英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

above [above 词源字典]: above: [OE] As in the case of about, the a- in above represents on and the -b- element represents by; above (Old English abufan) is a compound based on Old English ufan. This meant both ‘on top’ and ‘down from above’; it is related to over, and is probably descended from a hypothetical West Germanic ancestor *ufana, whose uf- element eventually became modern English up. So in a sense, above means ‘on by up’ or ‘on by over’.
=> by, on, up[above etymology, above origin, 英语词源]
acne: acne: [19] It is ironic that acne, that represents a low point in many teenagers’ lives, comes from acme, ‘the highest point’. The Greeks used akme, which literally meant ‘point’, for referring to spots on the face, but when it came to be rendered into Latin it was mistransliterated as acnē, and the error has stuck. (Acme comes, incidentally, from an Indo-European base *ak- ‘be pointed’, and thus is related to acid, edge, and oxygen.)
=> acid, acme, edge, oxygen
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
air: air: [13] Modern English air is a blend of three strands of meaning from, ultimately, two completely separate sources. In the sense of the gas we breathe it goes back via Old French air and Latin āēr to Greek áēr ‘air’ (whence the aero-compounds of English; see AEROPLANE). Related words in Greek were áērni ‘I blow’ and aúrā ‘breeze’ (from which English acquired aura in the 18th century), and cognates in other Indo-European languages include Latin ventus ‘wind’, English wind, and nirvana ‘extinction of existence’, which in Sanskrit meant literally ‘blown out’.

In the 16th century a completely new set of meanings of air arrived in English: ‘appearance’ or ‘demeanour’. The first known instance comes in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, IV, i: ‘The quality and air of our attempt brooks no division’ (1596). This air was borrowed from French, where it probably represents an earlier, Old French, aire ‘nature, quality’, whose original literal meaning ‘place of origin’ (reflected in another derivative, eyrie) takes it back to Latin ager ‘place, field’, source of English agriculture and related to acre. (The final syllable of English debonair [13] came from Old French aire, incidentally; the phrase de bon aire meant ‘of good disposition’.) The final strand in modern English air comes via the Italian descendant of Latin āēr, aria.

This had absorbed the ‘nature, quality’ meanings of Old French aire, and developed them further to ‘melody’ (perhaps on the model of German weise, which means both ‘way, manner’ and ‘tune’ – its English cognate wise, as in ‘in no wise’, meant ‘song’ from the 11th to the 13th centuries). It seems likely that English air in the sense ‘tune’ is a direct translation of the Italian.

Here again, Shakespeare got in with it first – in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I, i: ‘Your tongue’s sweet air more tunable than lark to shepherd’s ear’ (1590). (Aria itself became an English word in the 18th century.)
=> acre, aeroplane, agriculture, aria, aura, eyrie, malaria, wind
alchemy: alchemy: [14] Alchemy comes, via Old French alkemie and medieval Latin alchimia, from Arabic alkīmīā. Broken down into its component parts, this represents Arabic al ‘the’ and kīmīā, a word borrowed by Arabic from Greek khēmíā ‘alchemy’ – that is, the art of transmuting base metals into gold. (It has been suggested that khēmīā is the same word as Khēmīā, the ancient name for Egypt, on the grounds that alchemy originated in Egypt, but it seems more likely that it derives from Greek khūmós ‘fluid’ – source of English chyme [17] – itself based on the verb khein ‘pour’).

Modern English chemistry comes not directly from Greek khēmíā, but from alchemy, with the loss of the first syllable.
=> chemistry, chyme
alimony: alimony: [17] Alimony is an anglicization of Latin alimōnia, which is based on the verb alere ‘nourish’ (source of alma ‘bounteous’, as in alma mater, and of alumnus). This in turn goes back to a hypothetical root *al-, which is also the basis of English adolescent, adult, altitude (from Latin altus ‘high’), and old.

The original sense ‘nourishment, sustenance’ has now died out, but the specialized ‘support for a former wife’ is of equal antiquity in English. The -mony element in the word represents Latin -mōnia, a fairly meaning-free suffix used for forming nouns from verbs (it is related to -ment, which coincidentally was also combined with alere, to form alimentary), but in the later 20th century it took on a newly productive role in the sense ‘provision of maintenance for a former partner’. Palimony ‘provision for a former non-married partner’ was coined around 1979, and in the 1980s appeared dallymony ‘provision for somebody one has jilted’.
=> adult, altitude, alumnus, old
anther: anther: [18] Greek ánthos originally meant ‘part of a plant which grows above ground’ (this was the basis of the Homeric ‘metaphor’ translated as ‘flower of youth’, which originally referred to the first growth of beard on young men’s faces). Later it narrowed somewhat to ‘flower’. The adjective derived from it was anthērós, which was borrowed into Latin as anthēra, a noun meaning ‘medicine made from flowers’.

