英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

agitate: agitate: [16] Agitate is one of a host of English words descended ultimately from Latin agere (see AGENT). Among the many meanings of agere was ‘drive, move’, and a verb derived from it denoting repeated action, agitāre, hence meant ‘move to and fro’. This physical sense of shaking was present from the start in English agitate, but so was the more metaphorical ‘perturb’.

The notion of political agitation does not emerge until the early 19th century, when the Marquis of Anglesey is quoted as saying to an Irish deputation: ‘If you really expect success, agitate, agitate, agitate!’ In this meaning, a derivative of Latin agitāre has entered English via Russian in agitprop ‘political propaganda’ [20], in which agit is short for agitatsiya ‘agitation’.
=> act, agent
alert: alert: [17] Alert comes, via French, from an Italian phrase all’ erta ‘on the look-out’, or literally ‘at the (alla) watch-tower (erta)’. Erta was short for torre erta, literally ‘high tower’, in which the adjective erta ‘high’ came ultimately from Latin ērectus, the past participle of ērigere ‘raise’.
=> erect
bet: bet: [16] Since its comparatively late arrival, bet has ousted the earlier lay, wager, and game as the main term for ‘risking money on an uncertain outcome’ (gamble is later still). It is by no means clear where it came from; the usual explanation is that it is short for the noun abet, in the sense ‘instigation, encouragement, support’ – that is, one is giving one’s ‘support’ to that which one thinks, or hopes, may happen in the future (abet itself comes from the Old French verb abeter, and is related to English bait).

It first appears in Robert Greene’s Art of Cony Catching 1592, which suggests an origin in the argot of smalltime Elizabethan criminals.
=> abet, bait, bite
bird: bird: [OE] Bird is something of a mystery word. It was not the ordinary Old English word for ‘feathered flying animal’; that was fowl. In Old English, bird meant specifically ‘young bird, nestling’. It did not begin to replace fowl as the general term until the 14th century, and the process took many hundreds of years to complete. Its source is quite unknown; it has no obvious relatives in the Germanic languages, or in any other Indo-European language.

The connotations of its original meaning have led to speculation that it is connected with breed and brood (the usual Old English form was brid, but the r and i subsequently became transposed in a process known as metathesis), but no convincing evidence for this has ever been advanced. As early as 1300, bird was used for ‘girl’, but this was probably owing to confusion with another similar Middle English word, burde, which also meant ‘young woman’.

The usage crops up from time to time in later centuries, clearly as an independent metaphorical application, but there does not really seem to be an unbroken chain of occurrences leading up to the sudden explosion in the use of bird for ‘young woman’ in the 20th century. Of other figurative applications of the word, ‘audience disapproval’ (as in ‘get the bird’) comes from the hissing of geese, and in ‘prison sentence’ bird is short for bird lime, rhyming slang for time.
bog: bog: [13] Bog is of Gaelic origin. It comes from bogach ‘bog’, which was a derivative of the adjective bog ‘soft’. A possible link between Gaelic bog and Old English būgan ‘bend’ (source of modern English bow) has been suggested. The British slang use ‘lavatory’, which dates from the 18th century, appears to be short for the slightly earlier bog-house, which may have been an alteration of the 16th-century boggard – quite possibly completely unrelated to bog ‘swamp’.
broad: broad: [OE] Broad’s close relatives are widespread in the Germanic languages (German breit, for example, Dutch breed, and Swedish bred), pointing to a prehistoric Germanic ancestor *braithaz, but no trace of the word is found in any non-Germanic Indo-European language. The original derived noun was brede, which was superseded in the 16th century by breadth. The 20th-century American slang noun use ‘woman’ may come from an obsolete American compound broadwife, short for abroadwife, meaning ‘woman away from her husband’; this was a term applied to female slaves in relation to their new ‘masters’.
=> breadth
bud: bud: [14] Bud is something of a mystery word. It appears in the late 14th century, with no apparent English ancestors. Various suggestions have been put forward as to its origin, including Old French boter ‘push forward, thrust’ (a distant relative of English button). Similarities have also been noted to Old English budd ‘beetle’ and Sanskrit bhūri ‘abundant’. But the question remains open. The American colloquial form of address bud is short for buddy [19], probably itself an alteration of brother.
bumf: bumf: [20] The earliest, literal, but now long discontinued sense of bumf is ‘toilet paper’ (first recorded in 1889), which does much to elucidate its origin: it is short for bum fodder. The element of contempt is carried over into its modern meaning, ‘unwanted or uninteresting printed material’, which dates from around 1930.
bunkum: bunkum: [19] Buncombe is a county of North Carolina, USA. Around 1820, during a debate in the US Congress, its representative Felix Walker rose to make a speech. He spoke on – and on – and on. Fellow congressmen pleaded with him to sit down, but he refused to be deflected, declaring that he had to make a speech ‘for Buncombe’. Most of what he said was fatuous and irrelevant, and henceforth bunkum (or buncombe, as it was at first spelled) became a term for political windbagging intended to ingratiate the speaker with the voters rather than address the real issues.

