英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

abroad [abroad 词源字典]: abroad: [13] It was only in the 15th century that abroad came to mean ‘in foreign parts’. Earlier, it had been used for ‘out of doors’, a sense still current today, if with a rather archaic air; but originally it meant ‘widely’ or ‘about’ (as in ‘noise something abroad’). It was formed quite simply from a ‘on’ and the adjective broad, although it was probably modelled on the much earlier (Old English) phrase on brede, in which brede was a noun, meaning ‘breadth’.
=> broad[abroad etymology, abroad origin, 英语词源]
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
agoraphobia: agoraphobia: [19] Agoraphobia – fear of open spaces or, more generally, of simply being out of doors – is first referred to in an 1873 issue of the Journal of Mental Science; this attributes the term to Dr C Westphal, and gives his definition of it as ‘the fear of squares or open places’. This would be literally true, since the first element in the word represents Greek agorá ‘open space, typically a market place, used for public assemblies’ (the most celebrated in the ancient world was the Agora in Athens, rivalled only by the Forum in Rome).

The word agorá came from ageirein ‘assemble’, which is related to Latin grex ‘flock’, the source of English gregarious. Agoraphobia was not the first of the -phobias. That honour goes to hydrophobia in the mid 16th century. But that was an isolated example, and the surge of compounds based on Greek phóbos ‘fear’ really starts in the 19th century.

At first it was used for symptoms of physical illness (photophobia ‘abnormal sensitivity to light’ 1799), for aversions to other nationalities (Gallophobia 1803; the synonymous Francophobia does not appear until 1887), and for facetious formations (dustophobia, Robert Southey, 1824), and the range of specialized psychological terms familiar today does not begin to appear until the last quarter of the century (CLAUSTROPHOBIA 1879, acrophobia ‘fear of heights’ from Greek akros ‘topmost’ – see ACROBAT – 1892).
=> aggregate, allegory, gregarious, segregate
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
aristocracy: aristocracy: [16] Greek áristos meant ‘best’; hence aristocracy signifies, etymologically, ‘rule by the best’ (the suffix -cracy derives ultimately from Greek krátos ‘strength, power’, a relative of English hard). The term aristokratíā was used by Aristotle and Plato in their political writings, denoting ‘government of a state by those best fitted for the task’, and English writers perpetuated the usage when the word was borrowed from French aristocratie: Thomas Hobbes, for instance, wrote ‘Aristocracy is that, wherein the highest magistrate is chosen out of those that have had the best education’, Art of Rhetoric 1679.

But from the first the term was also used in English for ‘rule by a privileged class’, and by the mid 17th century this had begun to pass into ‘the privileged class’ itself, ‘the nobility’. The derived aristocrat appeared at the end of the 18th century; it was a direct borrowing of French aristocrate, a coinage inspired by the French Revolution.
=> hard
blight: blight: [17] Blight appeared out of the blue in the early 17th century in agricultural and horticultural texts, and its origins are far from clear. It has, however, been speculated that it may be connected with the Old English words blǣce and blǣcthu, both terms for some sort of itchy skin condition such as scabies. These in turn are probably related to Old English blǣcan ‘bleach’, the link being the flaky whiteness of the infected skin.