In practice, herbalists often made such medicines from the reproductive part of the flower, and so anther came to be applied to the pollen-bearing part of the stamen. More remote semantically, but also derived from Greek ánthos, is anthology [17]. The second element represents Greek logíā ‘collecting’, a derivative of the verb legein ‘gather’ (which is related to legend and logic).

The notion of a collection of flowers, anthologíā, was applied metaphorically to a selection of choice epigrams or brief poems: borrowed into English, via French anthologie or medieval Latin anthologia, it was originally restricted to collections of Greek verse, but by the mid 19th century its application had broadened out considerably. The parallel Latin formation, florilegium, also literally ‘collection of flowers’, has occasionally been used in English for ‘anthology’.
=> anthology
backgammon: backgammon: [17] Backgammon appears to mean literally ‘back game’, although the reason for the name is far from clear (gammon had been used since at least the early 18th century for a particular type of victory in the game, but it is hard to say whether the term for the victory came from the term for the game, or vice versa). Either way, gammon represents Old English gamen, the ancestor of modern English game. The game backgammon goes back far further than the 17th century, of course, but before that it was called tables in English.
=> game
bathos: bathos: [18] Bathos, the descent from the sublime to the commonplace, means etymologically ‘depth’. It represents Greek báthos, a derivative of the adjective bathús ‘deep’ (which has also given English such technical terms as bathyal ‘of the deep sea’, bathymetry, bathyscaphe, and bathysphere). The use of the word in English seems to have been initiated by the poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744), in his Bathos.
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.
between: between: [OE] The second syllable of between is related to two and twin; the word as a whole seems to represent an original phrase meaning something like ‘by two each’. Old English betwēonum reflects a Germanic *twēon, reduced from an earlier *twikhnai; this represents the base *twīkh- (from which we get two) plus an -n suffix with apparently some sort of distributive function. The related betwixt comes ultimately from Germanic *twa ‘two’ and the element *-isk- ‘-ish’.
=> twin, two
bubble: bubble: [14] Several Germanic languages have words that sound like, and mean the same as, bubble – Swedish bubla, for instance, and Dutch bobbel – but all are relatively modern, and there is no evidence to link them to a common source. As likely as not, the whole family of bubble words represents ultimately an attempt to lexicalize the sound of bubbling, by blowing through nearly closed lips.
bugbear: bugbear: [16] Early references to bugbear suggest that it was a sort of bug – ‘frightening creature’ – conjured up to frighten naughty children. It is usually assumed that the second element of the word simply represents the animal ‘bear’, and that the frightening creature was represented as being in the shape of a bear. The modern sense ‘source of annoyance’ developed in the late 19th century.
burk: burk: [20] Although burk is now the commoner spelling, presumably under the influence of the proper name Burk, the original form of the word was berk. It is short for Berkeley (or perhaps Berkshire) hunt, rhyming slang for cunt. (The Berkeley hunt chases foxes in Gloucestershire.) The pronunciation of the word represents, of course, the dialectal or nonstandard version of Berkeley/Berkshire, rather than the /ba:k/ which became standard in southern British English from the 15th century.
chapter: chapter: [13] Ultimately, chapter is the same word as capital. Both came via Old French from Latin capitulum ‘small head’, a diminutive form of caput ‘head’, but whereas capital represents a late, 12th-century borrowing into French in ecclesiastical and legal contexts, chapter is far earlier and therefore shows more differences: in Old French, capitulum became chapitle, later chapitre.

Already in Latin the word was used for ‘section of a book’; the semantic development seems to parallel English head ‘category, section’ (as in ‘heads of agreement’) and the derived heading. The ecclesiastical use of chapter, as a collective term for the canons of a cathedral, originated in the canons’ practice of meeting to read a chapter of Scripture. Latin capitulum in the sense ‘head of a discourse, chapter’ produced the derivative capitulāre ‘draw up under separate headings’.

