英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

because [because 词源字典]: because: [14] Because originated in the phrase by cause, which was directly modelled on French par cause. At first it was always followed by of or by a subordinate clause introduced by that or why: ‘The Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified’, St John’s Gospel, 7:39, 1611. But already by the end of the 14th century that and why were beginning to be omitted, leaving because to function as a conjunction, a move which would perhaps have exercised contemporary linguistic purists as much as ‘The reason is because …’ does today. The abbreviated form ’cause first appears in print in the 16th century.
=> cause[because etymology, because origin, 英语词源]
blarney (n.): 1796, from Blarney Stone (which is said to make a persuasive flatterer of any who kiss it), in a castle near Cork, Ireland. As Bartlett explains it, the reason is the difficulty of the feat of kissing the stone where it sits high up in the battlement: "to have ascended it, was proof of perseverence, courage, and agility, whereof many are supposed to claim the honor who never achieved the adventure." So to have kissed the Blarney Stone came to mean "to tell wonderful tales" ["Dictionary of Americanisms," 1848]. The word reached wide currency through Lady Blarney, the smooth-talking flatterer in Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield" (1766). As a verb from 1803.
costermonger (n.): 1510s, "itinerant apple-seller" from coster (see costard) + monger. Sense extended from "apple-seller" to any salesman who plied his wares from a street-cart. Contemptuous use is from Shakespeare ("2 Henry IV"), but reason is unclear.
upsilon (n.): 20th letter of the Greek alphabet, 1640s, from Greek u psilon, literally "a mere (or bare) 'u;' " so called in later Greek in reference to its sound. The exact reason is variously explained, but it seems to have had something to do with distinguishing it from diphthongs.