In Middle English, blǣcthu would have become *bleht, which could plausibly have been the source of blight. A related piece in the jigsaw is blichening ‘blight or rust in corn’, found once in Middle English, which may have come ultimately from Old Norse blikna ‘become pale’.
=> bleach
brim: brim: [13] Brim appears out of the blue at the beginning of the 13th century, meaning ‘edge, border’, with no apparent ancestor in Old English. It is usually connected with Middle High German brem and Old Norse barmr, both ‘edge’, which would point to a prehistoric Germanic source *berm- or *barm-. It has been conjectured that this could derive from the stem *ber- (source of English bear ‘carry’), and that the etymological meaning of brim is thus ‘raised border’. The modern sense ‘rim of a hat’ is first recorded in Shakespeare.
=> bear
bulwark: bulwark: [15] Bulwark comes from Middle High German bolwerc ‘fortification’, a compound formed from bole ‘plank’ (the same word as English bole ‘tree trunk’) and werc, equivalent to English work. It thus originally meant ‘rampart constructed out of planks or tree trunks’. The word was shared by other Germanic languages, including Swedish bolverk, and French borrowed it as boullewerc, which has since become boulevard.
=> bole, boulevard, work
cheer: cheer: [13] Originally, cheer meant ‘face’. It came via Anglo-Norman chere ‘face’ and late Latin cara ‘face’ from Greek kárā ‘head’. As often happens, ‘face’ was taken as a metaphor of the mental condition causing the expression on it, so ‘be of good cheer’ came to mean ‘be in a good mood’; and gradually cheer grew to be used on its own for ‘happy frame of mind, cheerfulness’. It first appears in the sense ‘shout of applause or encouragement’ at the start of the 18th century, when Daniel Defoe identifies it as a nautical usage.
chintz: chintz: [17] Chintz is originally an Indian word. English borrowed it from Hindi chīnt, and at first used it unaltered: Samuel Pepys, for instance, writing in his diary for 5 September 1663, notes ‘Bought my wife a chint, that is, a painted Indian calico, for to line her new study’. However, since in commercial use the plural form, chints, was so much commoner than the singular, it eventually came to be regarded as a singular itself, and the s-less form dropped out of the language.

In the 18th century, for some unexplained reason (perhaps on the analogy of such words as quartz) chints began to be spelled chintz. The Hindi word itself was originally an adjective, which came from Sanskrit chitra ‘many-coloured, bright’ (ultimate source of English chit ‘small piece of paper containing some sort of official notification’ [18]).
=> chit
clue: clue: [15] Clue is a variant spelling of the now obsolete clew ‘ball of thread’, and its current application to ‘that which helps to solve a problem’, which originated in the early 17th century, is based on the notion of using (like Theseus in the Minotaur’s labyrinth) a ball of thread to show one the way out of an intricate maze one has entered. Clew itself goes back to Old English cliwan or cleowan, which may be related to claw.
=> claw
countenance: countenance: [13] A person’s countenance has nothing to do with computation. Etymologically, it is how they ‘contain’ themselves, or conduct themselves, and the word itself is a parallel construction with continence. It was borrowed from Old French contenance (a derivative of the verb contenir ‘contain’), which meant ‘behaviour’, ‘demeanour’, or ‘calmness’ as well as ‘contents’, and originally had this somewhat abstract sense in English.

It was not until the 14th century that the meaning began to develop through ‘facial expression’ to the now familiar ‘face’ (traces of the original sense survive in such expressions as ‘put someone out of countenance’, meaning to make them lose their cool).
=> contain, continence
dandruff: dandruff: [16] The word dandruff (or dandriff, as it commonly used to be) first appears, out of the blue, in the mid 16th century, with no known relatives. Its first element, dand-, remains utterly obscure, but the second part may have been borrowed from Old Norse hrufa or Middle Low German rōve, both meaning ‘scab’ (Middle English had a word roufe ‘scab, scurf’, and modern Dutch has roof).
decimate: decimate: [17] Decimate is a cause célèbre amongst those who apparently believe that words should never change their meanings. The original general signification of its Latin source, the verb decimāre, was the removal or destruction of one tenth (it was derived from Latin decem ‘ten’), and it may perhaps strike the 20th century as odd to have a particular word for such an apparently abstruse operation.