It early passed into the more general sense ‘nonsense, claptrap’. Its abbreviated form, bunk, is 20th-century; it was popularized by Henry Ford’s remark ‘History is more or less bunk’, made in 1916. Of the other English words bunk, ‘bed’ [19] is probably short for bunker, which first appeared in 16th-century Scottish English, meaning ‘chest, box’; while bunk as in do a bunk and bunk off [19] is of unknown origin.
burk: burk: [20] Although burk is now the commoner spelling, presumably under the influence of the proper name Burk, the original form of the word was berk. It is short for Berkeley (or perhaps Berkshire) hunt, rhyming slang for cunt. (The Berkeley hunt chases foxes in Gloucestershire.) The pronunciation of the word represents, of course, the dialectal or nonstandard version of Berkeley/Berkshire, rather than the /ba:k/ which became standard in southern British English from the 15th century.
bus: bus: [19] Bus is, of course, short for omnibus. The first person on record as using it was the British writer Harriet Martineau, who spelled it buss: ‘if the station offers me a place in the buss’, Weal and woe in Garveloch 1832. Omnibus itself was borrowed from French, where it was first applied in 1828 to a voiture omnibus, literally ‘carriage for everyone’ (omnibus is the dative plural of Latin omnis ‘all’).
cab: cab: [19] Cab is short for cabriolet, a term, borrowed from French, for a light horse-drawn carriage. It comes, via the French verb cabrioler, from Italian capriolare ‘jump in the air’, a derivative of capriolo ‘roebuck’, from Latin capreolus, a diminutive form of caper ‘goat’ (source of English caper ‘leap’ and Capricorn). The reason for its application to the carriage was that the vehicle’s suspension was so springy that it appeared to jump up and down as it went along. From the same source comes the cabriole leg ‘curved furniture leg’ [18], from its resemblance to the front leg of a capering animal.
=> cabriole, cabriolet, caper, capricorn
chap: chap: There are four distinct words chap in English. The oldest, ‘sore on the skin’ [14], originally meant more generally ‘crack, split’, and may be related to Middle Low German kappen ‘chop off’; it seems ultimately to be the same word as chop ‘cut’. Chap ‘jaw’ [16] (as in Bath chaps) is probably a variant of chop (as in ‘lick one’s chops’). Chap ‘fellow’ [16] originally meant ‘customer’; it is an abbreviation of chapman ‘trader’ [OE] (source of the common surname, but now obsolete as an ordinary noun), whose first element is related to English cheap. Chaps ‘leggings’ [19] is short for Mexican Spanish chaparreras, a derivative of Spanish chaparro ‘evergreen oak’; they were named from their use in protecting the legs of riders from the low thick scrub that grows in Mexico and Texas (named with another derivative of chaparro, chaparral). Chaparro itself probably comes from Basque txapar, a diminutive of saphar ‘thicket’.
=> chop; cheap; chaparral
check: check: There are two distinct words check in English, although by very involved pathways they are related. Check ‘verify’ [14] is originally a chess term meaning ‘threaten the king’. It comes from Old French eschequier, a derivative of the noun eschec (source also of English chess), which goes back via Vulgar Latin *scaccus and Arabic shāh to Persian shāh ‘king’ (whence also, of course, English shah). (Checkmate [14] comes via Old French eschec mat from Persian shāh māt ‘the king is left helpless’; the second element turns up again in mat or matt ‘lustreless’.) From the very specific chess sense there developed more general applications such as ‘attack’, ‘arrest’, ‘stop’, ‘restrict’, and ‘verify’.

