英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

chrome: chrome: [19] Compounds formed from the element chromium are brilliantly coloured green, red, and yellow. Hence, when it was first described by the French chemist Vauquelin in 1797, he named it chrome, after Greek khrōma ‘colour’. This was soon latinized to chromium, and chrome was henceforth used for chromium pigments or chromium plating. The Greek adjective derived from khrōma was khrōmatikós, which as well as referring to colour, denoted the gradations of notes in a musical scale; and it was in this musical sense that it was first borrowed into English in the 17th century.
harmony: harmony: [14] The etymological idea behind harmony is ‘fitting things together’ – that is, of combining notes in an aesthetically pleasing manner. It comes via Old French harmonie and Latin harmonia from Greek harmoníā ‘means of joining’, hence ‘agreement, concord’, a derivative of harmós ‘joint’. As a musical term in Greek it appears to have denoted ‘scale’, or more simply just ‘music’, and its original use in English was for what we would now call ‘melody’.

It was not applied to the combination of notes to form chords (a practice which originated in the 9th century) until the 16th century. The term harmonica was coined in 1762 by the American physicist and statesman Benjamin Franklin for a musical instrument consisting of a set of water-filled glasses tuned to different notes and played with the fingers. It was first applied to the mouth-organ in the 19th century.
sol-fa: sol-fa: [16] Sol-fa is a lexicalization of two of the syllables (sol and fa) used in the tonic sol-fa system for representing the notes of the musical scale. In Italian the combination was turned into a verb, solfeggiare, a derivative of which has given English solfeggio ‘use of the sol-fa system’ [18]. (Another English word based on the name of notes of the scale is gamut.)
warble: warble: [14] The etymological notion underlying the word warble is of ‘whirling around’; its application to sounds, originally in the sense ‘whirl of notes, trill’, is a secondary development. It was borrowed from Old Northern French werbler, a derivative of the noun werble ‘trill, melody’. And this in turn came from Frankish *hwirbilōn ‘whirl, trill’, which is distantly related to English whirl. (Warble ‘swelling on an animal’s back caused by insect larva’ [16] is a completely different word. It may have been borrowed from the now obsolete Swedish compound varbulde, literally ‘pustumour’, or a related Scandinavian word.)
commentator (n.): late 14c., "writer of commentaries," agent noun in Latin form from comment or commentary (Latin commentator meant "inventor, author"). Middle English also had a noun commentate, attested from early 15c. Meaning "writer of notes or expository comments" is from 1640s; sense of "one who gives commentary" (originally in sports) is from 1928.
"Well, Jem, what is a commentator?["]--"Why," was Jem's reply, "I suppose it must be the commonest of all taturs." ["Smart Sayings of Bright Children," collected by Howard Paul, 1886]
dolce far niente: 1814, from Italian, literally "sweet doing nothing." The Latin roots are dulcis "sweet" (see dulcet), facere "to make, do" (see factitious), and nec entem, literally "not a being."
This phrase, frequent enough in English literature, does not seem to occur in any Italian author of note. Howells says that he found it current among Neapolitan lazzaroni, but it is not included in any collection of Italian proverbial sayings. [Walsh]
gamut (n.): 1520s, "low G, lowest note in the medieval musical scale" (the system of notation devised by Guido d'Arezzo), a contraction of Medieval Latin gamma ut, from gamma, the Greek letter, used in medieval music notation to indicate the note below the A which began the classical scale, + ut (now do), the low note on the six-note musical scale that took names from syllables sung to those notes in a Latin sapphic hymn for St. John the Baptist's Day:
Ut queant laxis resonare fibris
Mira gestorum famuli tuorum,
Solve pollutis labiis reatum,
Sancte Iohannes.
The ut being the conjunction "that." Gamut also was used for "range of notes of a voice or instrument" (1630s), also "the whole musical scale," hence the figurative sense of "entire scale or range" of anything, first recorded 1620s. When the modern octave scale was set early 16c., si was added, changed to ti in Britain and U.S. to keep the syllables as different from each other as possible. Ut later was replaced by more sonorous do (n.). See also solmization.
harmony (n.): late 14c., "combination of tones pleasing to the ear," from Old French harmonie, armonie "harmony," also the name of a musical instrument (12c.), from Latin harmonia, from Greek harmonia "agreement, concord of sounds," also as a proper name, the personification of music, literally "means of joining," used of ship-planks, etc., also "settled government, order," related to harmos "fastenings of a door; shoulder," from PIE *ar-ti-, from *ar- "to fit together" (see arm (n.1)). Modern scientific harmony, using combinations of notes to form chords, is from 16c. Sense of "agreement of feeling, concord" is from late 14c.
lionize (v.): "to treat (someone) as a celebrity," a hybrid from lion + -ize. Used by Scott, 1809, and preserving lion in the sense of "person of note who is much sought-after" (1715), originally in reference to the lions formerly kept in the Tower of London (referred to from late 16c.), objects of general curiosity that every visitor in town was taken to see. Related: Lionized; lionizing.
agogic: "Relating to or denoting accentuation within musical phrases by slight lengthening of notes", Late 19th century: coined in German from Greek agōgos 'leading', from agein 'to lead', + -ic.