英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

a [a 词源字典]: a: [OE] The indefinite article in English is ultimately identical with the word one (as is the case, even more obviously, in other European languages – French un, German ein, and so on). The ancestor of both a(n) and one was ān, with a long vowel, but in the Old English period it was chiefly used for the numeral; where we would use a(n), the Anglo-Saxons tended not to use an article at all. Ān begins to emerge as the indefinite article in the middle of the 12th century, and it was not long before, in that relatively unemphatic linguistic environment, its vowel became weakened and shortened, giving an.

And at about the same time the distinction between an and a began to develop, although this was a slow process; until 1300 an was still often used before consonants, and right up to 1600 and beyond it was common before all words beginning with h, such as house.
=> one[a etymology, a origin, 英语词源]
an: an: [OE] The indefinite article in English is ultimately identical with the word one (as is the case, even more obviously, in other European languages – French un, German ein, and so on). The ancestor of both a(n) and one was ān, with a long vowel, but in the Old English period it was chiefly used for the numeral; where we would use a(n), the Anglo-Saxons tended not to use an article at all. Ān begins to emerge as the indefinite article in the middle of the 12th century, and it was not long before, in that relatively unemphatic linguistic environment, its vowel became weakened and shortened, giving an.

And at about the same time the distinction between an and a began to develop, although this was a slow process; until 1300 an was still often used before consonants, and right up to 1600 and beyond it was common before all words beginning with h, such as house.
=> one
abscess: abscess: [16] Abscess comes, via French abcès, from Latin abscessus, a noun derived from abscēdere ‘go away’. The constituent parts of this compound verb are abs ‘away’ and cēdere ‘go’, which has given English cede and a whole range of other words, such as accede and recede. The notion linking ‘abscesses’ and ‘going away’ was that impure or harmful bodily humours were eliminated, or ‘went away’, via the pus that gathered in abscesses.

It originated amongst the Greeks, who indeed had a word for it: apostema. This meant literally ‘separation’ (apo ‘away’ and histánai ‘stand’), and Latin abscessus was an approximate translation of it, possibly by Aulus Cornelius Celsus, the Roman writer on medical and other matters.
=> accede, cede, recede
abstain: abstain: [14] The literal meaning of this word’s ultimate source, Latin abstinēre, was ‘hold or keep away’, and hence ‘withhold’ (the root verb, tenēre, produced many other derivatives in English, such as contain, maintain, obtain, and retain, as well as tenacious, tenant, tenement, tenet, tenor, and tenure).

That is how it was used when it was first introduced into English (via Old French abstenir), and it was not until the 16th century that it began to be used more specifically for refraining from pleasurable activities, particularly the drinking of alcohol. The past participial stem of the Latin verb, abstent-, gave us abstention, while the present participial stem, abstinent-, produced abstinent and abstinence.

There is no connection, incidentally, with the semantically similar abstemious, which comes from a Latin word for alcoholic drink, tēmōtum.
acorn: acorn: [OE] Acorn has no etymological connection with oak; its nearest linguistic relative in English is probably acre. The Old English word was æcern, which may well have derived from æcer ‘open land’ (the related Middle High German ackeran referred to beech mast as well as acorns, and Gothic akran developed more widely still, to mean simply ‘fruit’).

There are cognate words in other, non- Germanic, Indo-European languages, such as Russian yagoda ‘berry’ and Welsh aeron ‘fruits’. Left to develop on its own, æcern would have become modern English achern, but the accidental similarity of oak and corn have combined to reroute its pronunciation.
=> acre
acre: acre: [OE] Acre is a word of ancient ancestry, going back probably to the Indo-European base *ag-, source of words such as agent and act. This base had a range of meanings covering ‘do’ and ‘drive’, and it is possible that the notion of driving contributed to the concept of driving animals on to land for pasture. However that may be, it gave rise to a group of words in Indo- European languages, including Latin ager (whence English agriculture), Greek agros, Sanskrit ájras, and a hypothetical Germanic *akraz.

