英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

ballyhoo [ballyhoo 词源字典]: ballyhoo: [20] Ballyhoo remains an etymological mystery, but there is no shortage of suggested candidates as its source: an Irish village called Ballyhooly; an old nautical slang word ballyhoo meaning ‘unseaworthy vessel’, which seems to have been an anglicization of Spanish balahú ‘schooner’; and the bizarre late- 19th-century ballyhoo bird, a fake bird made of wood and cardboard and intended to fool a birdhunter. None of them, alas, seems remotely relevant to ballyhoo’s original American sense, ‘barker’s patter outside a circus tent, to encourage people to enter’.
[ballyhoo etymology, ballyhoo origin, 英语词源]
chickpea: chickpea: [18] Chickpeas have nothing to do with chickens, and only remotely anything to do with peas (they are both legumes). The word comes ultimately from Latin cicer (the name of the Roman orator Cicero is based on it – one of his ancestors must have had a chickpea-shaped wart). That came into English in the 14th century, by way of Old French, as chich, and chich remained for several centuries the name of the vegetable. The French, meanwhile, noting the leguminous resemblance, had taken to calling it pois chiche, which the English duly translated in the 16th century as chich-pea. Later, folk-etymology transformed chich to chick.
choose (v.): Old English ceosan "choose, seek out, select; decide, test, taste, try; accept, approve" (class II strong verb; past tense ceas, past participle coren), from Proto-Germanic *keus- (cognates: Old Frisian kiasa, Old Saxon kiosan, Dutch kiezen, Old High German kiosan, German kiesen, Old Norse kjosa, Gothic kiusan "choose," Gothic kausjan "to taste, test"), from PIE root *geus- "to taste, relish" (see gusto). Only remotely related to choice. Variant spelling chuse is Middle English, very frequent 16c.-18c. The irregular past participle leveled out to chosen by 1200.
dreary (adj.): Old English dreorig "sad, sorrowful," originally "cruel, bloody, blood-stained," from dreor "gore, blood," from (ge)dreosan (past participle droren) "fall, decline, fail," from Proto-Germanic *dreuzas (cognates: Old Norse dreyrigr "gory, bloody," and more remotely, German traurig "sad, sorrowful"), from PIE root *dhreu- "to fall, flow, drip, droop" (see drip (v.)).

The word has lost its original sense of "dripping blood." Sense of "dismal, gloomy" first recorded 1667 in "Paradise Lost," but Old English had a related verb drysmian "become gloomy."
remote (adj.): mid-15c., from Middle French remot or directly from Latin remotus "afar off, remote, distant in place," past participle of removere "move back or away" (see remove (v.)). Related: Remotely; remoteness. Remote control "fact of controlling from a distance" is recorded from 1904; as a device which allows this from 1920.