英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

behalf: behalf: [14] Behalf was compounded from the prefix be- ‘by’ and the noun half, in the sense ‘side’. The latter had been used in such phrases as on my half, that is, ‘on my side, for my part’, since late Old English times, and the new compound began to replace it in the 14th century. (That particular use of half had died out by the end of the 16th century.) The modern sense of ‘representing or in the interests of someone’ was present from the beginning.
=> half
belch: belch: [OE] Belch first appears in recognizable form in the 15th century, but it can scarcely not be related to belk ‘eructate’, which goes back to Old English bealcan and survived dialectally into the modern English period. Belch itself may derive either from an unrecorded variant of bealcan, *belcan (with the c here representing a /ch/ sound), or from a related Old English verb belcettan ‘eructate’.

But whichever route it took, its ultimate source was probably a Germanic base *balk-or *belk-, from which German got bölken ‘bleat, low, belch’. Belch was originally a perfectly inoffensive word; it does not seem to have been until the 17th century that its associations began to drag it down towards vulgarity.
berserk: berserk: [19] Sir Walter Scott appears to be responsible for introducing this word to the English language. He mentions it in a footnote to his novel The pirate 1822, adopting it (in the form berserkar) from the Icelandic berserkr ‘frenzied Norse warrior’. Its etymology is not altogether clear. Its second syllable represents serkr ‘coat, shirt’ (a word English used to have, as sark: cutty sark meant ‘short shirt’), but the first is disputed.

Scott took it to mean ‘bare’ (which would have been Icelandic berr), and in fact the anglicized form baresark was quite commonly used in the mid 19th century; the plausible-sounding notion underlying this is that the original berserkr was so called because in his battle-crazed frenzy he tore off his armour and fought in his shirt-sleeves – ‘bare-shirted’. However, 20th-century etymologists have tended to prefer the theory that ber- is ‘bear’, representing Icelandic bern-, a by-form of bjorn ‘bear’.

The concept of warriors dressing themselves in animals’ skins is an ancient one, found in many mythologies. The modern use of the word as an adjective, meaning ‘in a violent frenzy’, appears to date from the third quarter of the 19th century.
broker: broker: [14] Broker has no connection with the past tense of break. It comes from Anglo- Norman brocour ‘small trader’, but its ultimate origin is not clear. A variant Anglo-Norman form abrocour has fuelled speculation as to a link with Spanish alboroque ‘sealing of a bargain’ and Portuguese alborcar ‘barter’, which are presumably of Arabic origin (the alrepresenting the Arabic definite article); but other etymologists have sought to link the word with broach, as if the underlying sense were ‘someone who sells wine from [that is, by broaching] the cask’, and hence any ‘retailer’.
bunion: bunion: [18] Bunion is probably a modification of the East Anglian dialect word bunny ‘lump, swelling’, representing a 15th-century form bony, glossed in a contemporary English-Latin dictionary as ‘great knob’. This was apparently borrowed from Old French hugne ‘bump on the head’.
chip: chip: [OE] Old English cipp meant ‘share-beam of a plough’ (a sense paralleled in related forms in other Germanic languages, such as Dutch kip ‘plough-beam’ and Old Norse keppr ‘stick’). This seems a far cry from the modern use of chip, for which there is no evidence before the 14th century, and in fact our noun chip may be a new formation based on the verb chip, which goes back to Old English -cippian ‘cut’ (found only in compounds).

Here again, though, the record is incomplete; for the post-Old English verb does not turn up until the late 15th century, and then in the very specialized sense ‘cut the crust off bread’. The more general meaning ‘cut’ appears in the 17th century, but the modern ‘break off a small fragment’ is as late as the 18th century. All in all, a picture confused by lack of evidence. But probably the basic etymological sense that underlies all later usage is ‘cut off’ or ‘piece cut off’ (the early noun senses representing ‘branch or bough cut off a tree’). ‘Small piece of fried potato’ dates from the 1860s. (Old French borrowed the word as chipe, and a variant of this, chiffe ‘rag’, is the ultimate source of English chiffon [18].)
=> chiffon
cholera: cholera: [14] Greek kholéra originally meant ‘illness caused by choler, bilious attack’; it was a derivative of kholé ‘bile’ (which is related to English gall). Passing into Latin as cholera, it began to be used for ‘bile’ itself, both in the physiological sense and as representing one of the four ancient humours, ‘anger’. It had that sense when first adopted into English, and into French, where it became colère (source of English choler [14]).

