英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

dragon: dragon: [13] English acquired dragon via Old French dragon and Latin dracō from Greek drákōn. Originally the word signified simply ‘snake’, but over the centuries this ‘snake’ increased in size, and many terrifying mythical attributes (such as wings and the breathing of fire) came to be added to it, several of them latterly from Chinese sources. The Greek form is usually connected with words for ‘look at, glance, flash, gleam’, such as Greek drakein and Sanskrit darç, as if its underlying meaning were ‘creature that looks at you (with a deadly glance)’. Dragon is second time around for English as far as this word is concerned: it originally came by it in the Old English period, via Germanic, as drake. Dragoons [17] (an adaptation of French dragon) were originally mounted infantry, so called because they carried muskets nicknamed by the French dragon ‘fire-breather’.
=> dragoon, drake, rankle
entire: entire: [14] Entire and integrity [15] have the same source – Latin integer. This meant ‘whole, complete’, and was formed from the prefix in- ‘in’ and *tag-, the base which produced Latin tangere ‘touch’, source of English tactile and tangible (and indeed of intact [15], a parallel formation to entire and integrity).

English borrowed integer [16] itself as a mathematical term denoting a ‘whole’ number, and several of its Latin derivatives – not just integrity but also integral [16], from late Latin integrālis, and integrate [17], from Latin integrāre ‘make whole’. As its difference in form suggests, however, entire came via a different route.

The Latin accusative form integrum produced Vulgar Latin *integro, which passed into Old French as entier – hence English entire.
=> intact, integrity, tactile, tangible
soap opera: soap opera: [20] The original soap operas were a radio phenomenon, in 1930s America. Serial dramas dealing with humdrum-butoccasionally- melodramatic domestic life were as common then as they are on television now, and several of those on the commercial US networks were sponsored by soap manufacturers. A writer on the Christian Century in 1938 said ‘These fifteen-minute tragedies…I call the “soap tragedies”…because it is by the grace of soap I am allowed to shed tears for these characters who suffer so much from life’.

The soap connection soon linked up with horse opera, a mildly derisive term for a Western movie that had been around since the 1920s, to produce soap opera (a later coinage on the same model was space opera). The abbreviated version soap is recorded as early as 1943.
aphasia (n.): "loss of ability to speak," especially as result of brain injury or disorder, 1867, from Modern Latin aphasia, from Greek aphasia "speechlessness," from a- "without" (see a- (3)) + phasis "utterance," from phanai "to speak," related to pheme "voice, report, rumor" (see fame (n.)).
APHASIA is the term which has recently been given to the loss of the faculty of articulate language, the organs of phonation and of articulation, as well as the intelligence, being unimpaired. The pathology of this affection is at the present time the subject of much discussion in the scientific world; the French Academy devoted several of their séances during the year 1865 to its special elucidation, and the Medical Journals of France and of our own country have lately contained a good deal of original matter bearing upon this obscure feature in cerebral pathology. [Frederic Bateman, M.D., "Aphasia," London, 1868]
caca (n.): "excrement," a nursery word but a very ancient one (PIE *kakka-), forming the base word for "excrement, to void excrement" in many Indo-European languages, such as Greek kakke "human excrement," Latin cacare, Irish caccaim, Serbo-Croatian kakati, Armenian k'akor; Old English cac-hus "latrine."

Etymologists dispute whether the modern Germanic words (Dutch kakken, Danish kakke, German kacken), are native cognates or student slang borrowed from Latin cacare. The word in this form appears in English slang c. 1870, and could have been taken from any or several of the languages that used it (Spanish, Modern Greek).
agrobacterium: "A bacterium of the genus Agrobacterium, which includes Gram-negative aerobic rods found in soil, several of which cause plant galls; also (in form Agrobacterium) the genus itself", 1940s. From agro- + bacterium, after scientific Latin Agrobacterium, genus name.
parapsoriasis: "Any of a group of chiefly chronic skin diseases characterized by the presence of scaly lesions thought to resemble those of psoriasis, several of which are now recognized to be caused by benign or pre-malignant clonal proliferation of T cells", Early 20th cent.; earliest use found in British Journal of Dermatology. From French parapsoriasis from para- + psoriasis.
streptomycete: "A bacterium which occurs chiefly in soil as aerobic saprophytes resembling moulds, several of which are important sources of antibiotics", 1950s: anglicized singular of modern Latin Streptomyces, from strepto- 'twisted' + Greek mukēs, mukēt- 'fungus'.