefix a- originally meant ‘away, out’, and hence was used as an intensive; rise comes from an unidentified Germanic source which some etymologists have connected with Latin rīvus ‘stream’ (source of English rivulet), on the basis of the notion of a stream ‘rising’ from a particular source.

The compound arise was in fact far commoner than the simple form rise in the Old English period, and it was only in early Middle English that rise began to take its place. This happened first in northern dialects, and may have been precipitated by Old Norse rísa. Today, it is only in the sense ‘come into existence’ that arise is commoner.
=> raise, rear, rise, rivulet
arrange: arrange: [14] Arrange is a French formation: Old French arangier was a compound verb formed from the prefix a- and the verb rangier ‘set in a row’ (related to English range and rank). In English its first, and for a long time its only meaning was ‘array in a line of battle’. Shakespeare does not use it, and it does not occur in the 1611 translation of the Bible. It is not until the 18th century that it becomes at all common, in the current sense ‘put in order’, and it has been speculated that this is a reborrowing from modern French arranger.
=> range, rank
arrest: arrest: [14] The Latin verb restāre meant ‘stand back, remain behind’ or ‘stop’ (it is the source of English rest in the sense ‘remainder’). The compound verb arrestāre, formed in postclassical times from the prefix ad- and restāre, had a causative function: ‘cause to remain behind or stop’, hence ‘capture, seize’. These meanings were carried over via Old French arester into English.
=> rest
arrow: arrow: [OE] Appropriately enough, the word arrow comes from the same ultimate Indo- European source that produced the Latin word for ‘bow’ – *arkw-. The Latin descendant of this was arcus (whence English arc and arch), but in Germanic it became *arkhw-. From this basic ‘bow’ word were formed derivatives in various Germanic languages meaning literally ‘that which belongs to the bow’ – that is, ‘arrow’ (Gothic, for instance, had arhwazna).

The Old English version of this was earh, but it is recorded only once, and the commonest words for ‘arrow’ in Old English were strǣl (still apparently in use in Sussex in the 19th century, and related to German strahl ‘ray’) and fiān (which remained in Scottish English until around 1500). Modern English arrow seems to be a 9th-century reborrowing from Old Norse *arw-.
=> arc, arch
arsenic: arsenic: [14] The term arsenic was originally applied to the lemon-yellow mineral arsenic trisulphide, and its history reveals the reason: for its appears to be based ultimately on Persian zar ‘gold’ (related forms include Sanskrit hari ‘yellowish’, Greek khlōros ‘greenish-yellow’, and English yellow itself). The derivative zarnīk was borrowed into Arabic as zernīkh, which, as usual with Arabic words, was perceived by foreign listeners as constituting an indivisible unit with its definite article al ‘the’ – hence azzernīkh, literally ‘the arsenic trisulphide’.

This was borrowed into Greek, where the substance’s supposed beneficial effects on virility led, through association with Greek árrēn ‘male, virile’, to the new forms arrenikón and arsenikón, source of Latin arsenicum and, through Old French, of English arsenic. The original English application was still to arsenic trisulphide (orpiment was its other current name), and it is not until the early 17th century that we find the term used for white arsenic or arsenic trioxide.

The element arsenic itself was isolated and so named at the start of the 19th century.
=> chlorine, yellow
arthritis: arthritis: [16] Greek árthron meant ‘joint’ (it is used in various technical terms in biology, such as arthropod ‘creature, such as an insect, with jointed limbs’). It came from the Indo-European root *ar- ‘put things together, join, fit’, which also produced Latin artus ‘limb’ (source of English article) and English arm, as well as art. The compound arthritis is a Greek formation (-itis was originally simply an adjectival suffix, so arthritis meant ‘of the joints’ – with ‘disease’ understood; its application to ‘inflammatory diseases’ is a relatively modern development); it reached English via Latin.
=> arm, art, article
asbestos: asbestos: [14] Originally, the word we now know as asbestos was applied in the Middle Ages to a mythical stone which, once set alight, could never be put out; it came from the Greek compound ásbestos, literally ‘inextinguishable’, which was formed from the prefix a- ‘not’ and sbestós, a derivative of the verb sbennúnai ‘extinguish’. However, by the time it first came into English, its form was not quite what it is today.

To begin with, it was the Greek accusative form, ásbeston, that was borrowed, and in its passage from Latin through Old French it developed several variants, including asbeston and albeston, most of which turned up in English. Then, in the early 17th century, the word was reborrowed from the original Greek source, ásbestos, and applied to a noncombustible silicate mineral.
aspirin: aspirin: [19] The word aspirin was coined in German towards the end of the 19th century. It is a condensed version of the term acetylierte spirsäure ‘acetylated spiraeic acid’. Spiraeic acid is a former term for ‘salicylic acid’, from which aspirin is derived; its name comes from the spiraea, a plant of the rose family.
=> spiraea
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
attach: attach: [14] When English first acquired it, attach meant ‘seize’ or ‘arrest’. It is Germanic in origin, but reached us via Old French atachier. This was an alteration of earlier Old French estachier ‘fasten (with a stake)’, which was based on a hypothetical Germanic *stakōn. The metaphorical meaning ‘arrest’ appears to have arisen in Anglo-Norman, the route by which the word reached English from Old French; the original, literal sense ‘fasten, join’ did not arrive in English until as late as the 18th century, as a reborrowing from modern French attacher.