By this time, people’s agricultural activities had moved on from herding animals in open country to tilling the soil in enclosed areas, and all of this group of words meant specifically ‘field’. From the Germanic form developed Old English æcer, which as early as 1000 AD had come to be used for referring to a particular measured area of agricultural land (as much as a pair of oxen could plough in one day).
=> act, agent, agriculture, eyrie, onager, peregrine, pilgrim
acrostic: acrostic: [16] An acrostic is a piece of verse in which the first letters of each line when put together spell out a word. The term is of Greek origin (akrostikhis), and was formed from ákros ‘at the extremity’ (see ACROBAT) and stíkhos ‘line of verse’. The second element crops up in several other prosodic terms, such as distich and hemistich, and comes from the Greek verb steíkhein ‘go’, which is related ultimately to English stair, stile, and stirrup.
=> acrobat, distich, hemistich, stair, stile, stirrup
adder: adder: [OE] In Old English, the term for a snake (any snake, not just an adder) was nǣddre; there are or were related forms in many other European languages, such as Latin natrix, Welsh neidr, and German natter (but there does not seem to be any connection with the natterjack toad). Around the 14th century, however, the word began to lose its initial consonant. The noun phrase including the indefinite article, a nadder, became misanalysed as an adder, and by the 17th century nadder had disappeared from the mainstream language (though it survived much longer in northern dialects).
address: address: [14] Address originally meant ‘straighten’. William Caxton, for example, here uses it for ‘stand up straight’: ‘The first day that he was washed and bathed he addressed him[self] right up in the basin’ Golden Legend 1483. This gives a clue to its ultimate source, Latin dīrectum ‘straight, direct’. The first two syllables of this seem gradually to have merged together to produce *drictum, which with the addition of the prefix ad- was used to produce the verb *addrictiāre.

Of its descendants in modern Romance languages, Italian addirizzare most clearly reveals its source. Old French changed it fairly radically, to adresser, and it was this form which English borrowed. The central current sense of ‘where somebody lives’ developed in the 17th and 18th centuries from the notion of directing something, such as a letter, to somebody.
=> direct
admonish: admonish: [14] In Middle English times this verb was amoneste. It came, via Old French amonester, from an assumed Vulgar Latin verb *admonestāre, an alteration of Latin admonēre (monēre meant ‘warn’, and came from the same source as English mind). The prefix ad- was reintroduced from Latin in the 15th century, while the -ish ending arose from a mistaken analysis of -este as some sort of past tense inflection; the t was removed when producing infinitive or present tense forms, giving spellings such as amonace and admonyss, and by the 16th century this final -is had become identified with and transformed into the more common -ish ending.
=> mind
advance: advance: [13] Advance originated in the Latin adverb abante ‘before’ (source of, among others, French avant and Italian avanti), which in turn was based on ab ‘from’ and ante ‘before’. In post-classical times a verb, *abantiāre, seems to have been formed from the adverb. It developed into Old French avancer, and passed into English as avaunce, initially with the meaning ‘promote’.

A new form, advancer, started life in Old French, on the mistaken association of avancer with other av- words, such as aventure, which really did derive from Latin words with the ad- prefix; over the 15th and 16th centuries this gradually established itself in English. The noun advance did not appear until the 17th century.
aeroplane: aeroplane: [19] The prefix aero- comes ultimately from Greek āér ‘air’, but many of the terms containing it (such as aeronaut and aerostat) reached English via French. This was the case, too, with aeroplane, in the sense of ‘heavier-than-air flying machine’. The word was first used in English in 1873 (30 years before the Wright brothers’ first flight), by D S Brown in the Annual Report of the Aeronautical Society – he refers vaguely to an aeroplane invented by ‘a Frenchman’.

