英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

abash [abash 词源字典]: abash: [14] Abash shares a common ancestry with abeyance [16], although the latter underwent an about-turn in meaning in the 17th century which disguises their relationship. They go back to a Latin verb batāre, meaning ‘yawn’ or ‘gape’. This was borrowed into French as baer, later bayer (it was the source of English bay ‘recessed space’).

The addition of the prefix es- (from Latin ex-) produced esbaer, later e(s)bahir ‘gape with astonishment’, whence, via the present stem e(s)bass-, came English abash, which originally meant ‘stand amazed’ as well as ‘embarrass, discomfit’. (Bashful is a 16thcentury derivative, with elision of the a-, which was first used by the dramatist Nicholas Udall.) Addition of the prefix a- to Old French baer, meanwhile, had given abaer ‘aspire after’, and its noun abeance ‘aspiration, desire’.

In legal terminology, this word was used in French for the condition of a person in expectation or hope of receiving property, but in English the focus quickly became reversed to the property, and its condition of being temporarily without an owner.
=> abeyance, bashful[abash etymology, abash origin, 英语词源]
abstain: abstain: [14] The literal meaning of this word’s ultimate source, Latin abstinēre, was ‘hold or keep away’, and hence ‘withhold’ (the root verb, tenēre, produced many other derivatives in English, such as contain, maintain, obtain, and retain, as well as tenacious, tenant, tenement, tenet, tenor, and tenure).

That is how it was used when it was first introduced into English (via Old French abstenir), and it was not until the 16th century that it began to be used more specifically for refraining from pleasurable activities, particularly the drinking of alcohol. The past participial stem of the Latin verb, abstent-, gave us abstention, while the present participial stem, abstinent-, produced abstinent and abstinence.

There is no connection, incidentally, with the semantically similar abstemious, which comes from a Latin word for alcoholic drink, tēmōtum.
accept: accept: [14] Accept comes ultimately from Latin capere, which meant ‘take’ (and was derived from the same root as English heave). The addition of the prefix ad- ‘to’ produced accipere, literally ‘take to oneself’, hence ‘receive’. The past participle of this, acceptus, formed the basis of a new verb, acceptāre, denoting repeated action, which made its way via Old French into English.
=> heave
accident: accident: [14] Etymologically, an accident is simply ‘something which happens’ – ‘an event’. That was what the word originally meant in English, and it was only subsequently that the senses ‘something which happens by chance’ and ‘mishap’ developed. It comes from the Latin verb cadere ‘fall’ (also the source of such diverse English words as case, decadent, and deciduous).

The addition of the prefix ad- ‘to’ produced accidere, literally ‘fall to’, hence ‘happen to’. Its present participle was used as an adjective in the Latin phrase rēs accidēns ‘thing happening’, and accidēns soon took on the role of a noun on its own, passing (in its stem form accident-) into Old French and thence into English.
=> case, decadent, deciduous
adobe: adobe: [18] Adobe is of Egyptian origin, from the time of the pharaohs. It comes from Coptic tōbe ‘brick’ (the form t.b appears in hieroglyphs). This was borrowed into Arabic, where the addition of the definite article al produced attob ‘the brick’. From Arabic it passed into Spanish (the corridor through which so many Arabic words reached other European languages), and its use by the Spanish-speaking population of North America (for a sun-dried brick) led to its adoption into English in the mid 18th century.
adolescent: adolescent: [15] The original notion lying behind both adolescent and adult is of ‘nourishment’. The Latin verb alere meant ‘nourish’ (alimentary and alimony come from it, and it is related to old). A derivative of this, denoting the beginning of an action, was alēscere ‘be nourished’, hence ‘grow’. The addition of the prefix ad- produced adolēscere.

Its present participial stem, adolēscent- ‘growing’, passed into English as the noun adolescent ‘a youth’ (the adjective appears not to have occurred before the end of the 18th century). Its past participle, adultus ‘grown’, was adopted into English as adult in the 16th century.
=> adult, alimentary, alimony, coalesce, coalition, proletarian, prolific
adventure: adventure: [13] Adventure derives ultimately from a Latin verb meaning ‘arrive’. It originally meant ‘what comes or happens by chance’, hence ‘luck’, but it took a rather pessimistic downturn via ‘risk, danger’ to (in the 14th century) ‘hazardous undertaking’. Its Latin source was advenīre, formed from the prefix adand venīre ‘come’. Its past participle stem, advent-, produced English advent [12] and adventitious [17], but it was its future participle, adventura ‘about to arrive’, which produced adventure.