Among these in the 18th century was ‘token used as a counterfoil for verifying something, such as an amount’. As check this survives mainly in American English (as in ‘hat-check’), but in the specific financial sense of ‘written money order’ it was transformed in British English into cheque, perhaps under the influence of exchequer. Check ‘pattern of squares’ [14] is probably short for chequer, which in turn is a reduced form of exchequer, a word derived ultimately from Vulgar Latin *scaccus ‘check’.
=> cheque, chess, exchequer
chief: chief: [13] Etymologically, the chief is the ‘head’. The word comes via Old French chef or chief and Vulgar Latin *capum from Latin caput ‘head’. The adjectival use is equally as old as the noun use in English. Other English offshoots of *capum are cape and, via the diminutive form *capitellus, cadet, and it also forms the basis of achieve.

The form which has come through into modern French is, of course, chef, which entered English in the sense ‘cook’ (short for chef de cuisine ‘head of the kitchen’) in the 19th century. Chieftain [14] comes via Old French chevetaine from late Latin capitāneus (a derivative of caput ‘head’), which was later reborrowed as captain.
=> achieve, cadet, cape, captain, chef
cobble: cobble: Cobble as in cobblestone [15] and cobble ‘mend’ [15] are two distinct words. The former was derived from cob ‘rounded lump’, with the diminutive suffix -le. The earliest evidence of it is in the compound cobblestone, and it is not recorded on its own until about 1600. The verb cobble is a back-formation from cobbler ‘shoemaker’ [14], of unknown origin. The derivative cobblers ‘nonsense’ [20] is short for cobbler’s awls, rhyming slang for ‘balls’.
=> cob
cobweb: cobweb: [14] A cobweb was originally literally a web woven by a cop, a Middle English word for ‘spider’. It was short for attercop ‘spider’, a compound of Old English origin which had largely died out by the 17th century. This seems to have meant literally ‘poison head’, from Old English ātōr ‘poison’ and coppe ‘head, top’ (a possible relative of English cob). It was revived by J R R Tolkien in The Hobbit 1937.
coster: coster: [19] Coster is short for costermonger, a term dating from the 16th century. Since the 19th century, and perhaps before, it has been a general term in Britain, and particularly in London, for a street trader with a barrow or stall, but further back in time it meant ‘fruiterer’, and originally, more specifically still, a ‘seller of apples’. The first element, coster, was an alteration of costard, a word of Anglo-Norman origin for a type of large apple.

This was derived from coste ‘rib’ (a descendant of Latin costa, source of English coast), and the costard was apparently so called because of its prominent ‘ribs’. (Monger ‘dealer’ [OE], now used in English only in compounds, comes from a prehistoric Germanic *manggōjan, a borrowing from Latin mangō ‘dealer’.)
=> coast
dollar: dollar: [16] English originally acquired the word dollar in the form doler; this was the Low German form of German taler, a large silver coin in use in the German states from the 16th century. The word was short for Joachimstaler, literally ‘of Joachim’s valley’, and is a reference to the fact that silver from which the coins were made was mined near Joachimstal (modern Jachymov) in the Erzgebirge mountains, Czech Republic. By around 1700 the spelling dollar had become fairly standard, and in 1785 the term was formally adopted for the main unit of currency in the USA. It has since been taken up by over thirty countries around the world.
=> dale
dynamic: dynamic: [19] Greek dūnamis (a word of unknown origin) meant ‘strength’. It was used by the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel in 1867 to form the name of the new explosive he had invented, dynamite. From it was derived the adjective dunamikós ‘powerful’, which French adopted in the 17th century as dynamique, and English acquired it in the early 19th century. Related to dúnamis was the verb dúnasthai ‘be strong’ or ‘be able’; from this was derived the noun dunasteíā ‘power, domination’, source, via French or late Latin, of English dynasty [15].

