英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

altruism: altruism: [19] Etymologically as well as semantically, altruism contains the notion of ‘other people’. It was borrowed from French altruisme, which was apparently coined in 1830 by the philosopher Auguste Comte on the basis of Italian altrui ‘that which belongs to other people’. This was the oblique case of altro ‘other’, from Latin alter. Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française suggests that the coinage was based on such French legal phrases as le bien d’autrui ‘the welfare of others’ and le droit d’autrui ‘the rights of others’ (autrui corresponds to Italian altrui).
=> alias, alter, else
ambidextrous: ambidextrous: [16] Ambidextrous means literally ‘right-handed on both sides’. It was formed in Latin from the prefix ambi- ‘both’ and the adjective dexter ‘right-handed’ (source of English dextrous). Ambi- corresponds to the Latin adjective ambo ‘both’, which derived ultimately from the Indo-European base *amb- ‘around’ (an element in the source of ambassador and embassy).

The second element in Latin ambo seems to correspond to Old English ba ‘both’, which is related to modern English both. Other English words formed with the prefix amb(i)- include ambient [16] (which came, like ambition, from Latin ambīre ‘go round’), ambit [16] (from Latin ambitus ‘circuit’), ambiguous, ambition, amble, and ambulance.
=> dextrous
baffle: baffle: [16] The etymology of baffle is appropriately baffling. Two main candidates have been proposed as a source. The first is the medieval Scots verb bawchill or bauchle, meaning ‘discredit publicly’. This fits in with the way baffle was first used: ‘I will baffull your good name, sound with the trumpet your dishonour, and paint your pictor with the heeles vpward, and beate it in despight of yourselfe’, Churchyardes chippes 1570.

The other strand is represented by French bafouer ‘hoodwink, deceive’, which perhaps comes from Old French beffer. This corresponds more closely to the present-day meaning of baffle, and it may well be that there are two distinct words here.
daft: daft: [13] Daft was not always a term of reproach. It originally meant ‘mild, gentle’, and only in late Middle English slid to ‘stupid’ (in a semantic decline perhaps paralleling that of silly, which started off as ‘happy, blessed’). Middle English dafte corresponds directly to an Old English gedæfte, whose underlying sense seems to have been ‘fit, suitable’ (the sense connection was apparently that mild unassuming people were considered as behaving suitably).

There is no direct evidence of its use with this meaning, but Old English had a verb gedæftan ‘make fit or ready, prepare’ which, together with the Gothic verb gedaban ‘be suitable’, points to its origin in a Germanic base *dab- ‘fit, suitable’. This ties in with the semantic development of deft, a variant of daft, which has moved from a prehistoric ‘fit, suitable’ to ‘skilful’.
=> deft
door: door: [OE] Old English had two closely related words for ‘door’: duru (mirrored by German tür ‘door’) and dor (which corresponds to German tor ‘gate’). They gradually came together during the Middle English period. Both go back ultimately to the Indo-European base *dhwer-, which also produced Greek thúrū ‘door’ (source of English thyroid), Latin foris ‘door’ (source of English foreign and forest) and forum, Sanskrit dvar- ‘door’, Russian dver’ ‘door’, Lithuanian dùrys ‘gate’, etc.
=> foreign, forest, thyroid
eucharist: eucharist: [14] The Greek-based eucharist corresponds to native English thanksgiving. It comes via Old French eucariste and late Latin eucharistia from Greek eukharistíā ‘gratitude’. This was a derivative of eukháristos ‘grateful’, a compound adjective formed from the prefix eu- ‘well’ and kharízesthai ‘show favour’. The verb in turn was formed from the noun kháris ‘favour, grace’ (source of English charisma [19] and probably a distant relative of yearn [OE]).
=> yearn
pond: pond: [13] Pond is historically the same word as pound ‘enclosure’. The differentiation between the two was established early on, although pound continued to be used for ‘pond’ in Scotland and in some English dialects until quite recently. The common denominator is that ponds were originally specifically used for keeping fish in. The reason for the phonetic change from pound to pond is not known.
=> pound
adultery (n.): "voluntary violation of the marriage bed," c. 1300, avoutrie, from Old French avouterie (12c.), noun of condition from avoutre, from Latin adulterare "to corrupt" (see adulteration). Modern spelling, with the re-inserted -d-, is from early 15c. (see ad-).