In the Romance languages in which it subsequently developed (Italian avventura, Spanish aventura, and French aventure, the source of Middle English aventure) the d disappeared, but it was revived in 15th – 16thcentury French in imitation of Latin. The reduced form venture first appears in the 15th century.
=> adventitious, avent, venture
again: again: [OE] The underlying etymological sense of again is ‘in a direct line with, facing’, hence ‘opposite’ and ‘in the opposite direction, back’ (its original meaning in Old English). It comes from a probable Germanic *gagin ‘straight’, which was the source of many compounds formed with on or in in various Germanic languages, such as Old Saxon angegin and Old Norse íg gegn.

The Old English form was ongēan, which would have produced ayen in modern English; however, Norse-influenced forms with a hard g had spread over the whole country from northern areas by the 16th century. The meaning ‘once more, anew’ did not develop until the late 14th century. From Old English times until the late 16th century a prefix-less form gain was used in forming compounds.

It carried a range of meanings, from ‘against’ to ‘in return’, but today survives only in gainsay. The notion of ‘opposition’ is carried through in against, which was formed in the 12th century from again and what was originally the genitive suffix -es, as in always and nowadays. The parasitic -t first appeared in the 14th century.
age: age: [13] Age has undergone considerable transmutations and abbreviations since its beginnings in Latin. Its immediate source in English is Old French aage, which was the product of a hypothetical Vulgar Latin form *aetāticum (the t is preserved in Provençal atge). This was based on Latin aetāt- (stem of aetās), which was a shortening of aevitās, which in turn came from aevum ‘lifetime’.

This entered English in more recognizable form in medieval, primeval, etc; it is related to Greek aión ‘age’, from which English gets aeon [17], and it can be traced back to the same root that produced (via Old Norse eí) the now archaic adverb ay(e) ‘ever’ (as in ‘will aye endure’).
=> aeon, aye
agent: agent: [15] Latin agere, a verb of great semantic breadth (‘drive, lead, act, do’), has been a prolific source of English words. Its past participle, āctus, produced act, action, active, actor, actual, cachet, and exact, while other parts of its paradigm lie behind agile, agitate, ambiguous, coagulate, cogent, cogitate, examine, exigent, exiguous, and prodigal.

Its most obvious offspring, however, are agent (literally ‘(person) doing something’) and agency, formed from the Latin present participial stem agent-. Agere itself is of considerable antiquity, being related to other Indo-European verbs such as Greek ágein ‘drive, lead’, Old Norse aka ‘travel in a vehicle’, and Sanskrit ájati ‘drives’.
=> act, agile, ambiguous, cachet, cogent, demagogue, exact, examine, prodigal
alcohol: alcohol: [16] Originally, alcohol was a powder, not a liquid. The word comes from Arabic alkuhul, literally ‘the kohl’ – that is, powdered antimony used as a cosmetic for darkening the eyelids. This was borrowed into English via French or medieval Latin, and retained this ‘powder’ meaning for some centuries (for instance, ‘They put between the eyelids and the eye a certain black powder made of a mineral brought from the kingdom of Fez, and called Alcohol’, George Sandys, Travels 1615).

But a change was rapidly taking place: from specifically ‘antimony’, alcohol came to mean any substance obtained by sublimation, and hence ‘quintessence’. Alcohol of wine was thus the ‘quintessence of wine’, produced by distillation or rectification, and by the middle of the 18th century alcohol was being used on its own for the intoxicating ingredient in strong liquor.

The more precise chemical definition (a compound with a hydroxyl group bound to a hydrocarbon group) developed in the 19th century.
=> kohl
ale: ale: [OE] Old English ealu ‘ale’ goes back to a Germanic root *aluth-, which also produced Old Norse öl (Scandinavian languages still use alerelated words, whereas other Germanic languages now only use beer-related words; English is the only one to retain both). Going beyond Germanic in time takes us back to the word’s ultimate Indo-European source, a base meaning ‘bitter’ which is also represented in alum and aluminium. Ale and beer seem to have been virtually synonymous to the Anglo- Saxons; various distinctions in usage have developed over the centuries, such as that ale is made without hops, and is heavier (or some would say lighter) than beer, but most of the differences have depended on local usage.