It does, however, arise out of two very specific procedures in the ancient world: the exaction of a tax of one tenth (for which indeed English has the ultimately related word tithe), and the practice in the Roman army of punishing a body of soldiers guilty of some crime such as mutiny by choosing one in ten of them by lot to be put to death. Modern English does not perhaps have much use for a verb with such specialized senses, but the general notion of impassive and indiscriminate slaughter implied in the Roman military use led, apparently as early as the mid- 17th century, to the modern sense ‘kill or destroy most of’.
=> decimal, ten
denizen: denizen: [15] Etymologically, denizen means ‘someone who is inside’, and it is related to French dans ‘in’. It comes from Anglo-Norman deinzein, a derivative of Old French deinz ‘inside’. This had grown out of the Latin phrase dē intus, literally ‘from inside’. Hence denizen’s original meaning of someone who lives ‘in’ a country, as opposed to a foreigner. In the 16th and 17th centuries the verb denize existed, coined by back-formation from denizen; it meant roughly the same as modern English naturalize.
devious: devious: [16] Devious and its close relative deviate [17] are both based on the notion of going ‘out of the way’. They come respectively from Latin dēvius and dēviāre, compound adjective and verb formed from the prefix dē- ‘from’ and via ‘way’.
=> deviate, via
dive: dive: [OE] Old English dyfan ‘dive’ came from a prehistoric Germanic *dūbjan. This was a derivative of the base *d(e)ub-, a variant of which, *d(e)up-, was the source of English deep and dip. The colloquial use of the noun for a disreputable bar, nightclub, etc, which comes from 1880s America, is probably a reference to someone ‘diving’ out of sight into such an establishment, which was often in a basement.
=> deep, dip
diverse: diverse: [13] Diverse is one of a small family of English words, including also divers, divert, and divorce, which come ultimately from Latin dīvertere. This was a compound verb formed from the prefix dis- ‘aside’ and vertere ‘turn’ (source of English verse, version, vertebra, etc and related to worth), and hence meant literally ‘turn aside, turn out of the way’.

It developed in various metaphorical directions, however. One was ‘turn one’s husband or wife out of the way’ which, via the variant dīvortere, gave English divorce [14]. The central sense of the verb passed more or less unchanged into English, via French divertir, as divert [15], but its past participle diversus illustrates a further metaphorical strand, in which ‘turned aside’ has become ‘separate, different’.

English acquired this via Old French in the 13th century in two distinct forms: masculine divers and feminine diverse. The present-day semantic distinction between the former (‘various, several’) and the latter (‘different’) had established itself by around 1700.
=> divert, divorce, verse, version, worth
dodo: dodo: [17] When Portuguese explorers first encountered the unfortunate dodo on the island of Mauritius, it struck them as a clumsy and foolish bird, so they applied to it the Portuguese word doudo ‘simpleton’. The name has stuck in English (although in the 17th century it had some competition from the French and Dutch term dronte). The first record of the simile ‘dead as a dodo’ comes from 1904, over 200 years after the extinction of the species, although the word had been used since the late 19th century as a metaphor for someone or something hopelessly out of date: ‘He belongs to the Dodo race of real unmitigated toryism’, Lisle Carr, Judith Gwynne 1874.
doff: doff: [14] Doff, don [14], and the now obsolete dout [16] and dup [16], contractions respectively of ‘do off, on, out, and up’, preserve the ancient meaning of do, ‘put, place’. They were standard Middle English forms, but gradually fell out of the mainstream language into dialect (from which dout and dup never emerged). Sir Walter Scott, however, included doff and don, in their specific sense ‘remove or put on clothing’, in his long list of medieval lexical revivals (‘My experience has been in donning steel gauntlets on mailed knights’, Fair Maid of Perth 1828), and they have survived as archaisms ever since.
ecstasy: ecstasy: [14] Etymologically, someone who is ecstatic is out of his or her mind. The word comes, via Old French extasie and late Latin extasis, from Greek ékstasis, a derivative of the verb existánai ‘displace, drive out of one’s mind’. This was a compound formed from the prefix ek- ‘out’ and histánai ‘place’ (a distant relative of English stand).

The underlying notion of being ‘beside oneself, in the grip of extreme passion’ survives in modern English in relation to mystic experiences or trances, and also, albeit archaically, in such phrases as ‘an ecstasy of rage’, and the specific sense ‘delight’ developed only comparatively recently, apparently in the 17th century.
=> stand
effrontery: effrontery: [18] The notion of ‘audacity’ or ‘impudence’ is often expressed in terms of ‘exposing or pushing forward the face’: a ‘barefaced lie’ or ‘putting on a bold front’, for instance. And effrontery is no exception. It comes ultimately from late Latin effrōns ‘barefaced, shameless’, a compound adjective formed from the prefix ex- ‘out of’ and frōns ‘forehead’ (source of English front).

