英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

bivouac: bivouac: [18] Bivouac appears to be of Swiss- German origin. The early 19th-century writer Stalder noted that the term beiwacht (bei ‘additional’ + wacht ‘guard’ – a relative of English watch and wake) was used in Aargau and Zürich for a sort of band of vigilantes who assisted the regular town guard. Beiwacht was borrowed into French as bivac, and came to English in a later form bivouac.

Its original application in English was to an army remaining on the alert during the night, to guard against surprise attack; in so doing, of course, the soldiers did not go to sleep in their tents, and from this the term bivouac spread to ‘improvised, temporary camp’, without the luxury of regular tents.
=> wake, watch
crew: crew: [15] The idea originally underlying crew is ‘augmentation’. It comes from Old French creue, which was derived from the verb creistre ‘grow, increase, augment’, a descendant of Latin crēscere ‘grow’. At first in English it denoted a squad of military reinforcements. Soon its meaning had spread to any band of soldiers, and by the end of the 16th century the word was being used for any group of people gathered together with or without a particular purpose. The most familiar modern application, to the people manning a ship, emerged in the latter part of the 17th century.
=> crescent, croissant, increase
dapper: dapper: [15] Modern English dapper connotes neatness, alertness, and liveliness, but its etymological significance as revealed by distant relatives such as Old High German tapfar ‘heavy’, Old Prussian debīkan ‘large’, and Old Slavic debelu ‘thick’, is ‘heavy’. The notion of ‘weightiness’ spread to ‘firmness, endurance in battle’, and hence ‘courage’ (German tapfer and Dutch dapper both mean ‘brave’). English acquired the word, with an apparently ironical change of meaning, from Middle Dutch or Middle Low German dapper ‘heavy, stout, bold’.
dome: dome: [16] Dome originally meant ‘house’ in English – it was borrowed from Latin domus ‘house’ (source of English domestic). However, in other European languages the descendants of domus had come to signify more than a humble dwelling house, and its new meanings spread to English. The word increasingly encompassed stately mansions and important places of worship. Italian duomo and German dom mean ‘cathedral’, for instance (a sense adopted by English in the late 17th and early 18th centuries), and since a leading characteristic of Italian cathedrals is their cupola, the word was soon applied to this.
=> domestic
drug: drug: [14] Drug is one of the mystery words of the language. It is clear that English acquired it from Old French drogue, but no one is certain where the French word came from. One suggestion is that it originated in Arabic dūrawā ‘chaff’; another, rather more likely, is that its source was Dutch droog ‘dry’, via either the phrase droge waere ‘dry goods’ or droge vate ‘dry barrels’, a common expression for ‘goods packed in barrels’. It has spread to many other European languages, including Italian and Spanish droga, German droge, and Swedish drog.
hope: hope: [OE] The origins of the word hope are obscure. It appears to have started life among the Low German dialects of northern Germany (whence English hope and Dutch hoop), and later spread to Scandinavia (giving Swedish hopp and Danish haab) and High German (modern German has the verb hoffen and the derived noun hoffnung ‘hope’). Where did the original Low German forms come from, though? A suggestion that has found some favour is that the word is related to hop, and that it started from the notion of ‘jumping to safety’. The theory goes that the ‘place of refuge’ thus reached gives one ‘hope’, but it has an air of desperation.
postulate: postulate: [16] The noun postulate originally meant ‘demand, request’. It was an anglicization of postulātum, a noun use of the past participle of postulāre ‘demand, request’. It was used in the mid-17th century by mathematicians and logicians for a proposition that (because it was a simple or uncontentious one) ‘demanded’ to be taken for granted for the sake of further reasoning, and from this it spread to more general usage. The notion of ‘requesting’ is better preserved in postulant [18], from the present participle of the Latin verb.
titchy: titchy: [20] Titchy commemorates the ‘Tichborne claimant’, the title given to Arthur Orton, who, in an English cause célèbre of the 1860s, returned from Australia claiming to be Roger Tichborne, the heir to an English baronetcy who had supposedly been lost at sea. The diminutive music-hall comedian Harry Relph (1868–28) bore some resemblance to Orton, and so he acquired the nickname ‘Little Tich’.

This in due course spread to other small people (the tiny Kent and England leg-spinner A P Freeman (1888–1965) was called ‘Tich’), but it does not appear to have been until the 1950s that tich, or titch, established itself as a colloquial generic term for a ‘small person’. With it came the derived adjective titchy.
tobacco: tobacco: [16] Tobacco was introduced to Europe from the Americas, and that is where its name came from too. It originated in a Carib word, and reached English via Spanish and Portuguese tabaco. What precisely the Carib word meant, however, is a matter of dispute. Some say that it referred to tobacco leaves rolled up into a cylindrical shape for smoking, while others maintain that it denoted a pipe for smoking the tobacco in.

