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]
Celsius: Celsius: [19] The notion of a temperature scale based on 100 was developed by the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius (1701–44) (he originally had water boiling at zero and freezing at 100º, but this was later reversed). His name began to be used to designate the scale in English around the middle of the 19th century. In popular parlance it has usually taken a back seat to centigrade (a French invention, first recorded in English in 1812), but it remains the preferred term in scientific usage.
détente: détente: [20] English originally acquired this word from French in the 17th century as detent, which denotes a catch that regulates the movement of a clock. French détente, which originally signified a device for releasing a crossbow string, came from the past participle of Old French destendre ‘release’, a compound verb formed from the prefix des- ‘apart’ and tendre ‘stretch’ (related to English tension).

But English-speakers, mistakenly associating it with detain [15] (a verb of completely different origin, via Old French detenir from Latin dētinēre ‘keep back’) completely reversed its meaning, applying to a restraining catch rather than a releasing one. French, the language of diplomacy, re-lent détente to English in the first decade of the 20th century in the sense ‘relaxation of international tension’.
=> tension
dirt: dirt: [13] Dirt was originally drit, and meant ‘excrement’ (it was borrowed from Old Norse drit, which goes back to a prehistoric Germanic base *drit- that also produced Dutch dreet ‘excrement’). The toned-down sense ‘soiling substance’ is of equal antiquity with ‘excrement’ in English, and the modern English form dirt first appeared in the 15th century, by a process known as metathesis in which two sounds are reversed.
disgust: disgust: [16] Something that disgusts one is literally ‘not to one’s taste’. The word comes from Old French desguster, a compound verb formed from the prefix des- ‘not’ and goust ‘taste’. This in turn came from Latin gustus (ultimate source of English gusto); its modern French descendant is goût. Originally, as its derivation implies, disgust meant simply ‘cause to feel aversion, displease’ (and also, with subject and object reversed, ‘dislike, loathe’: ‘Had he not known that I disgusted it, it had never been spoke or done by him’, Robert South, Sermons 1716); but over the centuries it has hardened into ‘sicken, repel’.
=> gusto
fright: fright: [OE] Prehistoric Germanic *furkhtaz, an adjective of unknown origin (not related to English fear), meant ‘afraid’. From it was derived a noun *furkhtīn, which was the basis of one of the main words for ‘fear’ among the ancient Germanic languages (not superseded as the chief English term by fear until the 13th century). Its modern descendants include German furcht and English fright (in which the original sequence ‘vowel plus r’ was reversed by the process known as metathesis – something which also happened to Middle Low German vruchte, from which Swedish fruktan and Danish frygt ‘fear’ were borrowed).
rest: rest: English has two words rest in current general use: ‘repose’ [OE] and ‘remainder’ [15]. The former is a general Germanic term, with relatives in German (rast) and Swedish (rast), but its ultimate antecedents are uncertain. The latter comes via Old French rester ‘remain’ from Latin restāre ‘stand back’, a compound verb formed from the prefix re- ‘back’ and stāre ‘stand’ (source of English statue, status, etc and related to English stand).

Amongst its derivatives is restive [16], which has completely reversed its meaning over the centuries. It comes from Vulgar Latin *restīvus ‘inclined to remain, unwilling to move’, and reached English via Old French restif in the sense ‘inactive’. The modern meaning ‘restless, uneasy’ comes partly from an intermediate ‘refractory, hard to control’, but also through association with the unrelated rest ‘repose’.
=> arrest, stand, station, statue
sceptic: sceptic: [16] The Greek verb sképtesthai meant ‘examine, consider’ (it was descended from a base *skep- which was related to *skop-, source of English scope, and may have been a reversed version of *spek-, from which English gets spectator, speculate, etc). From it was derived the adjective skeptikós, which was applied to various schools of philosophy (particularly that of Pyrrho of Elis) which stressed the need for careful examination of a proposition, starting from an attitude of doubt, before accepting it.

The word passed via Latin scepticus and French sceptique into English as sceptic, by which time it had acquired broader connotations of ‘initial doubt’.
=> scope
skirmish: skirmish: [14] English adapted skirmish from eskermiss-, the present stem of Old French eskermir ‘fight with a sword’. This in turn went back to a Frankish *skirmjan, a relative of modern German schirmen. A variant of skirmish arose with the i and r sounds reversed, giving scrimish, which is the source of modern English scrimmage [15] and also of scrummage [19] and its abbreviation scrum [19].
=> scrimmage, scrummage
spectacle: spectacle: [14] Spectacle is one of a large family of English words that go back ultimately to Latin specere ‘look’ (a descendant of the Indo- European base *spek- ‘look’, of which a reversed Greek version *skep- gave English sceptic and scope). Others include special, species, spectator [16], spectre [17] (etymologically an ‘appearance’ or ‘image’), spectrum [17] (from Latin spectrum ‘appearance’, ultimate source also of spectre, and first used for the ‘band of colours’ by Isaac Newton around 1671), speculate [16], spite, and spy, not to mention prefixed forms such as aspect [14], auspice, conspicuous [16], espionage, expect, frontispiece, inspect [17], respect, and suspect. Spectacle itself comes via Old French spectacle from the Latin derivative spectāculum ‘show, sight’.