Part of the same word family is dynamo [19], short for dynamo-electric machine, a term coined in 1867 by the electrical engineer Werner Siemens.
=> dynamite, dynasty
extra: extra: [18] In its modern English use, ‘beyond what is normal’ or ‘additional’, extra is probably an abbreviation of extraordinary [15], in which the prefix represents Latin extrā ‘outside, beyond’. This in turn was short for exterā, the ablative feminine case of the adjective exterus ‘outer’ (from which English gets exterior [16]). And exterus itself began life as a compound form based on Latin ex ‘out’.
=> exterior, extreme
fable: fable: [13] The Indo-European base *bha- ‘speak’ has produced a wide range of English words, including (via Germanic) ban and (via Latin fārī ‘speak’) affable, confess, fairy, fame, fate, ineffable, infant, nefarious, and profess. Fable is a member of this latter group; it comes via Old French fable from Latin fābula ‘narrative, story’ (source also of English fabulous [15]), which was a derivative of fārī. Fib [17] is probably short for an earlier fible-fable ‘nonsense’, a fanciful reduplication of fable.
=> affable, ban, confess, fabulous, fairy, fame, fate, fib, ineffable, infant, nefarious, profess, prophet
fag: fag: English has three distinct words fag, none of whose origins is altogether clear. The oldest is the one which denotes ‘drudgery’. It is first recorded as a verb in the 16th century, meaning ‘droop, decline’; its more common noun uses, ‘hard boring work’ and ‘boy who does tasks for an older boy in a British public school’, appear to have developed in the late 18th century.

It is generally taken to have been originally an alteration of flag ‘lose vigour, droop’, although there is no conclusive proof of this. Fag ‘cigarette’ [19] is an abbreviation of fag-end [17], which originally meant generally ‘extreme end’. It was a compound formed from an earlier fag [15], whose underlying meaning seems to have been something like ‘piece hanging down loosely, flap’ (and which conceivably could be related to fag ‘drudgery’). Fag ‘homosexual’ [20] is short for faggot [13], a derogatory term applied to male homosexuals in American English since the early 20th century; the usage is probably based on the slightly earlier uncomplimentary use of the word for ‘woman’. Faggot means literally ‘bundle of sticks’, and comes via Old French fagot from Italian faggotto (which is used also for ‘bassoon’).

This in turn is a diminutive form of Vulgar Latin *facus, which was based ultimately on Greek phákelos ‘bundle’. The notion of applying a term for ‘bundle’ abusively to ‘women’ is perhaps echoed in baggage.
fan: fan: English has two words fan. By far the older [OE] came from Latin vannus; it originally meant ‘device for winnowing grain’, and its now familiar sense ‘handheld device for creating a cooling draught’ did not develop until the 16th century. Its characteristic semicircular shape gave rise to the term fanlight [19] (since applied to a rectangular window above a door). Fan ‘supporter’ is short for fanatic. There is a one-off example of its use in the 17th century, in New news from Bedlam 1682, but the origins of the modern word were in late 19th-century America, where it was used for sports supporters.
fence: fence: [14] Fence is short for defence, and indeed until the 16th century meant ‘defence’ (‘Yet, for [that is, despite] the fence that he could make, she struck it from his hand’, Felon Sowe Rokeby 1500). Of its present-day meanings, ‘enclosing structure’ (originally a ‘defence’ against intruders) and ‘sword-fighting’ (originally the use of a sword for ‘self-defence’, now used only as a verb) developed in the 16th century.

The sense ‘dealer in stolen property’ came along in the 17th century; it arose from the notion that such transactions are carried out under the cover, or ‘defence’, of secrecy. Similarly, fend [13] and fender [15] came by loss of the initial syllable from defend.
=> defence, fend, fender
flu: flu: [19] Flu is short for influenza [18]. The first record of its use is in a letter of 1839 by the poet Robert Southey (who spelled it, as was commonly the practice in the 19th century, flue): ‘I have had a pretty fair share of the Flue’. Influenza means literally ‘influence’ in Italian, and was used metaphorically for the ‘outbreak of a particular disease’ (hence an influenza di febbre scarlattina was an ‘outbreak of scarlet fever’, a ‘scarlet fever epidemic’).