The word bridal is intimately connected with ale. Nowadays used as an adjective, and therefore subconsciously associated with other adjectives ending in -al, in Old English it was a noun, literally ‘bride ale’, that is, a beer-drinking session to celebrate a marriage.
alike: alike: [OE] Alike is an ancient word whose ultimate Germanic source, *galīkam, meant something like ‘associated form’ (*līkam ‘form, body’ produced German leiche ‘corpse’ and Old English lic, from which we get lychgate, the churchyard gate through which a funeral procession passes; and the collective prefix *gameant literally ‘with’ or ‘together’).

In Old English, *galīkam had become gelīc, which developed into Middle English ilik; and from the 14th century onwards the prefix i-, which was becoming progressively rarer in English, was assimilated to the more familiar a-. The verb like is indirectly related to alike, and the adjective, adverb, preposition, and conjunction like was formed directly from it, with the elimination of the prefix.
=> each, like
allegory: allegory: [14] Etymologically, allegory means ‘speaking otherwise’. It comes from a Greek compound based on allos ‘other’ (which is related to Latin alius, as in English alibi and alias, and to English else) and agoreúein ‘speak publicly’ (derived from agorá ‘(place of) assembly’, which is the source of English agoraphobia and is related to gregarious). Greek allēgorein ‘speak figuratively’ produced the noun allēgorīā, which passed into English via Latin and French.
=> aggregate, agoraphobia, alias, alibi, else, gregarious
alley: alley: [14] Alley is related to French aller ‘go’. Old French aler (which came from Latin ambulāre ‘walk’, source of English amble and ambulance) produced the derived noun alee ‘act of walking’, hence ‘place where one walks, passage’.
=> amble, ambulance
alluvial: alluvial: [19] Alluvial material is material that has been washed down and deposited by running water. Hence the term; for its ultimate source, Latin lavere (a variant of lavāre, which produced English latrine, laundry, lava, lavatory, lavish, and lotion), meant ‘wash’. Addition of the prefix ad- ‘to’ changed lavere to luere, giving alluere ‘wash against’.

Derived from this were the noun alluviō (source of the English technical term alluvion ‘alluvium’) and the adjective alluvius, whose neuter form alluvium became a noun meaning ‘material deposited by running water’. English adopted alluvium in the 17th century, and created the adjective alluvial from it in the 19th century. If Latin alluere meant ‘wash against’, abluere meant ‘wash away’.

Its noun form was ablūtiō, which English acquired as ablution in the 14th century.
=> ablution, latrine, laundry, lavatory, lavish, lotion
ambassador: ambassador: [14] Appropriately enough, ambassador is a highly cosmopolitan word. It was borrowed back and forth among several European languages before arriving in English. Its ultimate source appears to be the Indo- European root *ag- ‘drive, lead’, whose other numerous offspring include English act and agent. With the addition of the prefix *amb- ‘around’ (as in ambidextrous), this produced in the Celtic languages of Gaul the noun ambactos, which was borrowed by Latin as ambactus ‘vassal’.

The Latin word then found its way into the Germanic languages – Old English had ambeht ‘servant, messenger’, Old High German ambaht (from which modern German gets amt ‘official position’) – from which it was later borrowed back into medieval Latin as ambactia. This seems to have formed the basis of a verb, *ambactiāre ‘go on a mission’ (from which English ultimately gets embassy), from which in turn was derived the noun *ambactiātor.

This became ambasciator in Old Italian, from which Old French borrowed it as ambassadeur. The word had a be wildering array of spellings in Middle English (such as ambaxadour and inbassetour) before finally settling down as ambassador in the 16th century.
=> embassy
ambush: ambush: [14] Originally, ambush meant literally ‘put in a bush’ – or more precisely ‘hide in a wood, from where one can make a surprise attack’. The hypothetical Vulgar Latin verb *imboscāre was formed from the prefix in- and the noun *boscus ‘bush, thicket’ (a word of Germanic origin, related to English bush). In Old French this became embuschier, and when English acquired it its prefix gradually became transformed into am-.

