英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

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.
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.
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.
bequeath: bequeath: [OE] Etymologically, what you bequeath is what you ‘say’ you will leave someone in your will. The word comes from Old English becwethan, a derivative of cwethan ‘say’, whose past tense cwæth gives us quoth (it is no relation to quote, by the way). The original sense ‘say, utter’ died out in the 13th century, leaving the legal sense of ‘transferring by will’ (first recorded in 1066).

The noun derivative of Old English cwethan in compounds was -cwiss. Hence we can assume there was an Old English noun *becwiss, although none is recorded. The first we hear of it is at the beginning of the 14th century, when it had unaccountably had a t added to it, producing what we now know as bequest.
=> bequest, quoth
bread: bread: [OE] The general Germanic word for ‘bread’ in prehistoric times was what we now know as loaf; bread probably originally meant simply ‘(piece of) food’, but as bread was among the commonest foods, the word bread gradually became more specialized, passing via ‘piece of bread’, ‘broken bread’, to simply ‘bread’. Old English brēad and related Germanic forms such as German brot and Swedish bröd point to a hypothetical Germanic precursor *brautham, but the word’s ultimate origins are unknown. Some etymologists have derived it from Indo- European *bhreu-, source of English brew.
flu: flu: [19] Flu is short for influenza [18]. The first record of its use is in a letter of 1839 by the poet Robert Southey (who spelled it, as was commonly the practice in the 19th century, flue): ‘I have had a pretty fair share of the Flue’. Influenza means literally ‘influence’ in Italian, and was used metaphorically for the ‘outbreak of a particular disease’ (hence an influenza di febbre scarlattina was an ‘outbreak of scarlet fever’, a ‘scarlet fever epidemic’).

The severe epidemic of the disease we now know as flu, which struck Italy in 1743 and spread from there throughout Europe, was called an influenza di catarro ‘catarrh epidemic’, or simply an influenza – and hence influenza became the English word for the disease.
=> influence, influenza
golliwog: golliwog: [19] It was Florence Upton (1873– 1922), an American-born illustrator and writer of children’s books, who dreamed up the blackfaced male doll we now know as the golliwog. It first appeared in the story The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls – and a ‘Golliwog’ 1895, with verses by Florence’s mother Bertha. The inspiration for the word may have been golly [19], a euphemism for God, and polliwog, an American term for a ‘tadpole’ (which came from Middle English polwygle, a compound of pol ‘head’ and the verb wiglen ‘wiggle’). The offensive wog [20] for ‘black person’ is probably short for golliwog.
morning: morning: [13] The Old English word for ‘morning’ was morgen. It came from a prehistoric Germanic *murganaz (source also of German, Dutch, and Danish morgen ‘morning’), and links have been suggested with forms such as Old Church Slavonic mruknati ‘darken’ and Lithuanian mirgeti ‘twinkle’, which may point to an underlying etymological notion of the ‘glimmer of morning twilight’.

By the Middle English period the word morgen had evolved to what we now know as morn, and morning was derived from it on the analogy of evening. A parallel development of morgen was to Middle English morwe, from which we get modern English morrow (and hence tomorrow).
=> morn, tomorrow
potato: potato: [16] Potato was originally the English name for the ‘sweet potato’ (when Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor 1598 cried ‘Let the sky rain potatoes!’ it was to the sweet potato, and its supposed aphrodisiac properties, that he was referring). It did not begin to be used for the vegetable we now know as the potato until the very end of the 16th century. The word comes via Spanish patata from batata, the name for the ‘sweet potato’ in the Taino language of Haiti and other Caribbean islands.
rhododendron: rhododendron: [17] A rhododendron is etymologically a ‘rose-tree’. The term comes from Greek rhodódendron, a compound formed from rhódon ‘rose’ (apparently a relative of English rose) and déndron ‘tree’ (source of English dendrite [18] and dendrochronology [20]). This denoted the ‘oleander’, an application it retained through Latin rhododendron into English. The first record of its use for the plant we now know as the rhododendron dates from the mid 17th century.
=> rose
turkey: turkey: [16] The term turkey was originally applied to the ‘guinea-fowl’, apparently because the bird was imported into Europe from Africa by the Portuguese through Turkish territory. When the American bird we now know as the turkey was introduced to the British in the mid 16th century, it seems to have reminded them of the guinea fowl, for they transferred the guinea fowl’s name turkey to it.
asunder (adv.): mid-12c., contraction of Old English on sundran (see sunder). Middle English used to know asunder for "distinguish, tell apart."
can (v.1): Old English 1st & 3rd person singular present indicative of cunnan "know, have power to, be able," (also "to have carnal knowledge"), from Proto-Germanic *kunnan "to be mentally able, to have learned" (cognates: Old Norse kenna "to know, make known," Old Frisian kanna "to recognize, admit," German kennen "to know," Gothic kannjan "to make known"), from PIE root *gno- (see know).

Absorbing the third sense of "to know," that of "to know how to do something" (in addition to "to know as a fact" and "to be acquainted with" something or someone). An Old English preterite-present verb, its original past participle, couth, survived only in its negation (see uncouth), but see also could. The present participle has spun off as cunning.
rangy (adj.): "having a long, slender form" (as an animal suited to ranging), 1845, from range (v.) + -y (2). Also "adapted for ranging" (1868). Of landscapes, "hilly," 1862, Australian English. Related: Ranginess.
As a rule, we hold that the Jersey should be "growthy," deep-flanked, and loose-jointed, and should have, generally, the characteristics which farmers know as "rangy." ["American Agriculturalist," November 1876]