When its past participle passed into English in the 16th century as the verb capitulate, it was still with this meaning, and it did not narrow down to the more specific ‘make terms of surrender’ until the 17th century.
=> capital, capitulate, cattle, recapitulate
charcoal: charcoal: [14] The words char and charcoal are related, but not in the way commonsense might lead one to suppose: for the verb char [17], originally apparently a charcoal-burner’s term, appears to derive from charcoal. So etymologically, the element char has nothing to do with ‘burning’. There are two main suggestions as to charcoal’s origins: firstly that it comes from Old French charbon ‘charcoal’ (related to English carbon); and secondly that it represents the now obsolete English verb chare (see CHARWOMAN), which in Old English times (cerran) meant ‘turn’.

On the basis of this theory, the etymological meaning of the word would be ‘turning into charcoal’ (for in Old English, coal meant ‘charcoal’ as well as ‘coal’).
chemical: chemical: [16] Essentially chemical, and the related chemistry and chemist, come from alchemy with the initial al- dropped. Alchemy itself is of Arabic origin; al represents the Arabic definite article ‘the’, while the second element was borrowed from Greek khēmíā ‘alchemy’. Loss of al- seems to have taken place originally in French, so the immediate source of the English words was French chimiste and chimique (whence the now obsolete English chemic, on which chemical was based).

At first this whole group of words continued to be used in the same sense as its progenitor alchemy; it is not really until the 17th century that we find it being consistently applied to what we would now recognize as the scientific discipline of chemistry.
=> alchemy
cock: cock: [OE] The word cock is probably ultimately of onomatopoeic origin, imitative of the male fowl’s call (like the lengthier English cock-adoodle- doo [16], French coquerico, and German kikeriki). Beyond that it is difficult to go with any certainty; it reflects similar words in other languages, such as medieval Latin coccus and Old Norse kokkr, but which if any the English word was borrowed from is not clear.

It has been suggested that it goes back to a Germanic base *kuk-, of which a variant was the source of chicken, but typical Old English spellings, such as kok and kokke, suggest that it may have been a foreign borrowing rather than a native Germanic word – perhaps pointing to Germanic coccus. The origin of the interconnected set of senses ‘spout, tap’, ‘hammer of a firearm’, and ‘penis’ is not known; it is possible that it represents an entirely different word, but the fact that German hahn ‘hen’ has the same meanings suggests otherwise.

Of derived words, cocker [19], as in ‘cocker spaniel’, comes from cocking, the sport of shooting woodcock, and cocky [18] is probably based on the notion of the cock as a spirited or swaggering bird, lording it over his hens (there may well be some connection with cock ‘penis’, too, for there is an isolated record of cocky meaning ‘lecherous’ in the 16th century). Cockerel [15] was originally a diminutive form.
=> chicken, cocky
coleslaw: coleslaw: [18] Cole is an ancient and now little used English word for plants of the cabbage family, such as cabbage or rape (it comes ultimately from Latin caulis ‘cabbage’, whose underlying meaning was ‘hollow stem’ – see CAULIFLOWER). It was used in the partial translation of Dutch koolsla when that word was borrowed into English in the late 18th century. Kool, Dutch for ‘cabbage’, became cole, but sla presented more of a problem (it represents a phonetically reduced form of salade ‘salad’), and it was rendered variously as -slaugh (now defunct) and -slaw. (Interestingly enough, the earliest record of the word we have, from America in the 1790s – it was presumably borrowed from Dutch settlers – is in the form cold slaw, indicating that even then in some quarters English cole was not a sufficiently familiar word to be used for Dutch kool. Coldslaw is still heard, nowadays as a folketymological alteration of coleslaw.)
=> cauliflower, cole, salad
colonel: colonel: [17] Historically, a colonel was so called because he commanded the company at the head of a regiment, known in Italian as the compagna colonnella, literally the ‘little-column company’; hence the commander himself took the title colonnella. The word colonnella is a diminutive form of colonna, which is descended from Latin columna ‘pillar’ (source of English column).

