英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

akimbo: akimbo: [15] Akimbo was borrowed from Old Norse. Its original English spelling (which occurs only once, in the Tale of Beryn 1400) was in kenebowe, which suggests a probable Old Norse precursor *i keng boginn (never actually discovered), meaning literally ‘bent in a curve’ (Old Norse bogi is related to English bow); hence the notion of the arms sticking out at the side, elbows bent. When the word next appears in English, in the early 17th century, it has become on kenbow or a kenbo, and by the 18th century akimbo has arrived.
=> bow
bikini: bikini: [20] For Frenchmen, the sight of the first minimal two-piece swimming costumes for women produced by fashion designers in 1947 was as explosive as the test detonation of an atom bomb by the USA at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, in the western Pacific Ocean, in July 1946. Hence their naming it the ‘Bikini’, the first record of which is in the August 1947 issue of Le Monde Illustré. English acquired the word in 1948. The monokini, essentially a braless bikini, first appeared in 1964, the inspiration for its name being the accidental resemblance of the element bi- in bikini to the prefix bi- ‘two’.
bluestocking: bluestocking: [18] The term bluestocking ‘female intellectual’ derives from the gatherings held at the houses of fashionable mid-18th- century hostesses to discuss literary and related topics. It became the custom at these not to put on full formal dress, which for gentlemen included black silk stockings. One habitué in particular, Mr Benjamin Stillingfleet, used to wear greyish worsted stockings, conventionally called ‘blue’.

This lack of decorum was looked on with scorn in some quarters, and Admiral Boscawan dubbed the participants the ‘Blue Stocking Society’. Women who attended their highbrow meetings thus became known as ‘Blue Stocking Ladies’ (even though it was a man who had worn the stockings), and towards the end of the century this was abbreviated to simply bluestockings.
bodkin: bodkin: [14] A bodkin was originally a small dagger, and only in the 18th century did it develop the perhaps more familiar sense ‘long blunt needle’. Initially it was a three-syllable word, spelled boidekyn, and its origins are mysterious. Most speculation has centred on Celtic as a source. Welsh bidog ‘dagger’ being cited (the -kin is no doubt a diminutive suffix).
bumpkin: bumpkin: [16] Originally, bumpkin seems to have been a humorously disparaging epithet for a Dutch person: in the first known record of the word, in Peter Levins’s Dictionary of English and Latin words 1570, it is glossed batavus (Batavia was the name of an island at the mouth of the Rhine in ancient times, and was henceforth associated with the Netherlands). It was probably a Dutch word, boomken ‘little tree’ (from boom ‘tree’, related to German baum ‘tree’ and English beam), used with reference to Netherlanders’ supposedly dumpy stature. The phrase ‘country bumpkin’ is first recorded from the later 18th century.
=> beam
gherkin: gherkin: [17] Etymologically, a gherkin may be a ‘little unripe one’. The word was borrowed from an assumed early Dutch *gurkkijn, a diminutive form of gurk, which probably came from Lithuanian agurkas. This in turn goes back via Polish ogurek to medieval Greek angoúrion, which has been linked with classical Greek ágouros ‘youth’.
hara-kiri: hara-kiri: [19] Hara-kiri is a Japanese form of ritual suicide, now little practised, involving disembowelment. The term, which means literally ‘belly-cutting’, is a relatively colloquial one in Japanese; the more dignified expression is seppuku, literally ‘cut open the stomach’.
khaki: khaki: [19] Khaki is part of the large linguistic legacy of British rule in India. In Urdu khākī means ‘dusty’, and is a derivative of the noun khāk ‘dust’ (a word of Persian origin). It seems first to have been used with reference to the colour of military uniforms in the Guide Corps of the Indian army in the late 1840s. The term followed the colour when it was more widely adopted by the British army for camouflage purposes during the South African wars at the end of the 19th century.
kick: kick: [14] Kick is one of the mystery words of English. It first appears towards the end of the 14th century, but no one knows where it came from, and it has no relatives in the other Indo- European languages. It may have been a Scandinavian borrowing.
kidney: kidney: [14] The origins of kidney are a matter of guesswork rather than certain knowledge. Probably the most widely accepted theory is that the -ey element represents ey, the Middle English word for ‘egg’, in allusion to the shape of the kidneys. The first syllable is more problematical, but one possible source is Old English cwith ‘womb’ or the related Old Norse kvithr ‘belly, womb’, in which case kidney would mean etymologically ‘belly-egg’.
=> egg
kill: kill: [13] The Old English verbs for ‘kill’ were slēan, source of modern English slay, and cwellan, which has become modern English quell. The latter came from a prehistoric Germanic *kwaljan, which it has been suggested may have had a variant *kuljan that could have become Old English *cyllan. If such a verb did exist, it would be a plausible ancestor for modern English kill.