The application to a ‘device for seeing with’, which lies behind English spectacles [15] and its abbreviation specs [19], is a post-Latin development.
=> auspice, conspicuous, espionage, expect, frontispiece, inspect, respect, special, species, suspect
spoonerism: spoonerism: [19] The term spoonerism commemorates the name of the Reverend William Spooner (1844–1930), Warden of New College, Oxford, who reputedly was in the habit of producing utterances with the initial letters of words reversed, often to comic effect (as in ‘hush my brat’ for ‘brush my hat’ or ‘scoop of boy trouts’ for ‘troop of boy scouts’)
ampersand (n.): 1837, contraction of and per se and, meaning "(the character) '&' by itself is 'and' " (a hybrid phrase, partly in Latin, partly in English). The symbol is based on the Latin word et "and," and comes from an old Roman system of shorthand signs (ligatures), attested in Pompeiian graffiti, but not (as sometimes stated) from the Tironian Notes, which was a different form of shorthand, probably invented by Cicero's companion Marcus Tullius Tiro, which used a different symbol, something like a reversed capital gamma, to indicate et.

This Tironian symbol was maintained by some medieval scribes, including Anglo-Saxon chroniclers, who sprinkled their works with a symbol like a numeral 7 to indicate the word and. In old schoolbooks the ampersand was printed at the end of the alphabet and thus by 1880s had acquired a slang sense of "posterior, rear end, hindquarters."
banquet (n.): late 15c., "feast, sumptuous entertainment," from French banquet (15c.; in Old French only "small bench"), from Old Italian banchetto, diminutive of banco "bench;" originally a snack eaten on a bench (rather than at table), hence "a slight repast between meals;" the meaning has entirely reversed. As a verb from 1510s.
blessed (adj.): late 12c., "supremely happy," also "consecrated" (c. 1200), past participle adjective from bless (v.). Reversed or ironic sense of "cursed, damned" is recorded from 1806. Related: Blessedly; blessedness.
clinic (n.): 1620s, from French clinique (17c.), from Latin clinicus "physician that visits patients in their beds," from Greek klinike (techne) "(practice) at the sickbed," from klinikos "of the bed," from kline "bed, couch, that on which one lies," from suffixed form of PIE root *kli- "lean, slope" (see lean (v.)).

Originally in English "bedridden person;" sense of "hospital" is 1884, from German Klinik in this sense, itself from French clinique, via the notion of "bedside medical education." The modern sense is thus reversed from the classical, when the "clinic" came to the patient. General sense of "conference for group instruction in something" is from 1919.
disgust (v.): c. 1600, from Middle French desgouster "have a distaste for" (see disgust (n.)). Sense has strengthened over time, and subject and object have been reversed; the older use looks like this: "It is not very palatable, which makes some disgust it" (1660s). The reverse sense of "to excite nausea" is attested from 1640s. Related: Disgusted; disgusting.
Dorothy: fem. proper name, from French Dorothée, from Latin Dorothea, from Greek, literally "gift of God," from doron "gift" (see date (n.1)) + fem. of theos "god" (see theo-). With the elements reversed, it becomes Theodora. The accessory called a Dorothy bag is so called from 1907.
faucet (n.): c. 1400, from Old French fausset (14c.) "breach, spigot, stopper, peg (of a barrel)," which is of unknown origin; perhaps diminutive of Latin faux, fauces "upper part of the throat, pharynx, gullet." Not in Watkins, but Barnhart, Gamillscheg, and others suggest the Old French word is from fausser "to damage, break into," from Late Latin falsare (see false).