The word has spread to virtually all European languages (French tabac, German, Dutch, Russian, and Czech tabak, Welsh tybaco, etc), and only a few remnants of alternative terms remain: Romanian tutun and Polish tytun, for instance, borrowings from Turkish tütün, which originally meant ‘smoke’, and Breton butun, which came from pety, the word for ‘tobacco’ in the Guarani language of South America (source also of English petunia [19], a close relative of the tobacco plant).
Yankee: Yankee: [17] Yankee appears to have started life as a nickname for Dutchmen, and it is thought that it may represent Dutch Janke, a diminutive form of the common Dutch forename Jan. It was first used as a term for inhabitants of New England (where of course there were many early Dutch settlers) in the mid-18th century, and its application gradually spread to cover all the northern states and (more loosely, by non- American speakers) the whole of the USA.
admiral (n.): c. 1200, "Saracen commander or chieftain," from Old French amirail (12c.) "Saracen military commander; any military commander," ultimately from medieval Arabic amir "military commander," probably via Medieval Latin use of the word for "Muslim military leader." Meaning "highest-ranking naval officer" in English is from early 15c. The extension of the word's meaning from "commander on land" to "commander at sea" likely began in 12c. Sicily with Medieval Latin amiratus and then spread to the continent, but the word also continued to mean "Muslim military commander" in Europe in the Middle Ages.

The intrusive -d- probably is from influence of Latin ad-mirabilis (see admire). Italian form almiraglio, Spanish almirante are from confusion with Arabic words in al-. As a type of butterfly, from 1720, possibly a corruption of admirable.
dogfish (n.): a name for various types of small shark, late 15c., dokefyche, from dog (n.) + fish (n.). Said to be so called because they hunt in packs. This was the image of sharks in classical antiquity as well.
But in the Mediterranean, among the Greeks and Romans of antiquity, closer contact with sharks had left an impression of vicious dogs of the sea. Thus, Pliny's canis marinus. The metaphor of the dog spread to the North to dominate the European image of the shark, from the Italian pescecane and French chien de mer to the German Meerhund and Hundfisch and English sea dog and dogfish. [Tom Jones, "The Xoc, the Sharke and the Sea Dogs," in "Fifth Palenque Round Table, 1983," edited by Virginia M. Field, 1985.]
gnarly (adj.): "knotted and rugged," c. 1600, from gnarl (see gnarled) + -y (2). Picked up 1970s as surfer slang to describe a dangerous wave; it had spread to teen slang by 1982, where it meant both "excellent" and "disgusting."
heathen: Old English hæðen "not Christian or Jewish," also as a noun, "heathen man, one of a race or nation which does not acknowledge the God of the Bible" (especially of the Danes), merged with Old Norse heiðinn (adj.) "heathen, pagan," of uncertain origin. Cognate with Old Saxon hedhin, Old Frisian hethen, Dutch heiden, Old High German heidan, German Heiden.

Perhaps literally "dweller on the heath, one inhabiting uncultivated land;" see heath + -en (2). Historically assumed to be ultimately from Gothic haiþno "gentile, heathen woman," used by Ulfilas in the first translation of the Bible into a Germanic language (as in Mark vii:26, for "Greek"); like other basic words for exclusively Christian ideas (such as church) it likely would have come first into Gothic and then spread to other Germanic languages. If so it could be a noun use of an unrelated Gothic adjective (compare Gothic haiþi "dwelling on the heath," but a religious sense is not recorded for this). Whether native or Gothic, it may have been chosen on model of Latin paganus, with its root sense of "rural" (see pagan), or for resemblance to Greek ethne (see gentile), or it may be a literal borrowing of that Greek word, perhaps via Armenian hethanos [Sophus Bugge].
jukebox (n.): 1937, jook organ, from jook joint "roadhouse" (1935), Black English slang, from juke, joog "wicked, disorderly," in Gullah (the creolized English of the coastlands of South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida), probably from Wolof and Bambara dzug "unsavory." Said to have originated in central Florida (see "A Note on Juke," Florida Review, vol. VII, no. 3, spring 1938). The spelling with a -u- might represent a deliberate attempt to put distance between the word and its origins.
For a long time the commercial juke trade resisted the name juke box and even tried to raise a big publicity fund to wage a national campaign against it, but "juke box" turned out to be the biggest advertising term that could ever have been invented for the commercial phonograph and spread to the ends of the world during the war as American soldiers went abroad but remembered the juke boxes back home. ["Billboard," Sept. 15, 1945]
romanticism (n.): 1803, "a romantic idea," from romantic + -ism. In literature, 1823 in reference to a movement toward medieval forms (especially in reaction to classical ones) it has an association now more confined to Romanesque. The movement began in German and spread to England and France. Generalized sense of "a tendency toward romantic ideas" is first recorded 1840.
traipse (v.): 1590s, of uncertain origin, perhaps from dialectal French trepasser "pass over or beyond," from Old French trespasser "cross, traverse, transgress" (see trespass). Or from a source related to Middle Dutch trappen, dialectal Norwegian trappa "to tread, stamp" (see trap (n.)). Liberman points out that it resembles German traben "tramp" "and other similar verbs meaning 'tramp; wander; flee' in several European languages. They seem to have been part of soldiers' and vagabonds' slang between 1400 and 1700. In all likelihood, they originated as onomatopoeias and spread to neighboring languages from Low German." Related: Traipsed; traipsing.
wassail: mid-12c., from Old Norse ves heill "be healthy," a salutation, from ves, imperative of vesa "to be" (see was) + heill "healthy," from Proto-Germanic *haila- (see health). Use as a drinking phrase appears to have arisen among Danes in England and spread to native inhabitants.

A similar formation appears in Old English wes þu hal, but this is not recorded as a drinking salutation. Sense extended c. 1300 to "liquor in which healths were drunk," especially spiced ale used in Christmas Eve celebrations. Meaning "a carousal, reveling" first attested c. 1600. Wassailing "custom of going caroling house to house at Christmas time" is recorded from 1742.