In Middle English, also "sex between husband and wife for recreational purposes; idolatry, perversion, heresy." Classified as single adultery (with an unmarried person) and double adultery (with a married person). Old English word was æwbryce "breach of law(ful marriage)" (compare German Ehebruch). Adultery Dune in Arizona corresponds to Navajo sei adilehe "adultery sand," where illicit lovers met privately.
aft (adv.): Old English æftan "from behind, behind, farthest back," from superlative of Old English æf, af, of "away, away from, off" (see of). The Germanic superlative suffix *-ta corresponds to PIE *-to (compare Greek protos "first," superlative of pro "before"). Now purely nautical.
Algol: Beta Persei, variable star in the constellation Perseus, late 14c., literally "the Demon," from Arabic al-ghul "the demon" (see ghoul). It corresponds, in modern representations of the constellation, to the gorgon's head Perseus is holding, but it probably was so called because it visibly varies in brightness every three days, which sets it apart from other bright stars. The computer language (1959) is a contraction of algo(rithmic) l(anguage); see algorithm.
avoid (v.): c. 1300, from Anglo-French avoider "to clear out, withdraw (oneself)," partially anglicized from Old French esvuidier "to empty out," from es- "out" (see ex-) + vuidier "to be empty," from voide "empty, vast, wide, hollow, waste" (see void (adj.)). Originally a law term; modern sense of "have nothing to do with" also was in Middle English and corresponds to Old French eviter with which it was perhaps confused. Meaning "escape, evade" first attested 1520s. Related: Avoided; avoiding.
call (v.): Old English ceallian "to call, shout," less common than clipian; replaced by related Old Norse kalla "to cry loudly," from Proto-Germanic *kall- (cognates: Dutch kallen "to talk," Old High German kallon "to call"), from PIE root *gal- (2) "to call, scream, shriek, shout" (cognates: Sanskrit garhati "bewail, criticize;" Latin gallus "cock;" Old High German klaga, German Klage "complaint, grievance, lament, accusation;" Old English clacu "affront;" Old Church Slavonic glasu "voice," glagolu "word;" Welsh galw "call"). Related: Called; calling.

Meaning "to give a name to" is mid-13c. Coin-toss sense is from 1801. Meaning "to visit" (Middle English) was literally "to stand at the door and call." Telephone/telegraph sense is from 1889. To call out someone to fight (1823) corresponds to French provoquer. To call it a day is from 1834.
Camelot (n.): a name first found in medieval French romances; it corresponds to Latin Camuladonum, the Roman forerunner of Colchester, which was an impressive ruin in the Middle Ages. But Malory identifies it with Winchester and Elizabethans tended to see it as Cadbury Castle, an Iron Age hill fort near Glastonbury.
carp (n.): type of freshwater fish, late 14c., from Old French carpe "carp" (13c.) and directly from Vulgar Latin carpa (source also of Italian carpa, Spanish carpa), from a Germanic source (compare Middle Dutch carpe, Dutch karper, Old High German karpfo, German Karpfen "carp"); possibly the immediate source is Gothic *karpa. A Danube fish (hence the proposed East Germanic origin of its name), introduced in English ponds 14c. Lithuanian karpis, Russian karp are Germanic loan words.
depth (n.): late 14c., apparently formed in Middle English on model of length, breadth; from Old English deop "deep" (see deep) + -th (2). Replaced older deopnes "deepness." Though the English word is relatively recent, the formation is in Proto-Germanic, *deupitho-, and corresponds to Old Saxon diupitha, Dutch diepte, Old Norse dypð, Gothic diupiþa.
entre-: in words from French, corresponds to English enter-, which is itself from French entre "between, among" (11c.), from Latin inter (see inter-).
equivalent (adj.): early 15c., from Middle French equivalent and directly from Late Latin aequivalentem (nominative aequivalens) "equivalent," present participle of aequivalere "be equivalent," from Latin aequus "equal" (see equal (adj.)) + valere "be well, be worth" (see valiant). As a noun from c. 1500, "that which is equal or corresponds to." Related: Equivalently.
flaunt (v.): 1560s, "to display oneself in flashy clothes," of unknown origin. Perhaps a variant of flout or vaunt. Perhaps from Scandinavian, where the nearest form seems to be Swedish dialectal flankt "loosely, flutteringly," from flakka "to waver" (related to flag (v.1)). It looks French, but it corresponds to no known French word. Transitive sense, "flourish (something), show off, make an ostentatious or brazen display of" is from 1827. Related: Flaunted; flaunting; Flauntingly.
Friday (n.): sixth day of the week, Old English frigedæg "Friday, Frigga's day," from Frige, genitive of *Frigu (see Frigg), Germanic goddess of married love. The day name is a West Germanic translation of Latin dies Veneris "day of (the planet) Venus," which itself translated Greek Aphrodites hemera.