This seems subsequently to have been reformulated along the lines of its original components, giving Vulgar Latin *exfrontātus, source of Old French esfronte. This in turn developed to French effronté, whose derived noun effronterie was acquired by English as effrontery.
=> front
eliminate: eliminate: [16] To eliminate somebody is literally to ‘kick them out of doors’. The word comes from the past participle of Latin ēlīnāre, a compound verb formed from the prefix ex- ‘out’ and līmen ‘threshhold’ (source also of English subliminal and probably sublime). At first it was used in English with its original Latin sense (‘the secounde sorte thearfore, that eliminate Poets out of their citie gates’, Giles Fletcher, Christ’s Victorie 1610), and it was not until the early 18th century that the more general modern notion of ‘exclusion’ began to develop.
=> sublime, subliminal
emancipate: emancipate: [17] Despite modern associations with women’s liberation, emancipate has no etymological connection with man. It comes from Latin ēmancipāre, which meant originally ‘free from parental power’. This was a compound verb formed from the prefix ex- ‘out of’ and mancipium ‘ownership’, and referred in Roman law to the freeing of a son from the legal authority of the male head of the family, thus making him responsible for himself in law. Mancipium (source of the archaic English noun manciple ‘steward, purveyor’ [13]) was ultimately a compound noun formed from manus ‘hand’ (as in English manual) and capere ‘take’ (as in English captive and capture).

The association of the verb with the ‘freeing of slaves’, the basis of the present English meanings, is a modern development.
=> captive, capture, manciple, manual
enormous: enormous: [16] Etymologically, enormous is a parallel formation to abnormal and extraordinary. It comes from Latin ēnormis, a compound adjective formed from the prefix ex- ‘out of’ and norma ‘pattern, rule’ – hence literally ‘out of the usual pattern’. It originally had a range of meanings in English, including ‘abnormal, unusual’ (‘entered the choir in a military habit, and other enormous disguises’, Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry 1774) and ‘outrageous’.

By the beginning of the 19th century these had mostly died out, leaving the field clear for modern English ‘huge’, although the notion of ‘outrageousness’ remains in the noun derivative enormity [15].
=> abnormal, normal
erudite: erudite: [15] To be erudite is literally to be the opposite of ‘rude’. Latin rudis (source of English rude) meant ‘rough, unpolished’, and so ērudīre, a compound verb formed with the prefix ex- ‘out of, from’, signified ‘take the roughness out of’, hence ‘polish, teach’. Its past participle formed the basis of an adjective, ērudītus ‘(well) taught’, which as borrowed into English has acquired the greater gravitas of ‘learned’.
=> rude
eureka: eureka: [16] The Greek mathematician Archimedes (c. 287–212 BC) was commissioned by King Hiero II of Syracuse to find out whether the goldsmith who had made a new crown for him had fraudulently mixed some silver in with the gold. In order to do so, Archimedes needed to ascertain the metal’s specific gravity. But how to do this? According to Plutarch, he decided to take a bath to ponder the problem.

He filled the bath too full, and some of the water overflowed – and it suddenly occurred to Archimedes that a pure-gold crown would displace more water if immersed than one made from an alloy. Elated at this piece of lateral thinking, Archimedes is said to have leapt out of the bath shouting heúrēka! ‘I have found!’, the perfect indicative of Greek heurískein ‘find’ (source of English heuristic [19]).