In the 16th century, various related forms were borrowed into English – Spanish produced ambuscado, Italian was responsible for imboscata, and French embuscade was anglicized was ambuscade – but none now survives other than as an archaism.
=> bush
amethyst: amethyst: [13] The amethyst gets its name from a supposition in the ancient world that it was capable of preventing drunkenness. The Greek word for ‘intoxicate’ was methúskein, which was based ultimately on the noun methú ‘wine’ (source of English methyl, and related to English mead). The addition of the negative prefix a- ‘not’ produced the adjective améthustos, used in the phrase líthos améthustos ‘anti-intoxicant stone’. This was borrowed as a noun into Latin (amethystus), and ultimately into Old French as ametiste. English took it over and in the 16th century re-introduced the -th- spelling of the Latin word.
=> mead, methyl
amphibious: amphibious: [17] The Greek prefix amphimeant ‘both, on both sides’ (hence an amphitheatre [14]: Greek and Roman theatres were semicircular, so two joined together, completely surrounding the arena, formed an amphitheatre). Combination with bios ‘life’ (as in biology) produced the Greek adjective amphibios, literally ‘leading a double life’. From the beginning of its career as an English word it was used in a very wide, general sense of ‘combining two completely distinct or opposite conditions or qualities’ (Joseph Addison, for example, used it as an 18th-century equivalent of modern unisex), but that meaning has now almost entirely given way to the word’s zoological application.

At first, amphibious meant broadly ‘living on both land and water’, and so was applied by some scientists to, for example, seals; but around 1819 the zoologist William Macleay proposed the more precise application, since generally accepted, to frogs, newts, and other members of the class Amphibia whose larvae have gills but whose adults breathe with lungs.
=> biology
ancient: ancient: [14] Like antique, ancient was originally, in Latin, an adjectivized version of the adverb and preposition ‘before’: to ante ‘before’ was added the adjective suffix -ānus, to produce the adjective *anteānus ‘going before’. In Old French this became ancien, and it passed into English via Anglo-Norman auncien. The final -t began to appear in the 15th century, by the same phonetic process as produced it in pageant and tyrant. The now archaic use of ancient as ‘standard, flag’ and as ‘standard-bearer’ (as most famously in Shakespeare’s ‘ancient Pistol’) arose from an alteration of ensign.
=> antique
annual: annual: [14] Annual comes, via Old French annuel, from annuālis, a late Latin adjective based on annus ‘year’ (perhaps as a blend of two earlier, classical Latin adjectives, annuus and annālis – ultimate source of English annals [16]). Annus itself may go back to an earlier, unrecorded *atnos, probably borrowed from an ancient Indo-European language of the Italian peninsula, such as Oscan or Umbrian.

It appears to be related to Gothic athnam ‘years’ and Sanskrit átati ‘go, wander’. The medieval Latin noun annuitās, formed from the adjective annuus, produced French annuité, which was borrowed into English as annuity in the 15th century.
=> annals, anniversary, annuity
ant: ant: [OE] The word ant appears to carry the etymological sense ‘creature that cuts off or bites off’. Its Old English form, æmette, was derived from a hypothetical Germanic compound *aimaitjōn, formed from the prefix *ai- ‘off, away’ and the root *mait- ‘cut’ (modern German has the verb meissen ‘chisel, carve’): thus, ‘the biter’.

The Old English word later developed along two distinct strands: in one, it became emmet, which survived into the 20th century as a dialectal form; while in the other it progressed through amete and ampte to modern English ant. If the notion of ‘biting’ in the naming of the ant is restricted to the Germanic languages (German has ameise), the observation that it and its nest smell of urine has been brought into play far more widely.

The Indo-European root *meigh-, from which ultimately we get micturate ‘urinate’ [18], was also the source of several words for ‘ant’, including Greek múrmēx (origin of English myrmecology ‘study of ants’, and also perhaps of myrmidon [14] ‘faithful follower’, from the Myrmidons, a legendary Greek people who loyally followed their king Achilles in the Trojan war, and who were said originally to have been created from ants), Latin formīca (hence English formic acid [18], produced by ants, and formaldehyde [19]), and Danish myre.

It also produced Middle English mire ‘ant’, the underlying meaning of which was subsequently reinforced by the addition of piss to give pismire, which again survived dialectally into the 20th century.
antique: antique: [16] Originally, in Latin, antique was an adjectivized version of the adverb and preposition ‘before’: to ante ‘before’ was added the adjective suffix -īcus, to produce the adjective antīquus (somewhat later an exactly parallel formation, using the suffix -ānus rather than -īcus, produced the adjective which became English ancient).

