英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

abandon [abandon 词源字典]: abandon: [14] The Old French verb abandoner is the source of abandon. It was based on a bandon, meaning literally ‘under control or jurisdiction’, which was used in the phrase mettre a bandon ‘put someone under someone else’s control’ – hence ‘abandon them’. The word bandon came, in altered form, from Latin bannum ‘proclamation’, which is circuitously related to English banns ‘proclamation of marriage’ and is an ancestor of contraband.
=> banns, contraband[abandon etymology, abandon origin, 英语词源]
above: 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
abstruse: abstruse: [16] It is not clear whether English borrowed abstruse from French abstrus(e) or directly from Latin abstrūsus, but the ultimate source is the Latin form. It is the past participle of the verb abstrūdere, literally ‘thrust’ (trūdere) ‘away’ (ab). (Trūdere contributed other derivatives to English, including extrude and intrude, and it is related to threat.) The original, literal meaning of abstruse was ‘concealed’, but the metaphorical ‘obscure’ is just as old in English.
abyss: abyss: [16] English borrowed abyss from late Latin abyssus, which in turn derived from Greek ábussos. This was an adjective meaning ‘bottomless’, from a- ‘not’ and bussós ‘bottom’, a dialectal variant of buthós (which is related to bathys ‘deep’, the source of English bathyscape). In Greek the adjective was used in the phrase ábussos limnē ‘bottomless lake’, but only the adjective was borrowed into Latin, bringing with it the meaning of the noun as well.

In medieval times, a variant form arose in Latin – abysmus. It incorporated the Greek suffix -ismós (English -ism). It is the source of French abîme, and was borrowed into English in the 13th century as abysm (whence the 19th-century derivative abysmal). It began to be ousted by abyss in the 16th century, however, and now has a distinctly archaic air.
accelerate: accelerate: [16] Accelerate comes from Latin accelerāre, a compound verb formed from the intensive prefix ad- (ac- before /k/ sounds) and celerāre ‘hurry’. Celerāre, in turn, derived from the adjective celer ‘fast’ (which gave English celerity [15] and is ultimately related to hold).
accomplice: accomplice: [15] This word was borrowed into English (from French) as complice (and complice stayed in common usage until late in the 19th century). It comes from Latin complex, which is related to English complicated, and originally meant simply ‘an associate’, without any pejorative associations. The form accomplice first appears on the scene in the late 15th century (the first record of it is in William Caxton’s Charles the Great), and it probably arose through a misanalysis of complice preceded by the indefinite article (a complice) as acomplice. It may also have been influenced by accomplish or accompany.
=> complicated
accoutre: accoutre: [16] Accoutre is related to both couture and sew. English borrowed it from French accoutrer, which meant ‘equip with something, especially clothes’. A stage earlier, Old French had acoustrer, formed from cousture (whence couture) and the prefix a-. This came from Vulgar Latin *consūtūra, literally ‘sewn together’, from con- ‘together’ and sūtūra ‘sewn’ (whence English suture); sūtūra in turn came from the past participial stem of Latin suere, which derived from the same Indo- European root as English sew.
=> couture, sew, suture
achieve: achieve: [14] Achieve is related to chief. It comes from Old French achever ‘bring to an end’, or literally ‘bring to a head’, which was based on the phrase a chief ‘to a head’ (chief derives ultimately from Latin caput ‘head’). The heraldic meaning of achievement, ‘coat of arms’, comes from the notion that the escutcheon was granted as a reward for a particular achievement. Over the centuries it has evolved an alternative form, hatchment [16].
=> chief, hatchment
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
acolyte: acolyte: [14] Acolyte comes, via Old French and/or medieval Latin, from Greek akólouthos ‘following’. This was formed from the prefix a- (which is related to homos ‘same’) and the noun keleuthos ‘path’, and it appears again in English in anacolouthon [18] (literally ‘not following’), a technical term for lack of grammatical sequence. The original use of acolyte in English was as a minor church functionary, and it did not acquire its more general meaning of ‘follower’ until the 19th century.
=> anacolouthon
acoustic: acoustic: [17] Appropriately enough, acoustic may be distantly related to hear. It first appeared in English in Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning 1605, borrowed from Greek akoustikós. This in turn was derived from the Greek verb for ‘hear’, akoúein, which, it has been speculated, may have some connection with *khauzjan, the original Germanic source of English hear, not to mention German hören and Dutch horen (as well as with Latin cavēre ‘be on one’s guard’, and hence with English caution and caveat).
=> caution, caveat, hear
acquit: acquit: [13] Acquit is ultimately related to quiet. The Latin noun quies, from which we get quiet, was the basis of a probable verb *quietare, later *quitare, whose original meaning, ‘put to rest’, developed to ‘settle’, as in ‘settle a debt’. With the addition of the prefix ad- this passed into Old French as a(c)quiter, and thence into English (still with the ‘settling or discharging debts’ meaning). The currently most common sense, ‘declare not guilty’, did not appear until the 14th century, and the most recent meaning, ‘conduct oneself in a particular way’, developed from the notion of discharging one’s duties.
=> quiet
acrid: acrid: [18] Acrid is related to acid, and probably owes its second syllable entirely to that word. It is based essentially on Latin acer ‘sharp, pungent’, which, like acid, acute, oxygen, and edge, derives ultimately from an Indo-European base *ak- meaning ‘be pointed or sharp’. When this was imported into English in the 18th century, the ending -id was artificially grafted on to it, most likely from the semantically similar acid.
=> acid, acrylic, acute, edge, eglantine, oxygen, paragon
acrobat: acrobat: [19] The Greek adjective ákros meant ‘topmost, at the tip or extremity’ (it derives ultimately from the Indo-European base *akmeaning ‘be pointed or sharp’, which also gave rise to acid, acute, oxygen, and edge). It crops up in acrophobia ‘fear of heights’; in acropolis ‘citadel’, literally ‘upper city’; in acromegaly ‘unnaturally enlarged condition of the hands, feet, and face’, literally ‘large extremities’; and in acronym, literally ‘word formed from the tips of words’. Acrobat itself means literally ‘walking on tiptoe’.