It appears first to have entered English via French in the form coronel, in which the first l had mutated to r. Spellings with this r occur in English from the 17th and 18th centuries, and it is the source of the word’s modern pronunciation. Colonel represents a return to the original Italian spelling.
=> column
comely: comely: [13] Old English had an adjective cymlic ‘beautiful’ (no relation at all to come), but this seems to have died out around the year 1000, and it is likely that comely, which first appears in the early 13th century, represents a reduced version of becomely, an adjective long since defunct of which there are a few records towards the end of the 12th century. This meant ‘suitable, becoming’ (it was formed, of course, from the verb become), an early meaning of comely; its other semantic strand, ‘beautiful’, is probably a memory of Old English cymlic.
=> become
comply: comply: [17] Like accomplish, complete, complement, and compliment, comply comes from Latin complēre ‘fill up, finish’. It was originally acquired in the 14th century, via Old French complire, but does not seem to have survived, and the sudden explosion in its use in the early 17th century represents a new borrowing, from Italian complire. Italian had the word from Spanish cumplir, in which the meaning ‘be courteous’ had developed. This passed into English, and though long defunct, seems to have been the basis of the modern English sense ‘be amenable or obedient’. Compliant [17] is an English development.
=> complete, compliant, compliment
consult: consult: [17] The -sult element of consult represents a prehistoric Indo-European *sal-, which may be related to Sanskrit sar- ‘go’. It was used with the prefix com- ‘together’ to form the Latin verb consulere ‘discuss, consult’. An altered form developed, consultāre denoting repeated action, and this was the source, via French consulter of the English verb. Related to Latin consulere were the nouns consul, borrowed into English in the 14th century, and consilium, ultimate source of English counsel [13].
=> consul, counsel
corduroy: corduroy: [18] Popular etymology usually associates corduroy with a supposed French corde du roy ‘cord of the king’ or even couleur du roy ‘king’s colour’ (the original corduroy having according to this theory been purple), but in fact there is no concrete evidence to substantiate this. A more likely explanation is that the word’s first syllable represents cord in the sense ‘ribbed fabric’, and that the second element is the now obsolete noun duroy ‘coarse woollen fabric’ [17], of unknown origin.
cork: cork: [14] The earliest ascertainable ancestor of cork is Spanish alcorque ‘cork sole’, which passed into English via Dutch kork. The initial al-, of course, suggests that this was of Arabic origin (al being the Arabic definite article), and it seems likely that it represents Arabic al-qūrq, which some have suggested came from Latin cortex ‘bark’, source of English cortex [17]. The use of cork for a bottle-stopper made from cork dates from the early 16th century.
=> cortex
cover: cover: [13] Cover comes ultimately from Latin cooperīre, a compound verb formed from the intensive prefix com- ‘completely’ and operīre ‘cover’ (a relative of aperīre ‘open’, from which English gets aperient). It passed into English via Old French cuvrir or covrir. Derivatives include coverlet [13] (in which the final element represents not the diminutive suffix but French lit ‘bed’, the word being a borrowing from Anglo-Norman covrelit, literally ‘bed-cover’) and kerchief (literally ‘head-cover’), as in handkerchief.
=> aperient, discover
cue: cue: Cue has several meanings in English, and it is not clear whether they can all be considered to be the same word. In the case of ‘pigtail’ and ‘billiard stick’, both of which appeared in the 18th century, cue is clearly just a variant spelling of queue, but although cue ‘actor’s prompt’ [16] has been referred by some to the same source (on the grounds that it represents the ‘tail’ – from French queue ‘tail’ – of the previous actor’s speech) there is no direct evidence for this.

Another suggestion is that it represents qu, an abbreviation of Latin quando ‘when’ which was written in actor’s scripts to remind them when to come in.
=> queue
daffodil: daffodil: [16] Originally, this word was affodil, and referred to a plant of the lily family, the asphodel; it came from medieval Latin affodillus, and the reason for the change from asph- (or asf-, as it often was in medieval texts) to aff- is probably that the s in medieval manuscripts looked very like an f. The first evidence of its use to refer to a ‘daffodil’, rather than an ‘asphodel’, comes in the middle of the 16th century. It is not entirely clear where the initial d came from, but the likeliest explanation is that daffodil represents Dutch de affodil ‘the daffodil’ (the Dutch were then as now leading exponents of bulb cultivation).
dais: dais: [13] Ultimately, dais and disc are the same word. Both came from Latin discus ‘quoit’, which by medieval times had come to mean ‘table’ (see DESK). Its Old French descendant was deis, which was borrowed into Middle English as deis. It died out in English around 1600, but it survived in Scottish English, and was revived in England by antiquarians, its spelling based on the modern French form dais. Historically it is a monosyllabic word, and the modern two-syllable pronunciation represents an attempt to render the unfamiliar French word.
=> desk, disc, dish
decline: decline: [14] The notion underlying decline is of ‘bending away’. It comes via Old French decliner from Latin dēclināre ‘turn aside, go down’, a compound verb formed from the prefix dē-, ‘away, aside’ and clināre ‘bend’, which also produced English incline and recline and is related to lean. Its Latin nominal derivative dēclinātiō has bifurcated in English, to produce declination [14] and, via Old French declinaison, declension [15].