English acquired the word either via French antique or directly from Latin. To begin with, and until relatively recently, it meant simply ‘ancient’, or specifically ‘of the ancient world’; it was only towards the end of the 18th century that the modern sense ‘made long ago and therefore collectable’ began to become established. In Italian, antico (from Latin antīquus) was often applied to grotesque carvings found in ancient remains.

It was borrowed into English in the 16th century as an adjective, antic, meaning ‘bizarre’, but also as a noun, usually used in the plural, in the sense ‘absurd behaviour’.
=> ancient, antic
arch: arch: [14] English acquired arch via Old French arche and a hypothetical Vulgar Latin *arca from Latin arcus ‘curve, arch, bow’ (from which English also got arc [14]). When it first came into the language it was still used in the general sense of ‘curve, arc’ as well as ‘curved structure’ (Chaucer in his Treatise on the astrolabe 1391 wrote of ‘the arch of the day … from the sun arising till it go to rest’), but this had died out by the mid 19th century.

Vulgar Latin *arca also produced Italian arcata, which entered English via French as arcade in the 18th century. Arch meaning ‘saucy’ is an adjectival use of the prefix arch- (as in archetype).
=> arc
arm: arm: [OE] The two distinct senses of arm, ‘limb’ and ‘weapon’, both go back ultimately to the same source, the Indo-European base *ar- ‘fit, join’ (which also produced art and article). One derivative of this was Latin arma ‘weapons, tools’, which entered English via Old French armes in the 13th century (the singular form was virtually unknown before the 19th century, but the verb arm, from Latin armāre via Old French armer, came into the language in the 13th century).

The other strand is represented in several European languages, meaning variously ‘joint’, ‘shoulder’, and ‘arm’: Latin armus ‘shoulder’, for example, and Greek harmos ‘joint’. The prehistoric Germanic form was *armaz, from which developed, among others, German, Dutch, Swedish, and English arm.
=> art, article
arrow: arrow: [OE] Appropriately enough, the word arrow comes from the same ultimate Indo- European source that produced the Latin word for ‘bow’ – *arkw-. The Latin descendant of this was arcus (whence English arc and arch), but in Germanic it became *arkhw-. From this basic ‘bow’ word were formed derivatives in various Germanic languages meaning literally ‘that which belongs to the bow’ – that is, ‘arrow’ (Gothic, for instance, had arhwazna).

The Old English version of this was earh, but it is recorded only once, and the commonest words for ‘arrow’ in Old English were strǣl (still apparently in use in Sussex in the 19th century, and related to German strahl ‘ray’) and fiān (which remained in Scottish English until around 1500). Modern English arrow seems to be a 9th-century reborrowing from Old Norse *arw-.
=> arc, arch
arse: arse: [OE] Arse is a word of considerable antiquity, and its relatives are found practically from end to end of the geographical range of the Indo-European language family, from Old Irish err ‘tail’ in the west to Armenian or ‘rump’. Its Indo-European source was *órsos, which produced the Germanic form *arsaz: hence German arsch, Dutch aars, and, via Old English ærs, English arse.

The euphemistic American spelling ass appears to be as recent as the 1930s, although there is one isolated (British) record of it from 1860. The term wheatear, for a thrushlike European bird, is an alteration over time of a Middle English epithet ‘white arse’, after its white rump feathers.
art: art: [13] Like arm, arthritis, and article, art goes back to an Indo-European root *ar-, which meant ‘put things together, join’. Putting things together implies some skill: hence Latin ars ‘skill’. Its stem art- produced Old French art, the source of the English word. It brought with it the notion of ‘skill’, which it still retains; the modern association with painting, sculpture, etc did not begin until the mid 17th century.