The earliest occurrence of the word in an English text as an exclamation of delight at discovery is in John Dee’s Preface, but there it appears in Greek characters; the first English author to fully naturalize it was probably Henry Fielding in Joseph Andrews 1742; ‘Adams returned overjoyed cring out “Eureka!”’ (The goldsmith, incidentally, had adulterated the gold.)
=> heuristic
exaggerate: exaggerate: [16] Something that is exaggerated is literally ‘piled up’ out of all due proportion; indeed that is what it originally meant in English: ‘With their flipping and flapping up and down in the dirt they exaggerate a mountain of mire’, Philip Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses 1583. It was not really until the 17th century that the current sense ‘overemphasize’ came to the fore, although it was already present in the word’s Latin original. This was exaggerāre, a compound formed from the intensive prefix exand aggerāre ‘pile up’ (a derivative of agger ‘heap’).
exercise: exercise: [14] The notion underlying exercise is of ‘removal of restraint’. It comes ultimately from Latin exercēre, a compound verb formed from the prefix ex- ‘out of, from’ and arcēre ‘restrain, enclose’ (source of English arcane and related to English ark). It has been speculated that this originally denoted the driving of draught animals out into the fields to plough, but however that may be, it soon developed the general senses ‘set to work, keep at work’ and ‘drill, practise’ which form the semantic basis of English exercise.
=> arcane, ark
exploit: exploit: [14] Latin explicāre (source of English explicate and explicit) meant ‘unfold’. A Vulgar Latin descendant of its past participle was *explictum ‘something unfolded’, which passed into Old French as exploit or esplait. In the process, the original sense of ‘unfolding’ had developed through ‘bringing out, development’ and ‘advantage, success’ to ‘achievement’.

In the case of the English noun, it is the latter meaning which has survived, and in fact originally the verb too denoted ‘achieve, accomplish’. This seems to have died out in the 18th century, however, and when the verb reappears in the 19th century it is closer to the earlier ‘develop’ in meaning, particularly as applied to ‘getting the most out of’ natural resources. The modern derogatory sense ‘use for one’s own selfish ends’ emerged from this.
=> explicit, fold, ply
extempore: extempore: [16] An extempore speech is one that is given literally ‘out of time’ – that is, ‘on the spur of the moment’. That was the meaning of the Latin phrase extempore (ex ‘out of’ and tempore, the ablative case of tempus ‘time’), which was the source of the Latin adjectives extemporālis and extemporāneus. Both of these were acquired by English, as extemporal [16] and extemporaneous [17], but only the latter has survived. Ex tempore itself was first lexicalized in English as an adverb, and was not used as an adjective until the 17th century.
extravagant: extravagant: [14] An extravagant person is literally one who ‘wanders out of’ the proper course. The word comes from the present participle of medieval Latin extrāvagārī, a compound formed from the prefix extrā- ‘outside’ and vagārī ‘wander’ (source of English vagabond, vagary, and vagrant), which seems originally to have been used adjectivally with reference to certain uncodified or ‘stray’ papal decrees. This was the word’s original application in English, and the present-day meanings ‘wildly excessive’ and ‘spending too lavishly’ did not really establish themselves before the early 18th century.
=> vagabond, vagary, vagrant
foreign: foreign: [13] Etymologically, foreign means ‘out of doors’. It comes via Old French forein from Vulgar Latin *forānus, a derivative of Latin forās ‘out of doors, abroad’. This originated as the accusative plural of *fora, an unrecorded variant form of forēs ‘door’ (to which English door is related). The literal sense ‘outdoor’ survived into Middle English (the chambre forene mentioned by Robert of Gloucester in his Chronicle 1297, for instance, was an ‘outside loo’), but by the early 15th century the metaphorical ‘of other countries, abroad’ had more or less elbowed it aside.
=> door, forest, forfeit
fossil: fossil: [17] Etymologically, a fossil is something ‘dug’ out of the ground. It comes via French fossile from Latin fossilis ‘dug up’, a derivative of the verb fodere ‘dig’. The English adjective originally meant virtually the same as Latin fossilis (‘Seven unmixt fossil Metals are forecited’, Robert Vilvain, Epitome of Essais 1654), and this sense survives in the present-day expression fossil fuel, but the word’s main modern connotation ‘excavated relic of a former life-form’ had begun to emerge by the mid 17th century.
gargoyle: gargoyle: [15] The ancient root *garg-, *gurgoriginated as an imitation of throat sounds. From it were derived such guttural words as Greek gargaraaizein ‘gargle’ (whence Latin gargarizāre ‘gargle’) and Latin gurguliō ‘gullet’ (Latin gurges, source of English gorge and regurgitate, had moved further figuratively to ‘whirlpool’).