The severe epidemic of the disease we now know as flu, which struck Italy in 1743 and spread from there throughout Europe, was called an influenza di catarro ‘catarrh epidemic’, or simply an influenza – and hence influenza became the English word for the disease.
=> influence, influenza
galoshes: galoshes: [14] In modern terms, galoshes might be etymologically rendered as ‘little French shoes’. The word comes from Old French galoche, which was an alteration of late Latin gallicula. This in turn was a diminutive form of Latin gallica, short for gallica solea ‘Gallic sandal, sandal from Gaul’ (the name Gaul, incidentally, and the Latin-based Gallic [17], come ultimately from prehistoric Germanic *walkhoz ‘foreigners’, which is related also to Walloon, walnut, and Welsh). The term galosh was originally used in English for a sort of clog; the modern sense ‘overshoe’ did not develop until the early 19th century.
=> gallic, walloon, walnut, welsh
ghetto: ghetto: [17] English acquired ghetto from Italian, but its precise history is uncertain. Among the suggestions are that it represents Italian getto ‘foundry’, from a Jewish enclave in Venice established on the site of a medieval foundry in 1516; that it is short for Italian borghetto, a diminutive form of borgo ‘settlement outside city walls’ (to which English borough is related); and that it was an alteration of Latin Aegyptus ‘Egypt’, presumably an allusion to the captivity of the Jews in Egypt.
gin: gin: Gin ‘alcoholic drink’ [18] and gin ‘trap’ [13] are different words, but both originated as abbreviations. The latter comes from Old French engin (source of English engine), while the former is short for geneva. This now obsolete term for the spirit was borrowed via Dutch genever from Old French genevre, a derivative of Latin jūniperus ‘juniper’ (juniper being the chief flavouring agent of gin). English geneva was remodelled on the basis of the name of the Swiss city.
=> engine; juniper
golliwog: golliwog: [19] It was Florence Upton (1873– 1922), an American-born illustrator and writer of children’s books, who dreamed up the blackfaced male doll we now know as the golliwog. It first appeared in the story The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls – and a ‘Golliwog’ 1895, with verses by Florence’s mother Bertha. The inspiration for the word may have been golly [19], a euphemism for God, and polliwog, an American term for a ‘tadpole’ (which came from Middle English polwygle, a compound of pol ‘head’ and the verb wiglen ‘wiggle’). The offensive wog [20] for ‘black person’ is probably short for golliwog.
graphic: graphic: [17] The profoundest influence that Greek gráphein ‘write’ has had on English has no doubt been through its combining form -graphos, which has provided us with a whole host of words, both original Greek formations and new English ones, from autograph to telegraph. But descendants in their own right include graphic (which came via Latin graphicus from the Greek derivative graphikós), graphite [18] (originally coined in German as graphit, from its being used in writing implements), and graph [19] (short for graphic formular, a term used in chemistry for a diagram representing in lines the relationship between elements).

Greek gráphein itself originally meant ‘scratch’ (it is etymologically related to English carve); it was applied to early methods of writing, by scratching on clay tablets with a stylus, and kept its job when writing technology moved on.
=> carve, graft, graph, graphite
hack: hack: English has two distinct words hack. By far the older, ‘cut savagely or randomly’ [OE], goes back via Old English haccian to a prehistoric West Germanic *khak-, also reproduced in German hacken and Dutch hakken. It perhaps originated in imitation of the sound of chopping. Hack ‘worn-out horse’ [17] is short for hackney (as in hackney carriage), a word in use since the 14th century in connection with hired horses.

It is thought that this may be an adaptation of the name of Hackney, now an inner-London borough but once a village on the northeastern outskirts of the capital where horses were raised before being taken into the city for sale or hire. Most rented horses being past their best from long and probably ill usage, hackney came to mean ‘broken-down horse’ and hence in general ‘drudge’.