When this first appeared in early Middle English it was used for ‘hit’, but the meanings ‘hit’ and ‘kill’ often coexist in the same word (slay once meant ‘hit’ as well as ‘kill’, as is shown by the related sledgehammer); the sense ‘deprive of life’ emerged in the 14th century.
kiln: kiln: [OE] Etymologically a kiln is for ‘cooking’, not for burning or drying. Its distant ancestor was Latin coquīna ‘kitchen’, a derivative of the verb coquere ‘cook’. This produced an unexplained variant culīna (source of English culinary [17]), which was used not only for ‘kitchen’, but also for ‘cooking-stove’. Old English adopted it as cylene, which has become modern English kiln.
=> cook, culinary, kitchen
kilo: kilo: [19] Khílioi was Greek for a ‘thousand’. It was adopted in French in the 1790s as the prefix for ‘thousand’ in expressions of quantity under the new metric system, and various compound forms (kilogram, kilolitre, kilometre, etc) began to find their way into English from the first decade of the 19th century onwards. The first recorded instance of kilo being used in English for kilogram dates from 1870.
kin: kin: [OE] Kin is the central English member of the Germanic branch of a vast family of words that trace their ancestry back to the prehistoric Indo- European base *gen-, *gon-, *gn-, denoting ‘produce’ (the Latin branch has given English gender, general, generate, genital, nature, etc, the Greek branch gene, genetic, gonorrhoea, etc).

Amongst the Germanic descendants of this base was *kun-, from which was derived the noun *kunjam, source of Swedish kön ‘sex’ and English kin ‘family’. Kindred [12] was formed from kin in early Middle English by adding the suffix -red ‘condition’ (as in hatred). Also closely related are kind and king.
=> gender, gene, general, generate, genital, kind, kindred, king, nature
kind: kind: [OE] Kind the noun and kind the adjective are ultimately the same word, but they split apart in pre-historic times. Their common source was Germanic *kunjam, the ancestor of English kin. From it, using the collective prefix *ga- and the abstract suffix *-diz, was derived the noun *gakundiz, which passed into Old English as gecynde ‘birth, origin, nature, race’.

The prefix ge- disappeared in the early Middle English period. Germanic *gakundiz formed the basis of an adjective, *gakundjaz, which in Old English converged with its source to produce gecynde. It meant ‘natural, innate’, but gradually progressed via ‘of noble birth’ and ‘well-disposed by nature’ to (in the 14th century) ‘benign, compassionate’ (a semantic development remarkably similar to that of the distantly related gentle).
=> kin
kindred: kindred: see kin
king: king: [OE] The prehistoric Germanic ancestor of king (as of German könig, Dutch koning, Swedish konung, and Danish konge) was *kuninggaz. This seems to have been a derivative of *kunjam ‘race, people’ (source of English kin). If it was, king means etymologically ‘descendant of the race, offspring of the people’.
=> kin
kipper: kipper: [OE] There is a single Old English instance, in a text of around the year 1000, of a fish called cypera. The context suggests that this was a ‘salmon’, which would tie in with the later use of the word kipper, from the 16th to the 20th centuries, for ‘male salmon during the spawning season’. What is not clear, however, despite the obvious semantic link ‘fish’, is whether this is the same word as kipper ‘cured herring or other fish’, first recorded in the 14th century.