The latter is used only in the specialized grammatical sense ‘set of inflectional endings of a noun’, already present in Latin, which derives from the concept that every inflected form of a word represents a ‘falling away’ from its uninflected base form (the same underlying notion appears in the term oblique case ‘any grammatical sense other than the nominative or vocative’, and indeed the word case itself, whose etymological meaning is ‘fall’; and there are perhaps traces of it in inflection, literally ‘bending’).
=> declension, incline, lean, recline
defy: defy: [14] The underlying notion of defy is of the renunciation of allegiance. It comes via Old French defier from a Vulgar Latin *disfidāre ‘renounce one’s faith’, a compound verb formed from the prefix dis-, denoting reversal, and Latin fīdus ‘trusting’. This adjective came from a lengthened variant of the stem which produced fidēs ‘faith’, source of English faith.

The word’s current main sense represents a slight shift from ‘being disloyal’ to actively ‘challenging someone’s power’. The verb’s noun derivative defiance [14], borrowed from Old French, has a first cousin in diffidence [15], originally ‘distrustfulness’, which came from the classical Latin compound verb diffidere ‘mistrust’.
=> diffidence, faith
degree: degree: [13] Etymologically, degree means ‘step down’, a sense revealed more clearly in its relative degrade [14]. It comes via Old French degre from Vulgar Latin *dēgradus, a compound noun formed from the prefix dē- ‘down’ and gradus ‘step’ (source of English gradual and a wide range of other words). The word’s modern meanings, such as ‘academic rank’ and ‘unit of temperature’, come from an underlying abstract notion of a hierarchy of steps or ranks. Degrade represents a parallel but distinct formation, originally coined as ecclesiastical Latin dēgradāre and passed into English via Old French degrader.
=> degrade, gradual, progress
demagogue: demagogue: [17] A demagogue is literally a ‘leader of the people’. The word represents Greek demagōgós, a compound formed from demos ‘common people’ and agōgós ‘leader’. (This was derived from ágein ‘drive, lead’, a verb related to Latin agere ‘do’, and hence to its host of English descendants, from act to prodigal.) In ancient Greece the term was applied particularly to a set of unofficial leaders drawn from the common people who controlled the government of Athens in the 4th century BC, and whose irresponsible rule (as their critics saw it) has given demagogue a bad name ever since.
=> act, agent
deputy: deputy: [16] A deputy is literally ‘someone who has been deputed to act on someone else’s behalf’. It represents a reformulation of the Middle English noun depute. This was borrowed from the past participle of Old French deputer (source of the English verb depute [15] and hence of deputation [16]), which in turn came from late Latin dēputāre ‘assign, allot’.

In classical times this meant literally ‘cut off’ (it was a compound verb formed from the prefix dē- ‘off’ and putāre, which meant ‘cut’ – as in amputate – as well as ‘esteem, consider, reckon, think’ – as in compute, dispute, impute, and repute).
=> amputate, compute, count, dispute, impute, putative, repute
descant: descant: [14] Etymologically, descant is a parallel formation to English part song. English acquired it via Old French deschant from medieval Latin discantus ‘refrain’, a compound noun formed from the prefix dis- ‘apart’ and cantus ‘song’. The notion originally underlying it is of a separate vocal line ‘apart’ from the main musical theme. The Middle English form of the word was deschaunt; descant represents a partial 16th-century reversion to Latin discantus.
=> canto, chant
deteriorate: deteriorate: [16] The meaning of deteriorate resides etymologically in its first syllable, which represents the Latin preposition dē ‘down’. To this was added the adjectival suffix -ter, to produce *dēter ‘bad’, and this in turn was modified with the comparative suffix -ior to dēterior ‘worse’. Dēterior formed the basis of the verb dēteriorāre ‘get worse’, source of English deteriorate.
dismiss: dismiss: [15] Ultimately, dismiss and demise [16] are the same word: both come from Old French desmis or demis ‘sent away’. These in turn came from dismissus, the medieval descendant of Latin dīmissus, which was the past participle of dīmittere, a compound verb formed from dis- ‘away’ and mittere ‘send’. In the case of dismiss, English originally acquired the word, more logically, in the form dismit, based on the Latin infinitive, but in the late 15th century dismiss, in the past participial form dismissed modelled on the French past participle, began to replace it. Demise comes from Anglo-Norman *demise, which represents a nominal use of the feminine form of Old French demis.