Latin derivatives of ars include the verb artīre ‘instruct in various skills’, from which ultimately English gets artisan [16]; and artificium, a compound formed with a variant of facere ‘do, make’, from which we get artificial [14].
=> arm, arthritis, article, artificial, artisan, inert
artesian: artesian: [19] In the 18th century drillings made in Artois (a former northern French province roughly corresponding to the modern Pas-de- Calais) produced springs of water which rose spontaneously to the surface, without having to be pumped. The name of the province, in its erstwhile form Arteis, was bestowed on the phenomenon, and has been so used ever since.
arthritis: arthritis: [16] Greek árthron meant ‘joint’ (it is used in various technical terms in biology, such as arthropod ‘creature, such as an insect, with jointed limbs’). It came from the Indo-European root *ar- ‘put things together, join, fit’, which also produced Latin artus ‘limb’ (source of English article) and English arm, as well as art. The compound arthritis is a Greek formation (-itis was originally simply an adjectival suffix, so arthritis meant ‘of the joints’ – with ‘disease’ understood; its application to ‘inflammatory diseases’ is a relatively modern development); it reached English via Latin.
=> arm, art, article
ask: ask: [OE] The Old English ancestor of ask existed in two main forms: āscian and ācsian. The first produced descendants such as asshe, which died out in the 16th century; the second resulted in axe (still extant in some dialects), which by metathesis – the reversal of the consonant sounds k and s – became modern English ask. Ultimately the word comes from a prehistoric West Germanic verb *aiskōjan (source of German heischen, a poetical term for ‘ask’); cognates in other, non-Germanic, Indo- European languages include Latin aeruscāre ‘beg’ and Sanskrit iccháti ‘seek’.
assault: assault: [13] To assault somebody was originally to ‘jump on’ them. The word comes from a Vulgar Latin compound verb *assaltāre, formed from the prefix ad- ‘to’ and saltāre ‘jump’, a frequentative form (denoting repeated action) of the verb salīre ‘jump’ (which is the source of English salient, and by a similar compounding process produced assail [13]). In Old French this became asauter, and English originally borrowed it as asaute, but in the 16th century the l was reintroduced.
=> assail, somersault
astronomy: astronomy: [13] Astronomy comes via Old French and Latin from Greek astronomíā, a derivative of the verb astronomein, literally ‘watch the stars’. Greek ástron and astér ‘star’ (whence English astral [17] and asterisk [17]) came ultimately from the Indo-European base *ster-, which also produced Latin stella ‘star’, German stern ‘star’, and English star.

The second element of the compound, which came from the verb némein, meant originally ‘arrange, distribute’. At first, no distinction was made between astronomy and astrology. Indeed, in Latin astrologia was the standard term for the study of the stars until Seneca introduced the Greek term astronomia. When the two terms first coexisted in English (astrology entered the language about a century later than astronomy) they were used interchangeably, and in fact when a distinction first began to be recognized between the two it was the opposite of that now accepted: astrology meant simply ‘observation’, whereas astronomy signified ‘divination’.

The current assignment of sense was not fully established until the 17th century.
=> asterisk, astral, star
atlas: atlas: [16] In Greek mythology, Atlas was a Titan who as a punishment for rebelling against the gods was forced to carry the heavens on his shoulders. Hence when the term was first used in English it was applied to a ‘supporter’: ‘I dare commend him to all that know him, as the Atlas of Poetry’, Thomas Nashe on Robert Greene’s Menaphon 1589. In the 16th century it was common to include a picture of Atlas with his onerous burden as a frontispiece in books of maps, and from this arose the habit of referring to such books as atlases (the application is sometimes said to have arisen specifically from such a book produced in the late 16th century by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator (1512–94), published in England in 1636 under the title Atlas).

Atlas also gave his name to the Atlantic ocean. In ancient myth, the heavens were said to be supported on a high mountain in northwestern Africa, represented as, and now named after, the Titan Atlas. In its Greek adjectival form Atlantikós (later Latin Atlanticus) it was applied to the seas immediately to the west of Africa, and gradually to the rest of the ocean as it came within the boundaries of the known world.
=> atlantic
atrocious: atrocious: [17] Traced back to its ultimate source, atrocious meant something not too dissimilar to ‘having a black eye’. Latin āter was ‘black, dark’ (it occurs also in English atrabilious ‘melancholic’ [17] – Greek mélās meant ‘black’), and the stem *-oc-, *-ox meant ‘looking, appearing’ (Latin oculus ‘eye’ and ferox ‘fierce’ – based on ferus ‘wild’, and source of English ferocious – were formed from it, and it goes back to an earlier Indo-European base which also produced Greek ōps ‘eye’ and English eye).