Among the offspring of gurguliō are Vulgar Latin *gurguliāre, source of English gurgle [16], and Old French gargouille ‘throat’. Roof spouts carved in the shape of grotesque creatures had the term gargouille applied to them from the notion that the rain-water was coming out of their throats – hence English gargoyle. Gargouille also formed the basis of the verb gargouiller ‘gargle, gurgle’, from which English gets gargle [16].
=> gargle, gurgle
henchman: henchman: [14] Early spellings such as hengestman and henxstman suggest that this word is a compound of Old English hengest ‘stallion’ and man ‘man’. There are chronological difficulties, for hengest seems to have gone out of general use in the 13th century, and henchman is not recorded until the mid-14th century, but it seems highly likely nevertheless that the compound must originally have meant ‘horse servant, groom’.

The word hengest would no doubt have remained alive in popular consciousness as the name of the Jutish chieftain Hengist who conquered Kent in the 5th century with his brother Horsa; it is related to modern German hengst ‘stallion’, and goes back ultimately to a prehistoric Indo-European kənku-, which denoted ‘jump’. Henchman remained in use for ‘squire’ or ‘page’ until the 17th century, but then seems to have drifted out of use, and it was Sir Walter Scott who revived it in the early 19th century, in the sense ‘trusty right-hand man’.
oeuvre: oeuvre: hors d’oeuvre [18] In French, hors d’oeuvre means literally ‘outside the work’ – that is, ‘not part of the ordinary set of courses in a meal’. The earliest record of its use in English is in the general sense ‘out of the ordinary’ (‘The Frenzy of one who is given up for a Lunatick, is a Frenzy hors d’ oeuvre … something which is singular in its kind’, Joseph Addison, Spectator 1714), but this did not survive beyond the 18th century.

Alexander Pope, in his Dunciad 1742, was the first to use the word in its modern culinary sense. (French oeuvre ‘work’, incidentally, comes from Latin opera ‘work’, source of or related to English copious, manoeuvre, opera, operate, and opulent.)
=> d'oeuvre, copious, manoeuvre, manure, opera, operate, opulent
hors: hors: hors d’oeuvre [18] In French, hors d’oeuvre means literally ‘outside the work’ – that is, ‘not part of the ordinary set of courses in a meal’. The earliest record of its use in English is in the general sense ‘out of the ordinary’ (‘The Frenzy of one who is given up for a Lunatick, is a Frenzy hors d’ oeuvre … something which is singular in its kind’, Joseph Addison, Spectator 1714), but this did not survive beyond the 18th century.

Alexander Pope, in his Dunciad 1742, was the first to use the word in its modern culinary sense. (French oeuvre ‘work’, incidentally, comes from Latin opera ‘work’, source of or related to English copious, manoeuvre, opera, operate, and opulent.)
=> d'oeuvre, copious, manoeuvre, manure, opera, operate, opulent
hors d'oeuvre: hors d'oeuvre: [18] In French, hors d’oeuvre means literally ‘outside the work’ – that is, ‘not part of the ordinary set of courses in a meal’. The earliest record of its use in English is in the general sense ‘out of the ordinary’ (‘The Frenzy of one who is given up for a Lunatick, is a Frenzy hors d’ oeuvre … something which is singular in its kind’, Joseph Addison, Spectator 1714), but this did not survive beyond the 18th century.