It was revived as a term for a severe digestive disorder, involving vomiting, diarrhoea, etc, in the 17th century, and in the 19th century was applied (from the similarity of the symptoms) to the often fatal infectious disease caused by the bacterium Vibrio comma.
=> gall, melancholy
cipher: cipher: [14] The central meaning of cipher is ‘zero’ (a word to which it is related); its use since the 16th century in connection with encrypted communications derives from the fact that in their earliest forms such codes usually consisted of numbers representing letters, and cipher had by then broadened in use from ‘nought’ to ‘any numeral’. It entered English through Old French cifre, which came via medieval Latin cifra from Arabic sifr (source of English zero); this was a nominal use of an adjective meaning ‘empty’.
=> zero
draught: draught: [12] Draught and draft are essentially the same word, but draft (more accurately representing its modern English pronunciation) has become established since the 18th century as the spelling for ‘preliminary drawing or plan’, ‘money order’, and (in American English) ‘conscription’. The word itself probably comes from an unrecorded Old Norse *drahtr, an abstract noun meaning ‘pulling’ derived from a prehistoric Germanic verb *dragan (source of English drag and draw).

Most of its modern English meanings are fairly transparently descended from the idea of ‘pulling’: ‘draught beer’, for example, is ‘drawn’ from a barrel. Of the less obvious ones, ‘current of air’ is air that is ‘drawn’ through an opening; the game draughts comes from an earlier, Middle English sense of draught, ‘act of drawing a piece across the board in chess and similar games’; while draft ‘provisional plan’ was originally ‘something drawn or sketched’.
=> draft, drag, draw
elephant: elephant: [13] Elephants were named from their tusks. Greek eléphās (probably a borrowing from a non-Indo-European language) meant originally ‘ivory’ (hence chryselephantine ‘of gold and ivory’ [19]). Only later did it come to denote the animal itself, and it passed in this sense into Latin as elephantus. By post-classical times this had become *olifantus, and it is a measure of the unfamiliarity of the beast in northern Europe in the first millenium AD that when Old English acquired the word, as olfend, it was used for the ‘camel’.

Old French also had olifant (referring to the ‘elephant’ this time) and passed it on to English as olifaunt. It was not until the 14th century that, under the influence of the classical Latin form, this began to change to elephant. In the 16th and 17th centuries there was a learned revival of the sense ‘ivory’: Alexander Pope, for instance, in his translation of the Odyssey 1725, refers to ‘the handle … with steel and polish’d elephant adorn’d’.

The notion of the white elephant as ‘something unwanted’ arose apparently from the practice of the kings of Siam presenting courtiers who had incurred their displeasure with real white elephants, the cost of whose proper upkeep was ruinously high.
glow: glow: [OE] Glow comes ultimately from Indo- European *ghlō-, in which the ghl- seems originally to have had some sort of symbolic function, as if directly representing the notion of ‘brightness, shining’ in speech. Its Germanic descendant *glō- produced German glühen, Dutch gloeien, and Swedish glöda (all meaning ‘glow’) as well as English glow and probably also glower [16].
=> glower
graphic: graphic: [17] The profoundest influence that Greek gráphein ‘write’ has had on English has no doubt been through its combining form -graphos, which has provided us with a whole host of words, both original Greek formations and new English ones, from autograph to telegraph. But descendants in their own right include graphic (which came via Latin graphicus from the Greek derivative graphikós), graphite [18] (originally coined in German as graphit, from its being used in writing implements), and graph [19] (short for graphic formular, a term used in chemistry for a diagram representing in lines the relationship between elements).

Greek gráphein itself originally meant ‘scratch’ (it is etymologically related to English carve); it was applied to early methods of writing, by scratching on clay tablets with a stylus, and kept its job when writing technology moved on.
=> carve, graft, graph, graphite
gun: gun: [14] Gun probably comes, unlikely as it may seem, from the Scandinavian female forename Gunnhildr (originally a compound of gunnr ‘war’ and hildr ‘war’). It is by no means unusual for large fearsome weapons to be named after women (for reasons perhaps best left to psychologists): the huge German artillery weapon of World War I, Big Bertha, and the old British army musket, Brown Bess, are cases in point.