Combined, they formed atrox, literally ‘of a dark or threatening appearance’, hence ‘gloomy, cruel’. English borrowed it (in the stem form atrōci-) originally in the sense ‘wantonly cruel’.
=> eye, ferocious, inoculate, ocular
attach: attach: [14] When English first acquired it, attach meant ‘seize’ or ‘arrest’. It is Germanic in origin, but reached us via Old French atachier. This was an alteration of earlier Old French estachier ‘fasten (with a stake)’, which was based on a hypothetical Germanic *stakōn. The metaphorical meaning ‘arrest’ appears to have arisen in Anglo-Norman, the route by which the word reached English from Old French; the original, literal sense ‘fasten, join’ did not arrive in English until as late as the 18th century, as a reborrowing from modern French attacher.

A similar borrowing of Germanic *stakōn into Italian produced the ancestor of English attack.
=> attack, stake
attain: attain: [14] Unlike contain, maintain, obtain, and the rest of a very long list of English words ending in -tain, attain does not come from Latin tenēre ‘_hold’. Its source is Latin tangere ‘touch’ (as in English tangible and tangent). The addition of the prefix ad- ‘to’ produced attingere ‘reach’, which passed via Vulgar Latin *attangere and Old French ataindre into English.
=> tangent, tangible
attend: attend: [13] Etymologically, attend means ‘stretch to’. It comes originally from Latin attendere, a compound verb formed from the prefix ad- ‘to’ and tendere ‘stretch’ (a descendant of an Indo-European base *ten-, *ton- ‘stretch’ which also produced, among others, Latin tenēre ‘hold’ – source of English contain, maintain, obtain, etc – and English tendon, thin, and tone).

By metaphorical extension ‘stretch to’ became ‘direct one’s attention to’, which was the original meaning of the verb in Old French atendre and subsequently in English. The sense ‘take care of’ developed in the 15th century, ‘be present’ much later, in the 17th century. The noun derivative attention [14] comes from Latin attentiō. Tend meaning ‘look after’ comes mainly from attend, but also partly from intend, in both cases with loss of the first syllable.
=> contain, maintain, obtain, tendon, thin, tone
attorney: attorney: [14] Attorney was formed in Old French from the prefix a- ‘to’ and the verb torner ‘turn’. This produced the verb atorner, literally ‘turn to’, hence ‘assign to’ or ‘appoint to’. Its past participle, atorne, was used as a noun with much the same signification as appointee – ‘someone appointed’ – and hence ‘someone appointed to act as someone else’s agent’, and ultimately ‘legal agent’.

Borrowed into English, over the centuries the term came to mean ‘lawyer practising in the courts of Common Law’ (as contrasted with a solicitor, who practised in the Equity Courts); but it was officially abolished in that sense by the Judicature Act of 1873, and now survives only in American English, meaning ‘lawyer’, and in the title Attorney- General, the chief law officer of a government.
=> turn
aubergine: aubergine: [18] Etymologically, the aubergine is the ‘anti-fart vegetable’. That was the meaning of its ultimate source, Sanskrit vātinganah, so named because it did not produce intestinal gas. This was borrowed into Persian as bādingān, and reached Arabic as (with the definite article al) al-bādindjān. It then made its way with the Moors into the Iberian peninsula: here it produced Portuguese beringela (source of brinjal [18], an Indian and African English term for ‘aubergine’) and, with the definite article retained, Catalan alberginia.

French turned this into aubergine and passed it on to English. In British English it has gradually replaced the earlier eggplant, named after the vegetable’s shape, which American English has retained.
avarice: avarice: [13] The Latin verb avēre meant ‘covet’. One of its derivatives was the adjective avārus ‘greedy’, from which the noun avāritia was formed. This entered English via Old French avarice. Another of its derivatives was the adjective avidus ‘greedy’ which, as well as being the source of English avid [18], produced, via a hypothetical contracted form *audus, the adjective audax ‘bold’, source of English audacity [15].
=> audacity, avid
axis: axis: [14] Axis is at the centre of a complex web of ‘turning’ words. Besides its immediate source, Latin axis, there were Greek áxōn, Sanskrit ákshas, and a hypothetical Germanic *akhsō which produced Old English eax ‘axle’ as well as modern German achse ‘axle, shaft’ and Dutch as; and there could well be a connection with Latin agere (source of English act, agent, etc) in the sense ‘drive’.