A similar borrowing of Germanic *stakōn into Italian produced the ancestor of English attack.
=> attack, stake
awe: awe: [13] Old English had the word ege, meaning ‘awe’, but modern English awe is a Scandinavian borrowing; the related Old Norse agi steadily infiltrated the language from the northeast southwards during the Middle Ages. Agi came, like ege, from a hypothetical Germanic form *agon, which in turn goes back to an Indo-European base *agh- (whence also Greek ákhos ‘pain’). The guttural g sound of the 13th-century English word (technically a voiced velar spirant) was changed to w during the Middle English period. This was a general change, but it is not always reflected in spelling – as in owe and ought, for instance, which were originally the same word.
bachelor: bachelor: [13] The ultimate origins of bachelor are obscure, but by the time it first turned up, in Old French bacheler (from a hypothetical Vulgar Latin *baccalāris), it meant ‘squire’ or ‘young knight in the service of an older knight’. This was the sense it had when borrowed into English, and it is preserved, in fossilized form, in knight bachelor. Subsequent semantic development was via ‘university graduate’ to, in the late 14th century, ‘unmarried man’.

A resemblance to Old Irish bachlach ‘shepherd, peasant’ (a derivative of Old Irish bachall ‘staff’, from Latin baculum, source of English bacillus and related to English bacteria) has led some to speculate that the two may be connected. English baccalaureate [17] comes via French baccalauréat or medieval Latin baccalaureātus from medieval Latin baccalaureus ‘bachelor’, which was an alteration of an earlier baccalārius, perhaps owing to an association with the ‘laurels’ awarded for academic success (Latin bacca lauri meant literally ‘laurel berry’).
backgammon: backgammon: [17] Backgammon appears to mean literally ‘back game’, although the reason for the name is far from clear (gammon had been used since at least the early 18th century for a particular type of victory in the game, but it is hard to say whether the term for the victory came from the term for the game, or vice versa). Either way, gammon represents Old English gamen, the ancestor of modern English game. The game backgammon goes back far further than the 17th century, of course, but before that it was called tables in English.
=> game
badminton: badminton: [19] The game of ‘battledore and shuttlecock’ has been around for some time (it appears to go back to the 16th century; the word battledore, which may come ultimately from Portuguese batedor ‘beater’, first turns up in the 15th century, meaning ‘implement for beating clothes when washing them’, but by the 16th century is being used for a ‘small racket’; while shuttlecock, so named because it is hit back and forth, first appears in the early 16th century, in a poem of John Skelton’s).

This was usually a fairly informal, improvised affair, however, and latterly played mainly by children; the modern, codified game of badminton did not begin until the 1860s or 1870s, and takes its name from the place where it was apparently first played, Badminton House, Avon, country seat of the dukes of Beaufort. (A slightly earlier application of the word badminton had been to a cooling summer drink, a species of claret cup.)
bailiff: bailiff: [13] Latin bājulus meant literally ‘carrier’ (it is probably the ultimate source of English bail in some if not all of its uses). It developed the metaphorical meaning ‘person in charge, administrator’, which passed, via the hypothetical medieval adjectival form *bājulīvus, into Old French as baillif, and hence into English.
=> bail
balk: balk: [OE] There are two separate strands of meaning in balk, or baulk, as it is also spelled. When it first entered English in the 9th century, from Old Norse bálkr, it meant a ‘ridge of land, especially one between ploughed furrows’, from which the modern sense ‘stumbling block, obstruction’ developed. It is not until about 1300 that the meaning ‘beam of timber’ appears in English, although it was an established sense of the Old Norse word’s Germanic ancestor *balkon (source also of English balcony).

The common element of meaning in these two strands is something like ‘bar’, which may have been present in the word’s ultimate Indo- European base *bhalg- (possible source of Greek phálagx ‘log, phalanx’).
=> balcony, phalanx
bamboozle: bamboozle: [18] Bamboozle is a mystery word. It first appears in 1703, in the writings of the dramatist Colly Cibber, and seven years later it was one of a list of the latest buzzwords cited by Jonathan Swift in the Tatler (others included bully, mob, and sham). It is probably a ‘cant’ term (a sort of low-life argot), and may perhaps be of Scottish origin; there was a 17th-century Scottish verb bombaze ‘perplex’, which may be the same word as bombace, literally ‘padding, stuffing’, but metaphorically ‘inflated language’ (the variant form bombast has survived into modern English).
=> bombast