And it seems that in the Middle Ages Gunnhildr or Gunhild was applied to various large rock-hurling seige weapons, such as the ballista, and later to cannon. The earliest recorded sense of gun (on this theory representing Gunne, a pet form of Gunhild) is ‘cannon’, but it was applied to hand-held firearms as they developed in the 15th century.
macabre: macabre: [15] Macabre is now used generally for ‘ghastly’, but that is a late 19th-century development. It originated in the very specific phrase dance macabre, which denoted a dance in which a figure representing death enticed people to dance with him until they dropped down dead. This was borrowed from French danse macabre, which was probably an alteration of an earlier danse Macabé. This in turn was a translation of medieval Latin chorea Machabaeorum ‘dance of the Maccabees’, which is thought originally to have referred to a stylized representation of the slaughter of the Maccabees (a Jewish dynasty of biblical times) in a medieval miracle play.
morse: morse: [19] People had for some years been experimenting with the magnetic telegraph, but it was the American inventor Samuel Morse (1791–1872) who in 1836 produced the first workable system. And with his assistant Alexander Bain he devised a set of dots and dashes representing letters and numbers which could be used for transmitting messages, and which came to be known as the Morse code. In the first half of the 20th century morse was also used as a verb: ‘It can be used for Morsing instructions about breakfast to the cook’, Punch 31 March 1920.
mumps: mumps: [16] The dialect noun mump meant ‘grimace’; and the use of its plural mumps for the disease is thought to have been originally an allusion to the distorted expression caused by the swollen neck glands. Mump itself is presumably related to the verb mump ‘sulk’ [16], and belongs to a family of words (including also mumble [14]) based on the syllable mum, representing an ‘indistinct sound made through closed lips’ (mum ‘silent’ [14] itself, as in ‘keep mum’, comes from this source, as does mummer [15], originally ‘mime actor’).
=> mum, mumble, mummer
occur: occur: [16] Etymologically, occur means ‘run towards’. It was borrowed from Latin occurrere, a compound verb formed from the prefix ob- ‘towards’ and currere ‘run’ (source of English course, current, etc). This had the sense ‘run to meet’, hence simply ‘meet’, which survived into English: ‘The whole multitude might freely move … with very little occurring or interfering’, Richard Bentley, Boyle Lectures 1692. But ‘meeting’ also passed into ‘presenting itself’, ‘appearing’, and hence ‘happening’ – from which the main present-day meaning of English occur comes.
=> course, current
scene: scene: [16] Greek skēné originally meant ‘tent’ (it was related to skiá ‘shadow’, a descendant of the same Indo-European base that produced English shimmer and shine, and so etymologically denoted ‘something that gives shade’). Such tents or booths were used for presenting plays, and eventually the word skēné came to denote the backdrop against which drama is performed.