It was originally a technical legal term signifying the transference of property or title, and only in the 18th century came to be used for the ‘death’ which often brought this about.
=> commit, demise, mission, transmit
domino: domino: [18] The word domino was borrowed from French, where it originally signified (in the 16th century) a sort of hooded cloak worn by priests. It presumably represents a form of Latin dominus ‘lord, master’, but the reason for the application has never been satisfactorily explained (one suggestion is that it comes from the ritual formula benedicamus Domino ‘let us bless the Lord’).

By the time English acquired it, it had come to mean ‘hooded cloak with a halfmask, worn at masquerades’, and by the 19th century it was being used for the mask itself. It is far from clear whether the application to the game played with small rectangular blocks, which dates in English from the 19th century, represents a new use of the same word or a return to the original Latin, but either way the reason behind the usage is not known.

A possibility that has been advanced is that the winner of the game originally shouted domino! ‘lord!’.
duck: duck: [OE] A duck is a bird that ‘ducks’ – as simple as that. It gets its name from its habit of diving down under the surface of the water. There is no actual record of an English verb duck until the 14th century, but it is generally assumed that an Old English verb *dūcan did exist, which would have formed the basis of the noun duck. It came from a prehistoric West Germanic verb *dukjan, which also produced German tauchen ‘dive’.

English is the only language which uses this word for the bird, although Swedish has the term dykand, literally ‘dive-duck’, which refers to the ‘diver’, a sort of large waterbird. Nor is it the original English word: the Anglo-Saxons mainly called the duck ened, a term which survived until the 15th century. This represents the main Indo-European name for the duck, which comes from an original *anə ti- and is found in Greek nessa, Latin anas, German ente, Dutch eend, Swedish and, and Russian utka.
dupe: dupe: [17] English borrowed dupe from French, where it was probably originally a humorous application of a dialect word for a ‘hoopoe’, an extravagantly crested bird whose flamboyant appearance seems to have made it the butt of jokes. It presumably represents ultimately an alteration of Old French huppe ‘hoopoe’, sometimes explained as being a conflation of de huppe ‘of the hoopoe’. (English hoopoe [17] is an alteration of an earlier hoop, which came from Old French huppe; its ultimate source was Latin upupa, which originated as an imitation of the bird’s cry.)
=> hoopoe
ember: ember: [OE] Ember goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *aimuzjōn, although it is possible that the modern English word represents a borrowing from the related Old Norse eimyrja rather than a direct line of descent from Old English ǣmyrge. The ember of Ember days [10], incidentally, ‘days following certain Christian festivals’, is a completely different word. It comes from Old English ymbryne ‘circuit’, literally ‘running round’, a compound formed from ymb ‘round’ and ryne ‘course, running’, a relative of modern English run. It was applied to these particular days of the Christian calendar because they ‘come round’ four times a year.
extra: extra: [18] In its modern English use, ‘beyond what is normal’ or ‘additional’, extra is probably an abbreviation of extraordinary [15], in which the prefix represents Latin extrā ‘outside, beyond’. This in turn was short for exterā, the ablative feminine case of the adjective exterus ‘outer’ (from which English gets exterior [16]). And exterus itself began life as a compound form based on Latin ex ‘out’.
=> exterior, extreme
fade: fade: [14] Fade comes from Old French fader, a derivative of the adjective fade ‘faded, vapid’. This in turn came from Vulgar Latin *fatidus, which probably represents an alteration of Latin fatuus ‘stupid, insipid’ (source of English fatuous [17]) under the influence of Latin vapidus ‘flat, lifeless’ (source of English vapid).
=> fatuous, vapid
file: file: The file for smoothing and rubbing [OE] and the file for storing things in [16] are quite different words. The former comes from a prehistoric Germanic *fikhalā (source also of German feile and Dutch vijl), which goes back ultimately to Indo-European *pik-, *peik-, denoting ‘cut’. The latter, on the other hand, comes from Old French fil, a descendant of Latin filum ‘thread’, which was applied to a piece of string or wire suspended from two points and used for hanging documents and records on for easy reference.