Nor is it altogether clear where the term originally came from, although it is usually held to be a derivative of Old English copor ‘copper’, in allusion to the colour of the fish.
kiss: kiss: [OE] Kiss is a widespread Germanic word, represented also in German kūssen, Dutch kussen, Swedish kyssa, and Danish kysse. It probably goes back to some prehistoric syllable imitative of the sound or action of kissing, such as *ku or *kus, which would also lie behind Greek kunein ‘kiss’, Sanskrit cumb- ‘kiss’, and Hittite kuwass- ‘kiss’. There is not sufficient linguistic evidence, however, to show whether the Indo-Europeans expressed affection by kissing each other.
kitchen: kitchen: [OE] The Latin word for ‘kitchen’ was coquīna, a derivative of the verb coquere ‘cook’ (ultimate source of English cook, culinary, kiln, precocious, etc). It had a colloquial variant, *cocīna, which spread far and wide throughout the Roman empire. In French it became cuisine (borrowed by English in the 18th century), while prehistoric West Germanic took it over as *kocina. This has subsequently become German küche, Dutch keuken, and English kitchen – etymologically, a room where one ‘cooks’.
=> apricot, cook, culinary, kiln, precocious
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.
manikin: manikin: see man
mawkish: mawkish: [17] The underlying meaning of mawkish is ‘maggotish’. It was derived from a now obsolete word mawk, which meant literally ‘maggot’ but was used figuratively (like maggot itself) for a ‘whim’ or ‘fastidious fancy’. Hence mawkish originally meant ‘nauseated, as if repelled by something one is too fastidious to eat’. In the 18th century the notion of ‘sickness’ or ‘sickliness’ produced the present-day sense ‘over-sentimental’. Mawk itself went back to a Middle English mathek ‘maggot’ (possible source of maggot [14]), which was borrowed from Old Norse mathkr.
=> maggot
napkin: napkin: [15] Latin mappa meant ‘cloth’ (it is the source of English map). As it passed into Old French its m became transformed into an n, producing nappe. This was borrowed into English as the long-defunct nape ‘cloth’, which, with the addition of the diminutive suffix -kin, has bequeathed napkin to modern English. The abbreviation nappy dates from the early 20th century. From derivatives of Old French nappe English also gets apron and napery [14].
=> apron, map
puckish: puckish: [19] In English folklore from the late Middle Ages onward, Puck was a mischievous but essentially harmless sprite, up to all sorts of tricks (hence the coining of puckish for ‘mischievous’). But his Anglo-Saxon ancestor Pūca was a far less pleasant proposition – for this was the Devil himself. He gradually dwindled over the centuries, but a hint of his former power remained in his placatory alternative name Robin Goodfellow. It is not known whether pūca is of Germanic or Celtic origin.
pumpkin: pumpkin: [17] Much as they look as though they had been blown up with a pump, pumpkins have no etymological connection with pumps. Greek pépōn denoted a variety of melon that was not eaten until it was fully ripe (the word was a noun use of the adjective pépōn ‘ripe’). Latin took it over as pepō, and passed it on to Old French as *pepon. Through a series of vicissitudes this evolved via popon to early modern French pompon. This was borrowed into English in the 16th century, and soon altered to pompion; and in the 17th century the native diminutive suffix -kin was grafted on to it to produce pumpkin.
ski: ski: [19] A ski is etymologically a piece of wood ‘split’ from a tree trunk. The word was borrowed from Norwegian ski, a descendant of Old Norse skíth ‘piece of split wood, ski’. This in turn came from the prehistoric Germanic base *skīth-, *skaith- ‘divide, split’, source also of English sheath, shed, etc. The Norwegian word is pronounced /she/, and that is the way in which it was once often said (and indeed sometimes spelled) in English. (Old Norse skíth may also lie behind English skid [17], which originally meant ‘block of wood used as a support’, hence ‘wooden chock for stopping a wheel’.

