英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

ale [ale 词源字典]: ale: [OE] Old English ealu ‘ale’ goes back to a Germanic root *aluth-, which also produced Old Norse öl (Scandinavian languages still use alerelated words, whereas other Germanic languages now only use beer-related words; English is the only one to retain both). Going beyond Germanic in time takes us back to the word’s ultimate Indo-European source, a base meaning ‘bitter’ which is also represented in alum and aluminium. Ale and beer seem to have been virtually synonymous to the Anglo- Saxons; various distinctions in usage have developed over the centuries, such as that ale is made without hops, and is heavier (or some would say lighter) than beer, but most of the differences have depended on local usage.

The word bridal is intimately connected with ale. Nowadays used as an adjective, and therefore subconsciously associated with other adjectives ending in -al, in Old English it was a noun, literally ‘bride ale’, that is, a beer-drinking session to celebrate a marriage.
[ale etymology, ale origin, 英语词源]
byelaw: byelaw: [13] Although nowadays often subconsciously thought of as being a ‘secondary or additional law’, in fact byelaw has no connection with by. The closest English relatives of its first syllable are be, boor, bower, both, bound ‘about to go’, build, burly, byre, and the second syllable of neighbour. It comes ultimately from the Germanic base *bu- ‘dwell’, and is assumed to have reached English via an unrecorded Old Norse *býlagu ‘town law’, a compound of býr ‘place where people dwell, town, village’, and lagu, source of English law.

It thus originally meant ‘law or regulation which applied only to a particular local community’, rather than the whole country.
=> be, boor, booth, bower, build, burly, byre, neighbour
marzipan: marzipan: [19] The word marzipan has long puzzled etymologists. An elaborate theory was formulated in the early 20th century that traced it back to Arabic mawthabān ‘king who sits still’. That was applied by the Saracens to a medieval Venetian coin with a figure of the seated Christ on it. A series of fairly implausible semantic changes led from ‘coin’ via ‘box’ to ‘confectionery’, while the form of the word supposedly evolved in Italian to marzapane.

This turns out to be completely wide of the mark (not surprisingly), but the truth seems scarcely less remarkable. In Burma (now Myanmar) there is a port called Martaban, which was renowned in the Middle Ages for the jars of preserves and fruits exported from there to Europe. The name of the place came to be associated with its products, and in Italian, as marzapane, it denoted a type of sweetmeat (-pane for -ban suggests that some people subconsciously connected the word with Italian pane ‘bread’). Marzapane and its relatives in other languages (such as early modern French marcepain) entered English in the 16th century, and from the confusion of forms the consensus spelling marchpane emerged.

This remained the standard English word for ‘marzipan’ until the 19th century, when marzipan was borrowed from German; this was an alteration of Italian marzapane, based on the misconception that it came from Latin marci pānis ‘Mark’s bread’.
subconscious (adj.): 1823, "not wholly conscious, feebly conscious" (implied in subconsciously), from sub- + conscious. First attested in De Quincey. The noun, in the psychological sense ("mental processes taking place without consciousness"), is attested from 1886, from adjectival sense "occurring in the mind, but not in consciousness;" earlier noun was subconsciousness (1845).