The -bat morpheme comes from Greek baínein ‘walk’, which is closely related to basis and base, and is also connected with come. Akrobátēs existed as a term in Greek, and reached English via French acrobate.
=> acid, acute, edge, oxygen
add: add: [14] Etymologically, add means simply ‘put to’. Its source is Latin addere, a compound verb formed from the prefix ad- ‘to’ and the stem -dere ‘put’ (which is related to English do). Its original meaning in English was simply ‘join one thing to another’; its specific mathematical use did not develop until the early 16th century.
=> do
adjutant: adjutant: [17] An adjutant was formerly simply an ‘assistant’, but the more specific military sense of an officer who acts as an aide to a more senior officer has now virtually ousted this original meaning. The word comes from a Latin verb for ‘help’, and is in fact related to English aid. Latin adjuvāre ‘help’ developed a new form, adjūtāre, denoting repeated action, and the present participial stem of this, adjutant- ‘helping’, was borrowed into English.
=> aid, coadjutor
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
aesthetic: aesthetic: [18] In strict etymological terms, aesthetic relates to perception via the senses. It comes ultimately from the Greek verb aísthesthai ‘perceive’ (which is related to Latin audīre ‘hear’), and this meaning is preserved in anaesthetic, literally ‘without feeling’. The derived adjective aisthētikós reached Western Europe via modern Latin aesthēticus, and was first used (in its Germanized form ästhetisch) in the writings of the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).