Also related is an unrecorded Latin form *acslā, which produced āla ‘wing’ (source of English aileron and aisle); its diminutive was axilla ‘armpit’, from which English gets the adjective axillary [17] and the botanical term axil [18].
=> aileron, aisle, axil
bait: bait: [13] Etymologically, the verb bait means ‘cause to bite’. It comes from Old Norse beita, a causative version of bita ‘bite’ (related to English bite). This took two semantic paths in English. In its aggressive mode, it meant literally ‘set dogs on someone’, and hence by figurative extension ‘harrass, persecute’. More peaceably, it signified ‘feed an animal’.

And this sense of ‘food provided’ is reflected in the noun bait, which comes partly from the verb, partly from the related Old Norse nouns beit ‘pasturage’ and beita ‘fish bait’. Old Norse beita was probably borrowed into Old French as beter, which with the prefix aproduced abeter, source of English abet [14], originally meaning ‘urge on, incite’.
=> abet, bite
bake: bake: [OE] The Old English verb bacan goes back to a prehistoric Germanic base *bak-, which also produced German backen, Dutch bakken, and Swedish baka; its ultimate source was the Indo-European base *bhog-, another descendant of which was Greek phógein ‘roast’. Derivatives of the English verb include batch [15], which comes from Old English *bæcce, literally ‘something baked’, and the name Baxter, which originally meant ‘female baker’.
=> batch
bald: bald: [14] In Middle English times, bald was ballede, which suggests that it may have been a compound formed in Old English with the suffix -ede ‘characterized by, having’. It has been conjectured that the first element in the compound was Old English *ball-, meaning ‘white patch’ or ‘blaze’ on an animal’s head; this may be supported by isolated examples of the use of the adjective to mean (of a horse) ‘whitefaced’ from the 16th to the 18th centuries, and by the obsolete dialectal ball meaning both ‘white patch on the head’ and ‘white-faced horse’.

This would have produced the Old English adjective *bællede or *beallede, which, from ‘having a white blaze’, progressed naturally in meaning to ‘hairless’. The compounds piebald [16] and skewbald [17] are both based on bald: piebald means ‘having black and white patches like a magpie’, while skewbald may be based on Middle English skew ‘(cloudy) skies’ or on Old French escu ‘shield’.
=> piebald, skewbald
bandit: bandit: [16] Etymologically, a bandit is someone who has been ‘banished’ or outlawed. The word was borrowed from Italian bandito, which was a nominal use of the past participle of the verb bandire ‘ban’. The source of this was Vulgar Latin *bannīre, which was formed from the borrowed Germanic base *bann- ‘proclaim’ (from which English gets ban). Meanwhile, in Old French, bannīre had produced banir, whose lengthened stem form baniss- gave English banish [14].
=> ban, banish
banjo: banjo: [18] The origins of banjo are uncertain, but its likeliest source seems to be bandore, the name of a 16th-century stringed instrument similar to the lute. It has been argued that in the speech of Southern US blacks, amongst whom the banjo originated, bandore became banjo, perhaps under the influence of mbanza, a term for a similar instrument in the Kimbundu language of Northern Angola (although it might be more plausible to suggest that mbanza is the immediate source, altered by English-speakers more familiar with bandore). Bandore itself appears to be a variant of pandore or pandora, which comes from Greek pandoura ‘three-stringed lute’.

A more farreaching modification produced mandore, likewise a term for a lutelike instrument. The Italian version of the word, mandola, is familiar in English from its diminutive form, which has given us mandolin [18].
=> mandolin
banyan: banyan: [17] Banyan originally meant ‘Hindu trader’. It is an arabization of Gujarati vāniyān ‘traders’, which comes ultimately from Sanskrit vanija ‘merchant’ (the Portuguese version, banian, produced an alternative English spelling). When European travellers first visited Bandar Abbas, a port on the Persian Gulf, they found there a pagoda which the banyans had built in the shade of a large Indian fig tree. They immediately applied the name banyan to this particular tree, and the term later widened to include all such trees.
barbarous: barbarous: [15] Originally, a barbarous person was a ‘foreigner’, anyone who did not speak your own language. Greek bárbaros meant ‘foreign, ignorant’, and it has been speculated that its ultimate signification was ‘unable to speak intelligibly’ (the related Sanskrit barbaras meant ‘stammering’). English acquired the word from Latin barbarus, a modified Vulgar Latin version of which, *brabus, produced Italian bravo and hence, via French, English brave.
=> brave