This quickly became respecified to ‘someone who writes for hire, and hence unimaginatively’, which influenced the development of hackneyed ‘trite’ [18]. The modern sense of hacker, ‘someone who gains unauthorized access to computer records’, comes from a slightly earlier ‘one who works like a hack – that is, very hard – at writing and experimenting with software’.
hobby: hobby: Hobby in the sense ‘pastime’ is short for hobbyhorse. This originated in the 16th century as a term for the figure of a horse used in morris dances: the element hobby, used since the 14th century for a ‘small horse’, was derived from Hob, a pet form of the man’s name Robert or Robin which survives also in hobgoblin [16]. From the morris-dance hobbyhorse was descended the toy hobbyhorse, a stick with a horse’s head on top; and the notion of ‘riding a hobbyhorse’, which could not actually take you anywhere, passed metaphorically into ‘doing something only for amusement’ – hence the meaning ‘pastime’, first recorded for hobbyhorse in the 17th century and for the shortened hobby in the early 19th century. Hobby ‘bird of prey’ [15] comes from Old French hobet, a diminutive form of hobe ‘small bird of prey’, whose origins are not known.
=> hobbyhorse, hobgoblin
hock: hock: English has three words hock. The oldest, ‘joint of a quadruped corresponding to the human ankle’ [16], is short for an earlier hockshin, which comes from Old English hōhsinu. This meant literally ‘heel-sinew’, and the hōh came from the same prehistoric Germanic source as produced modern English heel. In its original sense it can also be spelled hough, but for ‘joint of bacon’, first recorded in the 18th century, hock is the only spelling. Hock ‘Rhinewine’ [17] is short for an earlier hockamore, an anglicization of Hochheimer (Hochheim, on the river Main, is a centre of German wine production). Hock ‘pawn, debt’ [19] comes from Dutch hok ‘prison’, hence ‘debt’; it was introduced to English by Dutch immigrants in the USA.

The -hock of hollyhock, incidentally, comes from Old English hoc ‘mallow’ (and the holly- is an alteration of holy, and has no connection with holly).
=> heel
jeans: jeans: [19] Jeans of the sort we would recognize today – close-fitting working trousers made of hard-wearing, typically blue cloth – emerged in America in the mid-19th century. But their antecedents have to be sought in a far distant place. The first known reference to trousers called jeans actually comes from mid-19thcentury England: ‘Septimus arrived flourishin’ his cambric, with his white jeans strapped under his chammy leather opera boots’, R S Surtees, Handley Cross 1843.

Why the name jeans? Because they were made of jean, a sort of tough twilled cotton cloth. This was short for jean fustian, a term first introduced into English in the mid-16th century, in which the jean represented a modification of Janne, the Old French name of the Italian city of Genoa. So jean fustian was ‘cotton fabric from Genoa’, so named because that was where it was first made.
karaoke: karaoke: [20] The conceptual basis of this term, enthusiastically adopted in the West from Japan in the latter part of the 20th century, is of a backing or accompaniment waiting to be ‘filled’ by a singer or other soloist. In Japanese, it means literally ‘empty orchestra’: kara is ‘empty’ (it also appears in English karate [20], literally ‘empty hand’) and oke is short for okesutora – originally a Japanization of English orchestra.
knickers: knickers: [19] The use of the word knickers for ‘women’s underpants’ dates back to the 1880s: a writer in the magazine Queen in 1882 recommended ‘flannel knickers in preference to flannel petticoat’, and Home Chat in 1895 was advertising ‘serge knickers for girls from twelve to sixteen’. Over the decades, of course, the precise application of the term has changed with the nature of the garment, and today’s legless briefs are a far cry from the knee-length ‘knickers’ of the 1880s.

They got their name because of their similarity to the original knickers, which were knee-length trousers for men (The Times in 1900 reported the ‘Imperial Yeomanry … in their well-made, loosely-fitting khaki tunics and riding knickers’). And knickers itself was short for knickerbockers, a term used for such trousers since the 1850s. This came from Diedrich Knickerbocker, a fictitious Dutch-sounding name invented by the American writer Washington Irving for the ‘author’ of his History of New York 1809.