Here, it retained its original sense, ‘perceptual’, but its use by A T Baumgarten as the title (Æsthetica) of a work on the theory of beauty in art (1750) soon led to its adoption in its now generally accepted meaning.
=> audible, audition
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
aggregate: aggregate: [15] Etymologically, aggregate contains the notion of a collection of animals. It comes from greg-, the stem of the Latin noun grex ‘flock, herd’ (also the source of gregarious). This formed the basis of a verb aggregāre ‘collect together’, whose past participle aggregātus passed into English as aggregate. Latin grex is related to Greek agorā ‘open space, market place’, from which English gets agoraphobia.
=> agoraphobia, egregious, gregarious, segregate
agiotage: agiotage: [19] Agiotage is the speculative buying and selling of stocks and shares. The term was borrowed from French, where it was based on agioter ‘speculate’, a verb formed from the noun agio ‘premium paid on currency exchanges’. English acquired agio in the 17th century (as with so many other banking and financial terms, directly from Italian – aggio). This Italian word is thought to be an alteration of a dialectal form lajjē, borrowed from medieval Greek allagion ‘exchange’. This in turn was based on Greek allagē ‘change’, which derived ultimately from állos ‘other’ (a word distantly related to English else).
=> else
agony: agony: [14] Agony is one of the more remote relatives of that prolific Latin verb agere (see AGENT). Its ultimate source is the Greek verb ágein ‘lead’, which comes from the same Indo- European root as agere. Related to ágein was the Greek noun agón, originally literally ‘a bringing of people together to compete for a prize’, hence ‘contest, conflict’ (which has been borrowed directly into English as agon, a technical term for the conflict between the main characters in a work of literature).

Derived from agón was agōníā ‘(mental) struggle, anguish’, which passed into English via either late Latin agōnia or French agonie. The sense of physical suffering did not develop until the 17th century; hitherto, agony had been reserved for mental stress. The first mention of an agony column comes in the magazine Fun in 1863.
=> antagonist
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
akimbo: akimbo: [15] Akimbo was borrowed from Old Norse. Its original English spelling (which occurs only once, in the Tale of Beryn 1400) was in kenebowe, which suggests a probable Old Norse precursor *i keng boginn (never actually discovered), meaning literally ‘bent in a curve’ (Old Norse bogi is related to English bow); hence the notion of the arms sticking out at the side, elbows bent. When the word next appears in English, in the early 17th century, it has become on kenbow or a kenbo, and by the 18th century akimbo has arrived.
=> bow
alas: alas: [13] In origin alas was an exclamation of weariness rather than grief. Latin lassus ‘weary’ (related to let ‘allow’ and source of lassitude) passed into Old French as las which, with the addition of the exclamation a ‘ah’, became alas.
=> lassitude, let
alibi: alibi: [18] In Latin, alibi means literally ‘somewhere else’. It is the locative form (that is, the form expressing place) of the pronoun alius ‘other’ (which is related to Greek allos ‘other’ and English else). When first introduced into English it was used in legal contexts as an adverb, meaning, as in Latin, ‘elsewhere’: ‘The prisoner had little to say in his defence; he endeavoured to prove himself Alibi’, John Arbuthnot, Law is a bottomless pit 1727.

But by the end of the 18th century it had become a noun, ‘plea of being elsewhere at the time of a crime’. The more general sense of an ‘excuse’ developed in the 20th century. Another legal offspring of Latin alius is alias. This was a direct 16th-century borrowing of Latin aliās, a form of alius meaning ‘otherwise’.
=> alias, else
alien: alien: [14] The essential notion contained in alien is of ‘otherness’. Its ultimate source is Latin alius ‘other’ (which is related to English else). From this was formed a Latin adjective aliēnus ‘belonging to another person or place’, which passed into English via Old French alien. In Middle English an alternative version alient arose (in the same way as ancient, pageant, and tyrant came from earlier ancien, pagin, and tyran), but this died out during the 17th century.

The verb alienate ‘estrange’ or ‘transfer to another’s ownership’ entered the language in the mid 16th century, eventually replacing an earlier verb alien (source of alienable and inalienable).
=> alibi, else
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
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
all: all: [OE] Words related to all are found throughout the Germanic languages (German all, Dutch al, Old Norse allr, Gothic alls, for instance). They can probably all be traced back to a hypothetical Germanic ancestor *alnaz. Connections outside Germanic are not known, unless Lithuanian aliai ‘completely’ is a relative.
allege: allege: [14] Allege is related to law, legal, legislation, legation, and litigation. Its original source was Vulgar Latin *exlitigāre, which meant ‘clear of charges in a lawsuit’ (from ex- ‘out of’ and litigāre ‘litigate’). This developed successively into Old French esligier and Anglo- Norman alegier, from where it was borrowed into English; there, its original meaning was ‘make a declaration before a legal tribunal’.