The abbreviated form plane followed around 1908. (An earlier, and exclusively English, use of the word aeroplane was in the sense ‘aerofoil, wing’; this was coined in the 1860s, but did not long survive the introduction of the ‘aircraft’ sense.) Aeroplane is restricted in use mainly to British English (and even there now has a distinctly old-fashioned air). The preferred term in American English is airplane, a refashioning of aeroplane along more ‘English’ lines which is first recorded from 1907.
=> air
again: again: [OE] The underlying etymological sense of again is ‘in a direct line with, facing’, hence ‘opposite’ and ‘in the opposite direction, back’ (its original meaning in Old English). It comes from a probable Germanic *gagin ‘straight’, which was the source of many compounds formed with on or in in various Germanic languages, such as Old Saxon angegin and Old Norse íg gegn.

The Old English form was ongēan, which would have produced ayen in modern English; however, Norse-influenced forms with a hard g had spread over the whole country from northern areas by the 16th century. The meaning ‘once more, anew’ did not develop until the late 14th century. From Old English times until the late 16th century a prefix-less form gain was used in forming compounds.

It carried a range of meanings, from ‘against’ to ‘in return’, but today survives only in gainsay. The notion of ‘opposition’ is carried through in against, which was formed in the 12th century from again and what was originally the genitive suffix -es, as in always and nowadays. The parasitic -t first appeared in the 14th century.
agent: agent: [15] Latin agere, a verb of great semantic breadth (‘drive, lead, act, do’), has been a prolific source of English words. Its past participle, āctus, produced act, action, active, actor, actual, cachet, and exact, while other parts of its paradigm lie behind agile, agitate, ambiguous, coagulate, cogent, cogitate, examine, exigent, exiguous, and prodigal.

Its most obvious offspring, however, are agent (literally ‘(person) doing something’) and agency, formed from the Latin present participial stem agent-. Agere itself is of considerable antiquity, being related to other Indo-European verbs such as Greek ágein ‘drive, lead’, Old Norse aka ‘travel in a vehicle’, and Sanskrit ájati ‘drives’.
=> act, agile, ambiguous, cachet, cogent, demagogue, exact, examine, prodigal
ail: ail: [OE] Now virtually obsolete except in the metaphorical use of its present participial adjective ailing, ail is of long but uncertain history. The Old English verb egl(i)an came from the adjective egle ‘troublesome’, which had related forms in other Germanic languages, such as Middle Low German egelen ‘annoy’ and Gothic agls ‘disgraceful’, aglo ‘oppression’. The derivative ailment did not appear until as late as the 18th century.
ale: 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.
almanac: almanac: [14] One of the first recorded uses of almanac in English is by Chaucer in his Treatise on the astrolabe 1391: ‘A table of the verray Moeuyng of the Mone from howre to howre, every day and in every signe, after thin Almenak’. At that time an almanac was specifically a table of the movements and positions of the sun, moon, and planets, from which astronomical calculations could be made; other refinements and additions, such as a calendar, came to be included over succeeding centuries.

The earliest authenticated reference to an almanac comes in the (Latin) works of the English scientist Roger Bacon, in the mid 13th century. But the ultimate source of the word is obscure. Its first syllable, al-, and its general relevance to medieval science and technology, strongly suggest an Arabic origin, but no convincing candidate has been found.
alms: alms: [OE] The word alms has become much reduced in its passage through time from its ultimate Greek source, eleēmosúnē ‘pity, alms’. This was borrowed into post-classical (Christian) Latin as eleēmosyna, which subsequently became simplified in Vulgar Latin to *alimosina (source of the word for ‘alms’ in many Romance languages, such as French aumône and Italian limosina).

At this stage Germanic borrowed it, and in due course dispersed it (German almosen, Dutch aalmoes). It entered Old English as ælmesse, which became reduced in Middle English to almes and finally by the 17th century to alms (which because of its -s had come to be regarded as a plural noun). The original Greek eleēmosúnē is itself a derivative, of the adjective eleémōn ‘compassionate’, which in turn came from the noun éleos ‘pity’.