Alexander Pope, in his Dunciad 1742, was the first to use the word in its modern culinary sense. (French oeuvre ‘work’, incidentally, comes from Latin opera ‘work’, source of or related to English copious, manoeuvre, opera, operate, and opulent.)
=> d'oeuvre, copious, manoeuvre, manure, opera, operate, opulent
humble pie: humble pie: [17] Until the 19th century, humble pie was simply a pie made from the internal organs of a deer or other animal (‘Mrs Turner did bring us an umble pie hot out of her oven’, Samuel Pepys, Diary 8 July 1663). Humble has no etymological connection with the adjective humble ‘meek’; it is an alteration of the now extinct numbles ‘offal’ [14] (which came ultimately from Latin lumulus, a diminutive of lumbus ‘loin’, from which English gets loin and lumbar). Numbles became umbles (perhaps from misanalysis of a numble as an umble in contexts such as numble pie), and from there it was a short step to humble; but the expression eat humble pie is not recorded in the sense ‘be humiliated’ until the 1830s.

It combines the notion of ‘food fit only for those of lowly status’ with a fortuitous resemblance to the adjective humble.
=> loin, lumbar
invent: invent: [15] Invent originally meant ‘find’ (‘Since that Eve was procreated out of Adam’s side, could not such newels [novelties] in this land be invented’, wrote the anonymous author of a 15th-century song). It was based on invent-, the past participial stem of Latin invenīre ‘come upon, find’, a compound verb formed from the prefix in- ‘on’ and venīre ‘come’.

The sense ‘devise’, which developed via ‘discover’, actually existed in the Latin verb, but English did not take it on board until the 16th century. The derivative inventory [16] was borrowed from medieval Latin inventōrium ‘list’, an alteration of late Latin inventārium, which originally meant a ‘finding out’, hence an ‘enumeration’.
=> adventure, inventory
jelly: jelly: [14] The central idea of ‘coagulation’ takes us back to the ultimate source of jelly, the Latin verb gelāre ‘freeze’ (which also gave English congeal [14]). Its feminine past participle gelāta was used in Vulgar Latin for a substance solidified out of a liquid, and this passed into Old French as gelee, meaning both ‘frost’ and ‘jelly’ – whence the English word. (Culinarily, jelly at first denoted a savoury substance, made from gelatinous parts of animals; it was not really until the early 19th century that the ancestors of modern fruit jellies began to catch on in a big way.) The Italian descendant of gelāta was gelata.

From it was formed a diminutive, gelatina, which English acquired via French as gelatine [19]. Gel [19] is an abbreviation of it.
=> cold, congeal, gel, gelatine
jump: jump: [16] Until the early modern English period, the words for ‘jump’ were leap and spring. Then, apparently out of nowhere, the verb jump appeared. Its provenance has never been satisfactorily explained, and etymologists fall back on the notion that it may originally have been intended to suggest the sound of jumping feet hitting the ground (the similar-sounding bump and thump are used to support this theory).

And certainly one of the earliest known instances of the word’s use connotes as much ‘making heavy contact’ as ‘rising’: ‘The said anchor held us from jumping and beating upon the said rock’, Sir Richard Guylforde, Pilgrimage to the Holy Land 1511. Jumper ‘sweater’ [19], incidentally, appears to have no etymological connection with jump. It was probably derived from an earlier dialectal jump or jup, which denoted a short coat for men or a sort of woman’s underbodice.

This in turn was borrowed from French juppe, a variant of jupe ‘skirt’, whose ultimate source was Arabic jubbah, the name of a sort of loose outer garment.
litre: litre: [19] Litre goes back to Greek lītrā, a term which denoted a Sicilian monetary unit. This found its way via medieval Latin litrā into French as litron, where it was used for a unit of capacity. By the 18th century it had rather fallen out of use, but in 1793 it was revived, in the form litre, as the name for the basic unit of capacity in the new metric system.