Early traces of the notion of making an assertion without proof can be detected within 50 years of the word’s introduction into English, but it took a couple of centuries to develop fully. The hard g of allegation suggests that though it is ultimately related to allege, it comes from a slightly different source: Latin allēgātiō, from allēgāre ‘adduce’, a compound verb formed from ad- ‘to’ and lēgāre ‘charge’ (source of English legate and legation).
=> law, legal, legation, legislation, litigation
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
allergy: allergy: [20] Allergy was borrowed from German allergie, which was coined in 1906 by the scientist C E von Pirquet. He formed it from Greek allos ‘other, different’ and érgon ‘work’ (source of English energy and related to English work). Its original application was to a changed physiological condition caused by an injection of some foreign substance.
=> energy, work
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
along: along: [OE] The a- in along is related to the prefix anti-, and the original notion contained in the word is of ‘extending a long way in the opposite direction’. This was the force of Old English andlang, a compound formed from and- ‘against, facing’ (whose original source was Greek anti- ‘against’) and lang ‘long’. The meaning gradually changed via simply ‘extending a long way’, through ‘continuous’ and ‘the whole length of something’ to ‘lengthwise’.

At the same time the and- prefix was gradually losing its identity: by the 10th century the forms anlong and onlong were becoming established, and the 14th century saw the beginnings of modern English along. But there is another along entirely, nowadays dialectal. Used in the phrase along of ‘with’ (as in ‘Come along o’me!’), it derives from Old English gelong ‘pertaining, dependent’.

This was a compound formed from the prefix ge-, suggesting suitability, and long, of which the notions of ‘pertaining’ and ‘appropriateness’ are preserved in modern English belong.
=> long
alopecia: alopecia: [14] This word appears to derive from the resemblance observed by the Greeks between baldness in human beings and mange in foxes. The Greek for ‘fox’ was alōpēx, hence alōpekía, borrowed into Latin as alopēcia. Alōpēx is related to Latin vulpēs ‘fox’, from which English gets vulpine ‘foxlike’ [17].
=> vulpine
alpaca: alpaca: [18] English gets the term alpaca (for a South American animal related to the llama) from Spanish, which in turn got it from alpako, the word for the animal in the Aymara language of Bolivia and Peru. Alpako was a derivative of the adjective pako ‘reddish-brown’, a reference to the colour of the animal’s hair.
altar: altar: [OE] The etymological notion underlying the word altar is that of sacrificial burning. Latin altar, which was borrowed directly into Old English, was a derivative of the plural noun altāria, ‘burnt offerings’, which probably came from the verb adolēre ‘burn up’. Adolēre in turn appears to be a derivative of olēre ‘smell’ (the connection being the smell made by combustion), which is related to English odour, olfactory, and redolent. (The traditional view that altar derives from Latin altus ‘high’ is no longer generally accepted, although no doubt it played a part, by association, in its development.) In Middle English, the Old French form auter replaced altar, but in the 16th century the Latin form re-established itself.
=> odour, olfactory, redolent
ambidextrous: ambidextrous: [16] Ambidextrous means literally ‘right-handed on both sides’. It was formed in Latin from the prefix ambi- ‘both’ and the adjective dexter ‘right-handed’ (source of English dextrous). Ambi- corresponds to the Latin adjective ambo ‘both’, which derived ultimately from the Indo-European base *amb- ‘around’ (an element in the source of ambassador and embassy).

The second element in Latin ambo seems to correspond to Old English ba ‘both’, which is related to modern English both. Other English words formed with the prefix amb(i)- include ambient [16] (which came, like ambition, from Latin ambīre ‘go round’), ambit [16] (from Latin ambitus ‘circuit’), ambiguous, ambition, amble, and ambulance.
=> dextrous
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
ammunition: ammunition: [17] Ammunition is one of many words which resulted from a mistaken analysis of ‘article’ plus ‘noun’ (compare ADDER). In this case, French la munition ‘the munitions, the supplies’ was misapprehended as l’ammunition, and borrowed thus into English. At first it was used for military supplies in general, and it does not seem to have been until the beginning of the 18th century that its meaning became restricted to ‘bullets, shells, etc’.