It passed into English via Latin scaena. The Italian version of the word, scena (itself borrowed into English in the 19th century), has the derivative scenario, which has been acquired by English on two separate occasions: first as scenery [18] and later as scenario [19].
=> scenario, shimmer, shine
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.)
syllabus: syllabus: [17] The word syllabus is the result of a misprint. It originated as Greek sittúbā ‘label, table of contents’, which was borrowed into Latin as sittyba. However, in an early printed edition of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus, in the 1470s, its accusative plural form sittybas was misprinted as syllabos. This was taken as representing a Greek súllabos, a supposed (but quite spurious) derivative of Greek sullambánein ‘gather together’ (source of English syllable), which was then relatinized to syllabus. Its earliest application to the ‘contents of a course of instruction’ appears to date from the late 18th century.
zodiac: zodiac: [14] The zodiac is etymologically a circle of ‘little animals’. Greek zóidion originally denoted a ‘carved figure of an animal’ (it was a diminutive of zóion ‘animal’, a relative of English zoo). From it was derived the adjective zōidiakós, which was used in the expression zōidiakós kúklos ‘circle of carved figures’, denoting the twelve figures or signs representing the divisions of a band around the celestial sphere. Zōidiakós became a noun in its own right, and passed into English via Latin zōdiacus and French zodiaque.
=> zoo
ack-ack: 1939, representing A.A., the military abbreviation for anti-aircraft (see ack).
afar (adv.): contraction of Middle English of feor (late 12c.), on ferr (c. 1300), from Old English feor "far" (see far); the a- (1) in compounds representing both of and on (which in this use meant the same thing). Spelled afer in 14c.
ambuscade (n.): 1580s, essentially a variant form of ambush (n.), representing a reborrowing of that French word after it had been Italianized. Ambuscade is from French embuscade (16c.), Gallicized from Italian imboscata, literally "a hiding in the bush," compounded from the same elements as Old French embuscher. Sometimes in English as ambuscado, with faux Spanish ending of the sort popular in 17c.
attendance (n.): late 14c., "act of attending to one's duties," from Old French atendance "attention, wait, hope, expectation," from atendant, present participle of atendre (see attend). Meaning "action of waiting on someone" dates from late 14c. (to dance attendance on someone is from 1560s); that of "action of being present, presenting oneself" (originally with intent of taking a part) is from mid-15c. Meaning "number of persons present" is from 1835.
bad (adj.): c. 1200, "inferior in quality;" early 13c., "wicked, evil, vicious," a mystery word with no apparent relatives in other languages.* Possibly from Old English derogatory term bæddel and its diminutive bædling "effeminate man, hermaphrodite, pederast," probably related to bædan "to defile." A rare word before 1400, and evil was more common in this sense until c. 1700. Meaning "uncomfortable, sorry" is 1839, American English colloquial.

Comparable words in the other Indo-European languages tend to have grown from descriptions of specific qualities, such as "ugly," "defective," "weak," "faithless," "impudent," "crooked," "filthy" (such as Greek kakos, probably from the word for "excrement;" Russian plochoj, related to Old Church Slavonic plachu "wavering, timid;" Persian gast, Old Persian gasta-, related to gand "stench;" German schlecht, originally "level, straight, smooth," whence "simple, ordinary," then "bad").

Comparative and superlative forms badder, baddest were common 14c.-18c. and used as recently as Defoe (but not by Shakespeare), but yielded to comparative worse and superlative worst (which had belonged to evil and ill).

As a noun, late 14c., "evil, wickedness." In U.S. place names, sometimes translating native terms meaning "supernaturally dangerous." Ironic use as a word of approval is said to be at least since 1890s orally, originally in Black English, emerging in print 1928 in a jazz context. It might have emerged from the ambivalence of expressions like bad nigger, used as a term of reproach by whites, but among blacks sometimes representing one who stood up to injustice, but in the U.S. West bad man also had a certain ambivalence:
These are the men who do most of the killing in frontier communities, yet it is a noteworthy fact that the men who are killed generally deserve their fate. [Farmer & Henley]
*Farsi has bad in more or less the same sense as the English word, but this is regarded by linguists as a coincidence. The forms of the words diverge as they are traced back in time (Farsi bad comes from Middle Persian vat), and such accidental convergences exist across many languages, given the vast number of words in each and the limited range of sounds humans can make to signify them. Among other coincidental matches with English are Korean mani "many," Chinese pei "pay," Nahuatl (Aztecan) huel "well," Maya hol "hole."
balk (n.): Old English balca "ridge, bank," from or influenced by Old Norse balkr "ridge of land," especially between two plowed furrows, both from Proto-Germanic *balkon- (cognates: Old Saxon balko, Danish bjelke, Old Frisian balka, Old High German balcho, German Balken "beam, rafter"), from PIE *bhelg- "beam, plank" (cognates: Latin fulcire "to prop up, support," fulcrum "bedpost;" Lithuanian balziena "cross-bar;" and possibly Greek phalanx "trunk, log, line of battle"). Modern senses are figurative, representing the balk as a hindrance or obstruction (see balk (v.)). Baseball sense is first attested 1845.
batten (v.1): "to improve; to fatten," 1590s, probably representing an English dialectal survival of Old Norse batna "improve" (cognates: Old English batian, Old Frisian batia, Old High German bazen, Gothic gabatnan "to become better, avail, benefit," Old English bet "better;" also see boot (v.)). Related: Battened; battening.
betcha: representing casual pronunciation of bet you, attested by 1904.
bibliomancy (n.): 1753, "divination by opening a book (especially the Bible) at random," the first verse presenting itself being taken as a prognostication of future events, from biblio- + -mancy. In pagan times, Homer (sortes Homericae) and Virgil (sortes Virgilianae) were used.
bigot (n.): 1590s, "sanctimonious person, religious hypocrite," from French bigot (12c.), which is of unknown origin. Earliest French use of the word is as the name of a people apparently in southern Gaul, which led to the now-doubtful, on phonetic grounds, theory that the word comes from Visigothus. The typical use in Old French seems to have been as a derogatory nickname for Normans, the old theory (not universally accepted) being that it springs from their frequent use of the Germanic oath bi God. But OED dismisses in a three-exclamation-mark fury one fanciful version of the "by god" theory as "absurdly incongruous with facts." At the end, not much is left standing except Spanish bigote "mustache," which also has been proposed but not explained, and the chief virtue of which as a source seems to be there is no evidence for or against it.