Spigot and faucet was the name of an old type of tap for a barrel or cask, consisting of a hollow, tapering tube, which was driven at the narrow end into a barrel, and a screw into the tube which regulated the flow of the liquid. Properly, it seems, the spigot was the tube, the faucet the screw, but the senses have merged or reversed over time. OED reports that faucet is now the common word in American English for the whole apparatus.
Joel: masc. proper name, from Hebrew Yoh'el, name of a minor Old Testament prophet, literally "the Lord is God;" the same name as Elijah (q.v.) but with the elements reversed. But the personal name that became common in Devon and Cornwall and the Breton districts of Yorkshire and the Eastern Counties immediately after the Conquest is from Old Breton Iudhael, from Iud- "chief, lord" + hael "generous." It is the source of the modern British surname Joel, as well as Jewell, Joule, and Jolson.
peevish (adj.): late 14c., peyvesshe "perverse, capricious, silly," of uncertain origin, possibly modeled on Latin perversus "reversed, perverse," past participle of pervertere "to turn about" (see pervert (v.)). Meaning "cross, fretful" first recorded 1520s. Related: Peevishly; peevishness.
pen (n.1): "writing implement," late 13c., from Old French pene "quill pen; feather" (12c.) and directly from Latin penna "a feather, plume," in plural "a wing," in Late Latin, "a pen for writing," from Old Latin petna, pesna, from PIE *pet-na-, suffixed form of root *pet- "to rush; to fly" (see petition (n.)).

Latin penna and pinna "a feather, plume;" in plural "a wing;" also "a pinnacle; battlement" (see pin (n.)) are treated as identical in Watkins, etc., but regarded as separate (but confused) Latin words by Tucker and others, who derive pinna from PIE *spei- "sharp point" (see spike (n.1)) and see the "feather/wing" sense as secondary.

In later French, this word means only "long feather of a bird," while the equivalent of English plume is used for "writing implement," the senses of the two words thus are reversed from the situation in English. Pen-and-ink (adj.) is attested from 1670s. Pen name is recorded from mid-19c.
poignant (adj.): late 14c., "painful to physical or mental feeling" (of sauce, spice, wine as well as things that affect the feelings), from Old French poignant "sharp, pointed" (13c.), present participle of poindre "to prick, sting," from Latin pungere "to prick" (see pungent). Related: Poignantly.

The word disguises a linguistics trick-play, a double reverse. Latin pungere is from the same root as Latin pugnus "fist," and represents a metathesis of -n- and -g- that later was reversed in French.
Protestant (n., adj.): 1539, from German or French protestant, from Latin protestantem (nominative protestans), present participle of protestari (see protest (n.)). Originally used of German princes and free cities who declared their dissent from ("protested") the decision of the Diet of Speyer (1529), which reversed the liberal terms allowed Lutherans in 1526.
When forced to make their choice between obedience to God and obedience to the Emperor, they were compelled to choose the former. [Thomas M. Lindsay, "A History of the Reformation," New York, 1910]
The word was taken up by the Lutherans in Germany (Swiss and French preferred Reformed). It became the general word for "adherents of the Reformation in Germany," then "member of any Western church outside the Roman communion;" a sense first attested in English in 1553.
In the 17c., 'protestant' was primarily opposed to 'papist,' and thus accepted by English Churchmen generally; in more recent times, being generally opposed to 'Roman Catholic,' or ... to 'Catholic,' ... it is viewed with disfavour by those who lay stress on the claim of the Anglican Church to be equally Catholic with the Roman. [OED]
Often contemptuous shortened form Prot is from 1725, in Irish English. Protestant (work) ethic (1926) is taken from Max Weber's work "Die protestantische Ethik und der 'Geist' des Kapitalismus" (1904). Protestant Reformation attested by 1680s.
reverse (v.): early 14c. (transitive), "change, alter;" early 15c. (intransitive), "go backward," from Old French reverser "reverse, turn around; roll, turn up" (12c.), from Late Latin reversare "turn about, turn back," frequentative of Latin revertere (see revert). Related: Reversed; reversing.
W: not in the Roman alphabet, but the Modern English sound it represents is close to the devocalized consonant expressed by Roman -U- or -V-. In Old English, this originally was written -uu-, but by 8c. began to be expressed by the runic character wyn (Kentish wen), which looked like this: ƿ (the character is a late addition to the online font set and doesn't display properly on many computers, so it's something like a combination of lower-case -p- and a reversed -y-). In 11c., Norman scribes introduced -w-, a ligatured doubling of Roman -u- which had been used on the continent for the Germanic "w" sound, and wyn disappeared c. 1300. -W- is not properly a letter in the modern French alphabet, and it is used there only in borrowed foreign words, such as wagon, weekend, Western, whisky, wombat.
yok (n.): slang, "gentile, non-Jew," pejorative, 1920, from Yiddish, where it is back slang, a reversed and altered form of goy.
anapaest: "A metrical foot consisting of two short or unstressed syllables followed by one long or stressed syllable", Late 16th century: via Latin from Greek anapaistos 'reversed', from ana- 'back' + paiein 'strike' (because it is the reverse of a dactyl).