The word munition itself was borrowed into English from French in the 16th century. It originally meant ‘fortification’, and came from the Latin noun mūnītiō; this was a derivative of the verb munīre, ‘defend, fortify’, which in turn was based on the noun moenia ‘walls, ramparts’ (related to mūrus ‘wall’, the source of English mural).

Also from munīre, via medieval Latin mūnīmentum, comes muniment [15], a legal term for ‘title deed’; the semantic connection is that a title deed is a means by which someone can ‘defend’ his or her legal right to property.
=> muniment, munition, mural
among: among: [OE] Gemong was an Old English word for ‘crowd’ – ge- was a collective prefix, signifying ‘together’, and -mong is related to mingle – and so the phrase on gemonge meant ‘in a crowd’, hence ‘in the midst, surrounded’. By the 12th century, the ge- element had dropped out, giving onmong and eventually among. A parallel bimong existed in the 13th century.
=> mingle
analysis: analysis: [16] The underlying etymological notion contained in analysis is of ‘undoing’ or ‘loosening’, so that the component parts are separated and revealed. The word comes ultimately from Greek análusis, a derivative of the compound verb analúein ‘undo’, which was formed from the prefix ana- ‘up, back’ and the verb lúein ‘loosen, free’ (related to English less, loose, lose, and loss).

It entered English via medieval Latin, and in the 17th century was anglicized to analyse: ‘The Analyse I gave of the contents of this Verse’, Daniel Rogers, Naaman the Syrian 1642. This did not last long, but it may have provided the impetus for the introduction of the verb analyse, which first appeared around 1600; its later development was supported by French analyser.
=> dialysis, less, loose, lose, loss
anathema: anathema: [16] Originally in Greek anáthēma was a ‘votive offering’ (it was a derivative of the compound verb anatithénai ‘set up, dedicate’, formed from the prefix ana- ‘up’ and the verb tithénai ‘place’, source of English theme and related to English do). But from being broadly ‘anything offered up for religious purposes’, the word gradually developed negative associations of ‘something dedicated to evil’; and by the time it reached Latin it meant ‘curse’ or ‘accursed person’.
=> do, theme
angle: angle: There have been two distinct words angle in English. The older is now encountered virtually only in its derivatives, angler and angling, but until the early 19th century an angle was a ‘fishing hook’ (or, by extension, ‘fishing tackle’). It entered the language in the Old English period, and was based on Germanic *angg- (source also of German angel ‘fishing tackle’).

An earlier form of the word appears to have been applied by its former inhabitants to a fishhook-shaped area of Schleswig, in the Jutland peninsula; now Angeln, they called it Angul, and so they themselves came to be referred to as Angles. They brought their words with them to England, of course, and so both the country and the language, English, now contain a reminiscence of their fishhooks. Angle in the sense of a ‘figure formed by two intersecting lines’ entered the language in the 14th century (Chaucer is its first recorded user).

It came from Latin angulus ‘corner’, either directly or via French angle. The Latin word was originally a diminutive of *angus, which is related to other words that contain the notion of ‘bending’, such as Greek ágkūra (ultimate source of English anchor) and English ankle. They all go back to Indo-European *angg- ‘bent’, and it has been speculated that the fishhook angle, with its temptingly bent shape, may derive from the same source.
=> english; anchor, ankle
anniversary: anniversary: [13] Like annual, anniversary is based ultimately on Latin annus ‘year’. The underlying idea it contains is of ‘yearly turning’ or ‘returning’; the Latin adjective anniversārius was based on annus and versus ‘turning’ (related to a wide range of English words, from verse and convert to vertebra and vertigo). This was used in phrases such as diēs anniversāria ‘day returning every year’, and eventually became a noun in its own right.
=> annual, convert, verse
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