Compare Old Norse frijadagr, Old Frisian frigendei, Middle Dutch vridach, Dutch vrijdag, German Freitag "Friday," and the Latin-derived cognates Old French vendresdi, French vendredi, Spanish viernes. In Germanic religion, Freya (q.v.) corresponds more closely in character to Venus than Frigg does, and some early Icelandic writers used Freyjudagr for "Friday."

A fast-day in the Church, hence Friday face (17c.) for a gloomy countenance. Black Friday as the name for the busy shopping day after U.S. Thanksgiving holiday is said to date from 1960s and perhaps was coined by those who had the job of controlling the crowds, not by the merchants; earlier it was used principally of Fridays when financial markets crashed (1866, 1869, 1873).
Ionian (adj.): "of Ionia," the districts of ancient Greece inhabited by the Ionians (including Attica and the north coast of the Peloponnesus, but especially the coastal strip of Asia Minor, including the islands of Samos and Chios). The name (which Herodotus credits to an ancestral Ion, son of Apollo and Creusa) probably is pre-Greek, perhaps related to Sanskrit yoni "womb, vulva," and a reference to goddess-worshipping people.

Also used of the sea that lies between Italy and the northern Peloponnesus (1630s). The musical Ionian mode (1844) corresponds to our basic major scale but was characterized by the Greeks as soft and effeminate, as were the Ionians generally.
The Ionians delighted in wanton dances and songs more than the rest of the Greeks ... and wanton gestures were proverbially termed Ionic motions. [Thomas Robinson, "Archæologica Græca," 1807]
kaput (adj.): "finished, worn out, dead," 1895, from German kaputt "destroyed, ruined, lost" (1640s), which in this sense probably is a misunderstanding of the phrase capot machen, a partial translation of French faire capot, a phrase which meant "to win all the tricks (from the other player) in piquet," an obsolete card game. Literally "to make a bonnet;" perhaps the notion is throwing a hood over the other player, but faire capot also meant in French marine jargon "to overset in a squall when under sail." The word was popularized in English during World War I.
"Kaput" -- a slang word in common use which corresponds roughly to the English "done in," the French "fichu." Everything enemy was "kaput" in the early days of German victories. [F. Britten Austin, "According to Orders," New York, 1919]
French capot is literally "cover, bonnet," also the name of a type of greatcloak worn by sailors and soldiers (see capote). The card-playing sense attested in German only from 1690s, but capot in the (presumably) transferred sense of "destroyed, ruined, lost" is attested from 1640s. [see William Jervis Jones, "A Lexicon of French Borrowings in the German Vocabulary (1575-1648)," Berlin, de Gruyter, 1976]. In Hoyle and other English gaming sources, faire capot is "to win all the tricks," and a different phrase, être capot, "to be a bonnet," is sometimes cited as the term for losing them. The sense reversal in German might have come about because if someone wins all the tricks the other player has to lose them, and the same word capot, when it entered English from French in the mid-17c. meant "to score a cabot against; to win all the tricks from."
"There are others, says a third, that have played with my Lady Lurewell at picquet besides my lord; I have capotted her myself two or three times in an evening." [George Farquhar (1677-1707), "Sir Harry Wildair"]