From medieval Latin eleēmosyna was derived the adjective eleēmosynarius (borrowed into English in the 17th century as the almost unpronounceable eleemosynary ‘giving alms’). Used as a noun, this passed into Old French as a(u)lmonier, and eventually, in the 13th century, became English aumoner ‘giver of alms’. The modern sense of almoner as a hospital social worker did not develop until the end of the 19th century.
=> almoner, eleemosynary
alphabet: alphabet: [15] This word is based on the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta, standing for the whole. It derives from Greek alphabētos, via Latin alphabētum. When it first came into English, purists tried to insist that it should be reserved for the Greek alphabet, and that the English alphabet should be referred to by the term ABC (which had been lexicalized in various forms, such as abece, apece, and absee, since the late 13th century), but, like most such prescriptive demands, this was a waste of breath and ink.
amaze: amaze: [OE] Old English āmasian meant ‘stupefy’ or ‘stun’, with perhaps some reminiscences of an original sense ‘stun by hitting on the head’ still adhering to it. Some apparently related forms in Scandinavian languages, such as Swedish masa ‘be sluggish’ and Norwegian dialect masast ‘become unconscious’, suggest that it may originally have been borrowed from Old Norse.

The modern sense ‘astonish’ did not develop until the end of the 16th century; Shakespeare was one of its earliest exponents: ‘Crystal eyes, whose full perfection all the world amazes’, Venus and Adonis 1592. By the end of the 13th century both the verb and its related noun had developed a form without the initial a-, and in the late 14th century the word – maze – had begun to be applied to a deliberately confusing structure.
=> maze
ambassador: ambassador: [14] Appropriately enough, ambassador is a highly cosmopolitan word. It was borrowed back and forth among several European languages before arriving in English. Its ultimate source appears to be the Indo- European root *ag- ‘drive, lead’, whose other numerous offspring include English act and agent. With the addition of the prefix *amb- ‘around’ (as in ambidextrous), this produced in the Celtic languages of Gaul the noun ambactos, which was borrowed by Latin as ambactus ‘vassal’.

The Latin word then found its way into the Germanic languages – Old English had ambeht ‘servant, messenger’, Old High German ambaht (from which modern German gets amt ‘official position’) – from which it was later borrowed back into medieval Latin as ambactia. This seems to have formed the basis of a verb, *ambactiāre ‘go on a mission’ (from which English ultimately gets embassy), from which in turn was derived the noun *ambactiātor.

This became ambasciator in Old Italian, from which Old French borrowed it as ambassadeur. The word had a be wildering array of spellings in Middle English (such as ambaxadour and inbassetour) before finally settling down as ambassador in the 16th century.
=> embassy
ambergris: ambergris: [15] The original term for ambergris (a waxy material from the stomach of the sperm whale) was amber. But as confusion began to arise between the two substances amber and ambergris, amber came to be used for both in all the languages that had borrowed it from Arabic, thus compounding the bewilderment. The French solution was to differentiate ambergris as ambre gris, literally ‘grey amber’, and this eventually became the standard English term. (Later on, the contrastive term ambre jaune ‘yellow amber’ was coined for ‘amber’ in French.) Uncertainty over the identity of the second element, -gris, has led to some fanciful reformulations of the word.

In the 17th century, many people thought ambergris came from Greece – hence spellings such as amber-degrece and amber-greece. And until comparatively recently its somewhat greasy consistency encouraged the spelling ambergrease.
=> amber
ambulance: ambulance: [19] Originally, ambulance was a French term for a field hospital – that is, one set up at a site convenient for a battlefield, and capable of being moved on to the next battlefield when the army advanced (or retreated). In other words, it was an itinerant hospital, and the ultimate source of the term is the Latin verb ambulāre ‘walk’ (as in amble). The earliest recorded term for such a military hospital in French was the 17th-century hôpital ambulatoire.