In support of the "by God" theory, as a surname Bigott, Bygott are attested in Normandy and in England from the 11c., and French name etymology sources (such as Dauzat) explain it as a derogatory name applied by the French to the Normans and representing "by god." The English were known as goddamns 200 years later in Joan of Arc's France, and during World War I Americans serving in France were said to be known as les sommobiches (see also son of a bitch). But the sense development in bigot is difficult to explain. According to Donkin, the modern use first appears in French 16c. This and the earliest English sense, "religious hypocrite," especially a female one, might have been influenced by beguine and the words that cluster around it. Sense extended 1680s to other than religious opinions.
bird (n.3): "middle finger held up in a rude gesture," slang derived from 1860s expression give the big bird "to hiss someone like a goose," kept alive in vaudeville slang with sense of "to greet someone with boos, hisses, and catcalls" (1922), transferred 1960s to the "up yours" hand gesture (the rigid finger representing the hypothetical object to be inserted) on notion of defiance and contempt. Gesture itself seems to be much older (the human anatomy section of a 12c. Latin bestiary in Cambridge describes the middle finger as that "by means of which the pursuit of dishonour is indicated").
blatant (adj.): 1596, in blatant beast, coined by Edmund Spenser in "The Faerie Queen" to describe a thousand-tongued monster representing slander; probably suggested by Latin blatire "to babble." It entered general use 1650s, as "noisy in an offensive and vulgar way;" the sense of "obvious, glaringly conspicuous" is from 1889. Related: Blatantly.
booby (n.): 1590s, from Spanish bobo "stupid person, slow bird" (used of various ungainly seabirds), probably from Latin balbus "stammering," from an imitative root (see barbarian).

Booby prize is by 1883: an object of little value given to the loser of a game; booby trap is 1850, originally a schoolboy prank; the more lethal sense developed during World War I.
At the end of every session the dominie had the satirical custom of presenting his tawse as a "booby-prize" to some idle or stupid lout whom he picked out as meriting this distinction so that next time they met he might start fresh and fair with new pair for a new set of classes. [Ascott R. Hope, "Dumps," "Young England" magazine, 1883]
buckboard (n.): 1839, "plank on wheels," from board (n.1) + buck "body of a cart or wagon" (1690s), perhaps representing a dialectal survival of Old English buc "belly, body, trunk"(see bucket). As a type of vehicle constructed this way, from 1874.
butterfly (n.): Old English buttorfleoge, evidently butter (n.) + fly (n.), but of obscure signification. Perhaps based on the old notion that the insects (or witches disguised as butterflies) consume butter or milk that is left uncovered. Or, less creatively, simply because the pale yellow color of many species' wings suggests the color of butter. Another theory connects it to the color of the insect's excrement, based on Dutch cognate boterschijte. An overview of words for "butterfly" in various languages can be found here. Also see papillon.