kind (n.): "class, sort, variety," from Old English gecynd "kind, nature, race," related to cynn "family" (see kin), from Proto-Germanic *kundjaz "family, race," from PIE *gene- "to give birth, beget" (see genus). Ælfric's rendition of "the Book of Genesis" into Old English came out gecyndboc. The prefix disappeared 1150-1250. No exact cognates beyond English, but it corresponds to adjective endings such as Goth -kunds, Old High German -kund. Also in English as a suffix (mankind, etc.). Other earlier, now obsolete, senses in English included "character, quality derived from birth" and "manner or way natural or proper to anyone." Use in phrase a kind of (1590s) led to colloquial extension as adverb (1804) in phrases such as kind of stupid ("a kind of stupid (person)").
kitsch (n.): 1926, from German kitsch, literally "gaudy, trash," from dialectal kitschen "to smear."
What we English people call ugliness in German art is simply the furious reaction against what Germans call süsses Kitsch, the art of the picture postcard, and of what corresponds to the royalty ballad. It has for years been their constant reproach against us that England is the great country of Kitsch. Many years ago a German who loved England only too well said to me, 'I like your English word plain; it is a word for which we have no equivalent in German, because all German women are plain.' He might well have balanced it by saying that English has no equivalent for the word Kitsch. [Edward J. Dent, "The Music of Arnold Schönberg," "The Living Age," July 9, 1921]
metropolitan (n.): early 15c., "bishop having oversight of other bishops," from Late Latin metropolitanus, from Greek metropolis "mother city" (from which others have been colonized), also "capital city," from meter "mother" (see mother (n.1)) + polis "city" (see polis).

In Greek, "parent state of a colony;" later, "see of a metropolitan bishop." In the West, the position now roughly corresponds to archbishop, but in the Greek church it ranks above it.
-osis: word-forming element expressing state or condition, in medical terminology denoting "a state of disease," from Latin -osis and directly from Greek -osis, formed from the aorist of verbs ending in -o. It corresponds to Latin -atio.
petit (adj.): mid-14c., "trifling," from Old French petit "small, little, young, few in numbers" (11c.), probably from stem of Late Latin pitinnus "small," of uncertain origin; it corresponds to no known Latin form and perhaps is from a Celtic root pett- "part, piece, bit" also found in Italian pezza, English piece. Attested as a surname from 1086. Replaced by petty in most usages, except in established forms such as petit bourgeois "conventional middle-class" (1832; used in English by Charlotte Brontë earlier than by Marx or Engels); petit mal (1842, literally "little evil," mild form of epilepsy), and petit four (1884), which in French means "little oven," from Old French four "oven," from Latin furnus.
puddle (n.): early 14c., "small pool of dirty water," frequentative or diminutive of Old English pudd "ditch," related to German pudeln "to splash in water" (compare poodle). Originally used of pools and ponds as well.
tea (n.): 1650s, tay, also in early spellings thea, tey, tee and at first pronounced so as to rhyme with obey; the modern pronunciation predominates from mid-18c. But earlier in English as chaa (1590s), also cha, tcha, chia, cia. The two forms of the word reflect two paths of transmission: chaa is from Portuguese cha, attested in Portuguese from 1550s, via Macao, from Mandarin (Chinese) ch'a (cf chai). The later form, which became Modern English tea, is via Dutch, from Malay teh and directly from Chinese (Amoy dialect) t'e, which corresponds to Mandarin ch'a.