It is first recorded in English in 1810. The Greek word was descended from an earlier, unrecorded *līthrā, which was borrowed into Latin as lībra ‘pound’. This is the source of various modern terms for units of weight, and hence of currency, including Italian lira and the now disused French livre, and it also lies behind the English symbol £ for ‘pound’.
=> level, lira
loo: loo: [20] Loo presents one of the more celebrated puzzles of English etymology. Not the least of its problematical points is that there is no reliable evidence of its existence before the 1920s, whereas most of its suggested sources have a more dated air than that. Amongst them, the most widely touted is of course gardy loo!, a shout of warning (based on French gardez l’eau ‘beware of the water’) supposedly used when emptying chamber pots from upper-storey windows in the days before modern plumbing; but that is chronologically most unlikely.

Other possibilities are that it is short for Waterloo, which was a trade name for cast-iron lavatory cisterns in the early part of the 20th century (‘O yes, mon loup. How much cost? Waterloo. Watercloset’, James Joyce, Ulysses 1922), and that it comes from louvre, from the use of slatted screens for a makeshift lavatory. But perhaps the likeliest explanation is that it derives from French lieux d’aisances, literally ‘places of ease’, hence ‘lavatory’ (perhaps picked up by British servicemen in France during World War I).
mammoth: mammoth: [18] Mammoth is a Russian contribution to English. The word was borrowed from early modern Russian mammot, an adaptation of Tatar mamont ‘earth’ (the reason for the animal being so named is that the first remains of mammoths to be found were dug out of the frozen soil of Siberia). The adjectival use of the word for ‘huge’ dates from the early 19th century (‘The dancing very bad; the performers all had mammoth legs’, private diary of Sir Robert Wilson, 1814).
merge: merge: [17] Merge comes from Latin mergere, which meant ‘dive, plunge’ (it was also the source of English emerge [16], which etymologically means ‘rise out of a liquid’, immerse [17], and submerge [17]). Merge was originally used for ‘immerse’ in English too, and the modern meaning ‘combine into one’ did not emerge fully until as recently as the 20th century. It arose from the notion of one thing ‘sinking’ into another and losing its identity; in the 1920s this was applied to two business companies amalgamating, and the general sense ‘combine’ followed from it.
=> emerge, immerse, submerge
naff: naff: [20] There seem to be two separate words naff in British slang, but the origins of both are mysterious. The first, naff off, appeared in the 1950s. Functionally it is a euphemistic substitute for fuck off, and there could be some connection with eff, another euphemism for fuck (perhaps the n in an eff wandered out of place). Alternatively it could come from naf, an old backslang reversal of fan in the sense ‘female genitals’.

The second, an adjective meaning ‘unstylish, unfashionable, tasteless’, is first recorded in 1969. Its antecedents are even more obscure. Among possible relatives are northern English dialect niffy-naffy ‘stupid’ and naffy, naffin and naffhead ‘idiot’ and Scots nyaff ‘unpleasant person’.
nice: nice: [13] Nice is one of the more celebrated examples in English of a word changing its meaning out of all recognition over the centuries – in this case, from ‘stupid’ to ‘pleasant’. Its ultimate source was Latin nescius ‘ignorant’, a compound adjective formed from the negative particle ne- and the base of the verb scīre ‘know’ (source of English science).

This passed into English via Old French nice with minimal change of meaning, but from then on a slow but sure semantic transformation took place, from ‘foolish’ via ‘shy’, ‘fastidious’, and ‘refined’ to on the one hand ‘minutely accurate or discriminating’ (as in a ‘nice distinction’) and on the other ‘pleasant, agreeable’ (first recorded in the second half of the 18th century).
=> science
occupy: occupy: [14] Occupy comes via Anglo-Norman *occupier from Latin occupāre ‘seize’, a compound verb formed from the intensive prefix ob- and capere ‘take’ (source of English capture, chase, etc). In the 16th and 17th centuries it was used in English for ‘have sex (with)’ (‘as king Edwin occupied Alfgifa his concubine’, John Bale, English Votaries 1546), and fell temporarily out of ‘polite’ usage: as Doll Tearsheet complained in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV 1597, ‘A captain! God’s light, these villains will make the word ‘captain’ as odious as the word ‘occupy’, which was an excellent good word before it was ill sorted’.
=> captive, capture, chase