The reason for the application seems to have been that the original knickerbockers resembled the sort of kneebreeches supposedly worn by Dutchmen.
loo: loo: [20] Loo presents one of the more celebrated puzzles of English etymology. Not the least of its problematical points is that there is no reliable evidence of its existence before the 1920s, whereas most of its suggested sources have a more dated air than that. Amongst them, the most widely touted is of course gardy loo!, a shout of warning (based on French gardez l’eau ‘beware of the water’) supposedly used when emptying chamber pots from upper-storey windows in the days before modern plumbing; but that is chronologically most unlikely.

Other possibilities are that it is short for Waterloo, which was a trade name for cast-iron lavatory cisterns in the early part of the 20th century (‘O yes, mon loup. How much cost? Waterloo. Watercloset’, James Joyce, Ulysses 1922), and that it comes from louvre, from the use of slatted screens for a makeshift lavatory. But perhaps the likeliest explanation is that it derives from French lieux d’aisances, literally ‘places of ease’, hence ‘lavatory’ (perhaps picked up by British servicemen in France during World War I).
major: major: [16] Latin mājor ‘larger’ was the comparative form of magnus ‘large’, from which English gets magnitude, magnum etc (in early Latin it was *māgjōs). English originally acquired it as an adjective. Its noun use, for an army officer, followed in the 17th century. This represented a borrowing from French major, which was short for sergeant-major (in those days, ‘sergeant major’ was a more elevated rank than it is today). The derivative majority [16] comes via French majorité from medieval Latin mājōritās. Mayor comes from Latin mājor, routed via Old French.
=> magnitude, magnum, mayor
mate: mate: [14] Mate ‘friend’ and mate the chess term are two distinct words. The former was borrowed from Middle Low German mate or gemate ‘companion’ (source also of Dutch maat), which goes back to a prehistoric West Germanic *gamaton. This was formed from the collective prefix *ga- and *mat- ‘measure’, which was also the source of English meat; so etymologically mate (like companion) is ‘someone you eat with or share your food with’.

The chess term mate comes from Old French mat ‘dead’. This was short for eschec mat (source of English checkmate), which comes from Persian shāh māt ‘the king is dead’. Persian māt ‘dead’ also contributed the verb matar ‘kill’ to Spanish, from which was derived matador [17], literally ‘killer’.
=> meat; mat, matador, matte
maximum: maximum: [18] Maximum was adopted, via French, from maximum, the neuter form of Latin maximus ‘largest’. This was the superlative of magnus ‘large’ (source of English magnitude, magnum, etc). From the same ultimate source comes maxim [15], which goes back via French maxime to Latin maxima. This was short for maxima prōpositio ‘largest proposition’, a term used in medieval philosophy for a ‘fundamental axiom’.
=> magnitude, magnum, maxim
micro: micro: [19] The conversion of the prefix microinto a noun (standing, for instance, for a microskirt or microcomputer) is not as recent as one might have supposed: as long ago as the 1860s it was being used for a sort of tiny moth (short for microlepidoptera). The prefix itself comes from Greek mīkrós ‘small’, a variant of smīkrós, which may be distantly related to English small.