Applied to persons from c. 1600, originally in reference to vain and gaudy attire; by 1806 in reference to transformation from early lowly state; in reference to flitting tendencies by 1873. The swimming stroke so called from 1936. Butterflies "light stomach spasms caused by anxiety" is from 1908.
The butterfly effect is a deceptively simple insight extracted from a complex modern field. As a low-profile assistant professor in MIT's department of meteorology in 1961, [Edward] Lorenz created an early computer program to simulate weather. One day he changed one of a dozen numbers representing atmospheric conditions, from .506127 to .506. That tiny alteration utterly transformed his long-term forecast, a point Lorenz amplified in his 1972 paper, "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?" [Peter Dizikes, "The Meaning of the Butterfly," The Boston Globe, June 8, 2008]
Caesarea: Latin city name derived from Caesar, applied in honor of the emperors to some new and existing cities in the Roman Empire, including modern Kayseri, Turkey; Shaizar, Syria, and Cherchell, Algeria (representing a French spelling of an Arabic name based on a Berber garbling of the Latin word).
chi (n.): 22nd letter of the Greek alphabet, representing a -kh- sound (see ch). The letter is shaped like an X, and so the Greek letter name was used figuratively to signify such a shape or arrangement (as in khiasma "two things placed crosswise;" khiastos "arranged diagonally; marked with an X;" khiazein "to mark with an 'X', to write the letter 'X'"). Some dialects used chi to represent the -ks- sound properly belonging to xi; Latin picked this up and the sound value of chi in Latin-derived alphabets is now that of English X.
chirurgeon (n.): 1530s, representing a failed Renaissance attempt to restore Greek spelling to the word that had got into English as surgeon; now, thank the gods, archaic. Related: Chirurgery. Compare French chirurgien.
Connor: masc. proper name, little used in U.S. before 1980; in the top 100 names given to boys from 1992; apparently an alteration and appropriation of the surname Conner (13c.), representing Old English cunnere "examiner, inspector" (as in ale-conner (see con (n.2)).
conspecific (adj.): 1859, from conspecies (1837), from con- "with" + specific, here representing species (n.). From 1962 as a noun.
cross-: word-forming element typically representing cross as a verb, adverb, adjective, and in many words a confluence of them.
dat: representing the pronunciation of that in West Indian, Irish, or U.S. black speech, from 1680s.
dem: representing pronunciation of them in Jamaican speech, from 1868. As a minced form of damn, attested from late 14c.
donation (n.): early 15c., from Old French donacion (13c.), from Latin donationem (nominative donatio) "a presenting, giving," noun of action from past participle stem of donare "give as a gift," from donum "gift," from PIE *donum "gift" (cognates: Sanskrit danam "offering, present," Old Church Slavonic dani "tribute," Lithuanian duonis "gift," Old Irish dan "gift, endowment, talent," Welsh dawn "gift"), from root *do- "to give" (see date (n.1)).
Draco (n.): northern constellation representing a dragon, from Latin draco "dragon" (see dragon). Identified as such since ancient times.
Druid (n.): 1560s, from French druide, from Latin druidae (plural), from Gaulish Druides, from Celtic compound *dru-wid-, probably representing Old Celtic *derwos "true"/PIE *dru- "tree" (especially oak; see tree (n.)) + *wid- "to know" (see vision). Hence, literally, perhaps, "they who know the oak" (perhaps in allusion to divination from mistletoe). Anglo-Saxon, too, used identical words to mean "tree" and "truth" (treow).

The English form comes via Latin, not immediately from Celtic. The Old Irish form was drui (dative and accusative druid; plural druad); Modern Irish and Gaelic draoi, genitive druadh "magician, sorcerer." Not to be confused with United Ancient Order of Druids, secret benefit society founded in London 1781.
dummy (n.): 1590s, "mute person," from dumb (adj.) + -y (3). Extended by 1845 to "figure representing a person." Used in card games (originally whist) since 1736. Meaning "dolt, blockhead" is from 1796.
-ee: word-forming element in legal English (and in imitation of it), representing the Anglo-French -é ending of past participles used as nouns. As these sometimes were coupled with agent nouns in -or, the two suffixes came to be used as a pair to denote the initiator and the recipient of an action.
-el (1): instrumental suffix, from Old English -ol, -ul, -el, representing PIE *-lo- (see -ule). In modern English usually -le except after -n-.