As methods of document storage and retrieval became more sophisticated, the word file followed them. The later file ‘(military) column’, first recorded at the end of the 16th century, probably represents a reborrowing from French, but it is ultimately the same word. Fillet [14] originated as a diminutive form of Latin filum.
=> filigree, fillet
firm: firm: [14] Firm comes ultimately from Latin firmus ‘stable, strong, immovable’. In its adjectival use, the English word’s semantic line of descent from its Latin original is perfectly clear, but the noun presents a very different story. From firmus was derived the verb firmāre ‘make firm, fix’, which in post-classical times came to mean ‘confirm’.

It passed into Italian as firmare, which was used in the sense ‘confirm by one’s signature’, hence simply ‘sign’. It formed the basis of a noun firma ‘signature’, and by extension the ‘name under which a business is carried on’, and finally the ‘business’ itself. English took the noun over with the latter two meanings in the 18th century. Other English words that trace their ancestry back to Latin firmus are firmament [13], from Latin firmāmentum (this originally meant simply ‘strengthening, support’, and acquired the sense ‘sky’ in post-classical times as a literal Biblical translation of Greek steréōma ‘heavenly vault’, a derivative of stereós ‘firm’, which in turn was a literal translation of Hebrew rāqī a ‘heavenly vault’, also derived from a word meaning ‘firm’); furl [16], originally a blend formed in Old French from ferm ‘firm’ and lier ‘tie’ (a relative of English liable); and farm, whose semantic history is quite similar to that of the noun firm.
=> farm, firmament, furl
geezer: geezer: [19] Originally, a geezer seems to have been ‘someone who went around in disguise’. The word probably represents a dialectal pronunciation of the now obsolete guiser ‘someone wearing a masquerade as part of a performance, mummer’. This was a derivative of guise [13], which, together with disguise [14], goes back ultimately to prehistoric Germanic *wīsōn, ancestor of archaic English wise ‘manner’.
=> disguise, guise, wise
ghetto: ghetto: [17] English acquired ghetto from Italian, but its precise history is uncertain. Among the suggestions are that it represents Italian getto ‘foundry’, from a Jewish enclave in Venice established on the site of a medieval foundry in 1516; that it is short for Italian borghetto, a diminutive form of borgo ‘settlement outside city walls’ (to which English borough is related); and that it was an alteration of Latin Aegyptus ‘Egypt’, presumably an allusion to the captivity of the Jews in Egypt.
gift: gift: [13] Prehistoric Germanic *geb-, the source from which English gets the verb give, produced the derivative *geftiz. This passed into Old English as gift, which, as far as is known, meant only ‘bride price’, and seems to have died out by the Middle English period. Modern English gift represents a borrowing of the related Old Norse gipt or gift. (Modern German, Swedish, and Danish gift and Dutch gif are used euphemistically for ‘poison’.)
=> give
gravy: gravy: [14] To begin with, the word gravy signified a sort of spiced stock-based sauce served with white meat; it was not until the 16th century that its modern sense ‘meat juices’ or ‘sauce made from them’ emerged. Its origins are problematical. It is generally agreed that its v represents a misreading of an n in the Old French word, grané, from which it was borrowed (modern v was written u in medieval manuscripts, and was often very hard to distinguish from n); but what the source of grané was is not clear.

The favourite candidate is perhaps grain (source of English grain), as if ‘sauce flavoured with grains of spice’, but graine ‘meat’ has also been suggested.
=> grain
groundsel: groundsel: [OE] The -sel of groundsel represents Old English swelgan ‘swallow’ (ancestor of modern English swallow), and if ground- genuinely represents ground, then groundsel would mean etymologically ‘groundswallower’ – presumably a reference to its rapid and invasive growth. However, in early texts the form gundæswelgiæ appears, the first element of which suggests Old English gund ‘pus’. If this is the word’s true origin, it would mean literally ‘pus-swallower’, an allusion to its use in poultices to absorb pus, and groundsel would be a variant introduced through association with ground.
=> swallow