The earliest English word containing it appears to have been microcosm [15], etymologically ‘little world’. From the 17th century come micrometer, microphone, and microscope. Microbe [19] means etymologically ‘little life’ (from Greek bíos ‘life’), hence ‘little creature’.
mob: mob: [17] Mob is famous as one of the then new ‘slang’ abbreviations against which Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift inveighed at the beginning of the 18th century (others included pozz for positively and rep for reputation). Mob was short for mobile, which itself was a truncated form of mobile vulgus, a Latin phrase meaning ‘fickle crowd’. Latin mōbilis ‘movable’, hence metaphorically ‘fickle’ (source of English mobile [15]), came from the base of the verb movēre ‘move’ (source of English move).
=> mobile, move
mule: mule: English has two words mule. The ‘donkeylike animal’ [13] comes via Old French mul from Latin mūlus, which was borrowed from a pre- Latin language of the Mediterranean area; Albanian mušk ‘mule’ is related. Mule the ‘slipper’ [16] is probably an adaptation of Latin mulleus, which denoted a sort of red or purple shoe worn by high-ranking magistrates in Rome. This was short for mulleus calceus ‘red shoe’, and mulleus itself appears to have been derived from mullus ‘red mullet’ (ultimate source of English mullet [15]), which in turn came from Greek múllos, a relative of mélās ‘black’.
=> mullet
noon: noon: [OE] Noon denotes etymologically the ‘ninth’ hour. It was adopted in the Old English period from Latin nōna, short for nōna hōra, the ‘ninth hour’. Reckoning the day from sunrise, on average six o’clock, this meant that ‘noon’ was three o’clock in the afternoon (which was originally when the office of nones [18] – a related word – was said in the Roman catholic church).

By the 12th century, however, we find noon being used for a ‘midday meal’, and in the early 13th century it had moved on to simply ‘midday’, so it appears that some forward shifting of a meal that had originally taken place in mid afternoon was responsible for altering the meaning of noon (modern English terms for mealtimes, such as tea and dinner, are equally slippery).
=> nine
pants: pants: [19] Pants is short for pantaloons, a term used since the 17th century for men’s nether garments. The word originated in the name of a character in the old Italian commedia dell’arte, Pantalone, a silly old man with thin legs who encased them in tight trousers. English took the word over via French pantalon, and began to use it for ‘tight breeches or trousers’.

In American English it broadened out to ‘trousers’ generally, whence the current American use of pants for ‘trousers’. British English, however, tends to use the abbreviation for undergarments, perhaps influenced by pantalets, a 19th-century diminutive denoting ‘women’s long frilly drawers’.
peach: peach: [14] Etymologically, the peach is the ‘Persian’ fruit. The word comes via Old French peche from medieval Latin persica, an alteration of an earlier persicum ‘peach’. This was short for mālum Persicum, literally ‘Persian apple’, reflecting the fact that the peach, a native of China, first became widely known in Europe when it had reached Persia on its westward journey.
phone: phone: [20] Phone is of course short for telephone [19], a compound word formed from Greek tēle- ‘far off’ and phōné ‘voice, sound’ (a descendant of the Indo-European base *bha- ‘speak’, and related to English fable, fame, fate, etc). Other English words derived from or based on phōné include gramophone, megaphone [19], microphone, phonetic [19], phonology [18], saxophone, and xylophone.
=> fable, fame, fate
piano: piano: [19] Piano is short for pianoforte [18], a term borrowed from Italian which means literally ‘softloud’. It was a lexicalization of an epithet (piano e forte ‘soft and loud’) applied in the early 18th century to a new sort of harpsichord whose volume could be varied by the use of dampers. Italian piano itself is descended from Latin plānus ‘flat, even’, later ‘smooth’, source of English plain. It was introduced into English as a musical direction in the late 17th century.
=> plain, plane
ply: ply: English has two distinct words ply, although ultimately they are related. The one meaning ‘fold, twist, layer’ [14], now mainly found in plywood [20] and in combinations such as twoply and three-ply, comes from Old French pli, a derivative of the verb plier ‘bend, fold’ (source of English apply [14], pliable [15], pliant [14], pliers [16], and reply).

This went back to Latin plicāre ‘fold’, a relative of English fold and source of accomplice, complicate [17], employ, explicit, imply, pleat, plight ‘predicament’, and supplicate. It was formed from a base that also produced English perplex [16] and the final syllables of simple and supple. The apple pie of apple-pie bed [18] is thought to be an alteration of French nappe pliée ‘folded sheet’. Ply ‘travel a route regularly’ or ‘solicit’ (as in ‘ply for hire’) [14] is short for apply, a relative of ply ‘fold’, and originally meant ‘apply, employ’ (as in ‘ply one’s needle’).
=> accomplice, apply, complicate, comply, double, employ, explicit, fold, imply, perplex, pleat, pliable, pliers, plight, reply, simple, supple, supplicate