英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

gloss [gloss 词源字典]: gloss: English has two words gloss. The one meaning ‘shining surface’ [16] is of unknown origin, although no doubt it belongs ultimately to the general nexus of words beginning gl- which mean broadly ‘bright, shining’. Forms such as Icelandic glossi ‘spark’ and Swedish dialect glossa ‘glow’ suggest a Scandinavian origin. Gloss ‘explanation, definition’ [16] goes back to Greek glossa ‘tongue’, source also of English epiglottis [17].

This developed the secondary sense ‘language’ (as English tongue itself has done), and was borrowed by Latin as glōssa meaning ‘foreign word needing an explanation’, and eventually the ‘explanation’ itself. It passed into English via medieval Latin glōsa and Old French glose as gloze in the 14th century, and was reformulated as gloss on the basis of classical Latin glōssa in the 16th century. Glossary [14] comes from the Latin derivative glossārium.
=> epiglottis, glossary[gloss etymology, gloss origin, 英语词源]
pay: pay: [12] Etymologically, to pay someone is to ‘quieten them down by giving them the money they are owed’. For the word is closely related to English peace. It comes via Old French payer from Latin pācāre ‘pacify’, a derivative of pāx ‘peace’. The notion of the irate creditor needing to be appeased by payment led to the verb being used in medieval Latin for ‘pay’. The original sense ‘pacify, please’ actually survived into English (‘Well he weened with this tiding for to pay David the king’, Cursor Mundi 1300), but by the beginning of the 16th century it had virtually died out, leaving ‘give money’ in sole possession.
=> pact, peace
need (v.): Old English neodian "be necessary, be required (for some purpose); require, have need of," from the same root as need (n.). Meaning "to be under obligation (to do something)" is from late 14c. Related: Needed; needing. The adjectival phrase need-to-know is attested from 1952. Dismissive phrase who needs it?, popular from c. 1960, is a translated Yiddishism.