The distribution of the different forms of the word in Europe reflects the spread of use of the beverage. The modern English form, along with French thé, Spanish te, German Tee, etc., derive via Dutch thee from the Amoy form, reflecting the role of the Dutch as the chief importers of the leaves (through the Dutch East India Company, from 1610). Meanwhile, Russian chai, Persian cha, Greek tsai, Arabic shay, and Turkish çay all came overland from the Mandarin form.

First known in Paris 1635, the practice of drinking tea was first introduced to England 1644. Meaning "afternoon meal at which tea is served" is from 1738. Slang meaning "marijuana" (which sometimes was brewed in hot water) is attested from 1935, felt as obsolete by late 1960s. Tea ball is from 1895.
th: A sound found chiefly in words of Old English, Old Norse or Greek origin, unpronounceable by Normans and many other Europeans. In Greek, the sound corresponds etymologically to Sanskrit -dh- and English -d-; and it was represented graphically by -TH- and at first pronounced as a true aspirate (as still in English outhouse, shithead, etc.). But by 2c. B.C.E. the Greek letter theta was in universal use and had the modern "-th-" sound. Latin had neither the letter nor the sound, however, and the Romans represented Greek theta by -TH-, which they generally pronounced, at least in Late Latin, as simple "-t-" (passed down to Romanic languages, as in Spanish termal "thermal," teoria "theory," teatro "theater").

In Germanic languages it represents PIE *-t- and was common at the start of words or after stressed vowels. To represent it, Old English and Old Norse used the characters ð "eth" (a modified form of -d-) and þ "thorn," which originally was a rune. Old English, unlike Old Norse, seems never to have standardized which of the two versions of the sound ("hard" and "soft") was represented by which of the two letters.

The digraph -th- sometimes appears in early Old English, on the Roman model, and it returned in Middle English with the French scribes, driving out eth by c. 1250, but thorn persisted, especially in demonstratives (þat, þe, þis, etc.), even as other words were being spelled with -th-. The advent of printing dealt its death-blow, however, as types were imported from continental founders, who had no thorn. For a time y was used in its place (especially in Scotland), because it had a similar shape, hence ye for the in historical tourist trap Ye Olde _______ Shoppe (it never was pronounced "ye," only spelled that way).

The awareness that some Latin words in t- were from Greek th- encouraged over-correction in English and created unetymological forms such as Thames and author, while some words borrowed from Romanic languages preserve, on the Roman model, the Greek -th- spelling but the simple Latin "t" pronunciation (as in Thomas and thyme).
thatcher (n.): early 14c. (late 12c. as a surname); agent noun from thatch (v.). Corresponds to Old English þecere, Dutch dekker, German Decker. Thatcherite in British politics (1976) refers to policies and principles of Conservative politician and prime minister Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013).
twain: Old English twegen "two" (masc. nominative and accusative), from Proto-Germanic *twa- "two" (see two). It corresponds to Old Frisian twene, Dutch twee, Old High German zwene, Danish tvende. The word outlasted the breakdown of gender in Middle English and survived as a secondary form of two, especially in cases where the numeral follows a noun. Its continuation into modern times was aided by its use in KJV and the Marriage Service, in poetry (where it is a useful rhyme word), and in oral use where it is necessary to be clear that two and not to or too is meant. In U.S. nautical use as "a depth of two fathoms" from 1799.
orotic aciduria: "Excessive excretion of orotic acid in the urine; specifically a genetic (autosomal recessive) disorder of pyrimidine metabolism in humans, in which deficient activity of the enzyme uridine monophosphate synthase, which catalyses the two-step conversion of orotic acid to uridine monophosphate, results in the accumulation of orotic acid and in megaloblastic anaemia that responds to uridine administration", 1950s; earliest use found in Journal of Clinical Investigation. From orotic acid + -uria.