The modern sense only emerged in the 19th century, from the notion of a wheel slipping when it is prevented from revolving.)
=> sheath, shed, skid
skiff: skiff: see ship
skill: skill: [12] Skill etymologically denotes not a physical accomplishment, but the mental capacity to make ‘distinctions’. It was borrowed from Old Norse skil ‘distinction, discernment, knowledge’, whose relatives include Dutch geschil ‘difference’, and which goes back ultimately to the prehistoric Germanic base *skel- ‘divide, separate’ (source also of English scale, shell, shield, etc). The modern English sense emerged in the 13th century.
=> scale, shell, shield
skillet: skillet: [15] Skillet may come ultimately from the same source as English scuttle ‘large container’ – Latin scutella, a diminutive form of scutra ‘dish, platter’. This was altered in the postclassical period to *scūtella, which passed into Old French as escuele (source of Middle English skele ‘dish’, recorded only once). A further diminutive form escuelete ‘small platter’ emerged, which is a plausible source of English skillet. (An alternative possibility is that it was derived from the now virtually obsolete English skeel ‘bucket’ [14], which was borrowed from a Scandinavian source related to Old Norse skjóla ‘bucket’.)
=> scuttle
skim: skim: see scum
skin: skin: [11] The ancestral English word for ‘skin’ is hide. Skin was borrowed at the end of the Old English period from Old Norse skinn (source of Swedish skin and Danish skind). The etymological notion underlying the word is of ‘peeling’ or ‘slicing’ off an outer layer (it goes back ultimately to a prehistoric Indo-European base *sken- ‘cut off’, which was an extension of *sek- ‘cut’, source of English section, sector, sickle, etc), and so it presumably referred originally to the pelts removed from hunted animals.
=> section, segment, sickle
skipper: skipper: see ship
skirmish: skirmish: [14] English adapted skirmish from eskermiss-, the present stem of Old French eskermir ‘fight with a sword’. This in turn went back to a Frankish *skirmjan, a relative of modern German schirmen. A variant of skirmish arose with the i and r sounds reversed, giving scrimish, which is the source of modern English scrimmage [15] and also of scrummage [19] and its abbreviation scrum [19].
=> scrimmage, scrummage
skirt: skirt: [13] Essentially skirt is the same word as shirt. It was borrowed from Old Norse skyrta ‘shirt’, which came from the same prehistoric Germanic source as English shirt, and likewise meant etymologically ‘short garment’. It is not clear why English came to use the word for ‘woman’s garment hanging from the waist’, but a link may be provided by modern Icelandic skyrta, which denotes a sort of long shirt with full tails that come down well below the waist. Swedish skört and Danish skørt ‘skirt’ were borrowed from the related Middle Low German schorte ‘apron’.
=> shear, shirt, short
skive: skive: see eschew
stocking: stocking: [16] Stocking is a derivative of stock, in the now defunct sense ‘stocking’. This appears to have arisen in the 15th century from the blackly humorous comparison of the stocks in which one’s legs are restrained as a punishment with ‘leggings, hose’. Until comparatively recently stocking was a unisex term (as it still is in the expression in one’s stockinged feet); the restriction to ‘women’s hose’ is a 20th-century development.
=> stock
viking: viking: [19] There are two competing theories as to the origin of the word viking. If its ancestry is genuinely Scandinavian (and Old Norse víkingr is first recorded in the 10th century), then it was presumably based on Old Norse vík ‘inlet’, and it would denote etymologically ‘person who lives by the fjords’ – a logical enough notion. However, earlier traces of the word have been found in Old English and Old Frisian, from around the 8th century, which suggests the alternative theory that it may have been coined from Old English wīc ‘camp’ (ancestor of the -wick, -wich of English place-names).

On this view, the term originated as a word used by the Anglo-Saxons for the Norse raiders, who made temporary camps while they attacked and plundered the local populace. It was introduced into modern English at the start of the 19th century as an antiquarian’s or historian’s term.
Abenaki: see Abnaki.
Abnaki: also Abenaki, Algonquian people and language of northern New England and eastern Canada, 1721, from French abenaqui, from the people's name, East Abenaki wapanahki, literally "person of the dawn-land," hence "easterners."
aikido (n.): Japanese art of self-defense, 1936, literally "way of adapting the spirit," from Japanese ai "together" (from au "to harmonize") + ki "spirit" + do "way, art," from Chinese tao "way."
akimbo: c. 1400, in kenebowe, of unknown origin, perhaps from Middle English phrase in keen bow "at a sharp angle," or from a Scandinavian word akin to Icelandic kengboginn "bow-bent," but this seems not to have been used in this exact sense. Many languages use a teapot metaphor for this, such as French faire le pot a deux anses "to play the pot with two handles."
akin (adj.): 1550s, from phrase of kin; see kin.
Akita: type of dog, named for a prefecture in northern Japan.
backing (n.): 1590s, "support;" 1640s, "retreat;" verbal noun from back (v.). Physical sense of "anything forming a backing to something else" is from 1793. Meaning "musical accompaniment" is recorded from 1940.
banking (n.): "business of a banker," 1735, verbal noun from bank (v).
basking (adj.): 1742, present participle adjective from bask (v.). Basking shark is recorded from 1769.
bearskin (n.): from bear (n.) + skin (n.).
bikini (n.): "low-waisted two-piece women's bathing suit," 1948, from French coinage, 1947, named for U.S. A-bomb test of June 1946 on Bikini, Marshall Islands atoll, locally Pikinni and said to derive from pik "surface" and ni "coconut," but this is uncertain. Various explanations for the swimsuit name have been suggested, none convincingly, the best being an analogy of the explosive force of the bomb and the impact of the bathing suit style on men's libidos (compare c. 1900 British slang assassin "an ornamental bow worn on the female breast," so called because it was very "killing").
Bikini, ce mot cinglant comme l'explosion même ... correspondant au niveau du vêtement de plage à on anéantissement de la surface vêtue; à une minimisation extrême de la pudeur. [Le Monde, 1947]
As a style of scanty briefs, from 1960. Variant trikini (1967), with separate bra cups held on by Velcro, falsely presumes a compound in bi-.
blackie (n.): also blacky, "a black person," 1815, from black (adj.) + -y (3).