This was later replaced by hôpital ambulant, literally ‘walking hospital’, and finally, at the end of the 18th century, by ambulance. This sense of the word had died out by the late 19th century, but already its attributive use, in phrases such as ambulance cart and ambulance wagon, had led to its being used for a vehicle for carrying the wounded or sick.
=> acid, alacrity, amble, perambulator
anatomy: anatomy: [14] Etymologically, anatomy means ‘cutting up’ (the Greek noun anatomíā was compounded from the prefix ana- ‘up’ and the base *tom-, which figures in several English surgical terms, such as tonsillectomy [19], as well as in atom and tome), and when it first came into English it meant literally ‘dissection’ as well as ‘science of bodily structure’.

From the 16th century to the early 19th century it was also used for ‘skeleton’, and in this sense it was often misanalysed as an atomy, as if the initial anwere the indefinite article: ‘My bones … will be taken up smooth, and white, and bare as an atomy’, Tobias Smollett, Don Quixote 1755.
=> atom, tome
ancestor: ancestor: [13] Ultimately, ancestor is the same word as antecedent [14]: both come from the Latin compound verb antecēdere ‘precede’, formed from the prefix ante- ‘before’ and the verb cēdere ‘go’ (source of English cede and a host of related words, such as proceed and access). Derived from this was the agent noun antecessor ‘one who precedes’, which was borrowed into Old French at two distinct times: first as ancessour, and later as ancestre, which subsequently developed to ancêtre. Middle English had examples of all three of these forms. The modern spelling, ancestor, developed in the 16th century.
=> access, antecedent, cede, precede, proceed
angle: angle: There have been two distinct words angle in English. The older is now encountered virtually only in its derivatives, angler and angling, but until the early 19th century an angle was a ‘fishing hook’ (or, by extension, ‘fishing tackle’). It entered the language in the Old English period, and was based on Germanic *angg- (source also of German angel ‘fishing tackle’).

An earlier form of the word appears to have been applied by its former inhabitants to a fishhook-shaped area of Schleswig, in the Jutland peninsula; now Angeln, they called it Angul, and so they themselves came to be referred to as Angles. They brought their words with them to England, of course, and so both the country and the language, English, now contain a reminiscence of their fishhooks. Angle in the sense of a ‘figure formed by two intersecting lines’ entered the language in the 14th century (Chaucer is its first recorded user).

It came from Latin angulus ‘corner’, either directly or via French angle. The Latin word was originally a diminutive of *angus, which is related to other words that contain the notion of ‘bending’, such as Greek ágkūra (ultimate source of English anchor) and English ankle. They all go back to Indo-European *angg- ‘bent’, and it has been speculated that the fishhook angle, with its temptingly bent shape, may derive from the same source.
=> english; anchor, ankle
anniversary: anniversary: [13] Like annual, anniversary is based ultimately on Latin annus ‘year’. The underlying idea it contains is of ‘yearly turning’ or ‘returning’; the Latin adjective anniversārius was based on annus and versus ‘turning’ (related to a wide range of English words, from verse and convert to vertebra and vertigo). This was used in phrases such as diēs anniversāria ‘day returning every year’, and eventually became a noun in its own right.
=> annual, convert, verse
annual: annual: [14] Annual comes, via Old French annuel, from annuālis, a late Latin adjective based on annus ‘year’ (perhaps as a blend of two earlier, classical Latin adjectives, annuus and annālis – ultimate source of English annals [16]). Annus itself may go back to an earlier, unrecorded *atnos, probably borrowed from an ancient Indo-European language of the Italian peninsula, such as Oscan or Umbrian.

It appears to be related to Gothic athnam ‘years’ and Sanskrit átati ‘go, wander’. The medieval Latin noun annuitās, formed from the adjective annuus, produced French annuité, which was borrowed into English as annuity in the 15th century.
=> annals, anniversary, annuity
apocalypse: apocalypse: [13] A ‘catastrophic event, such as the end of the world’ is a relatively recent, 20thcentury development in the meaning of apocalypse. Originally it was an alternative name for the book of the Bible known as the ‘Revelation of St. John the divine’, which describes a vision of the future granted to St John on the island of Patmos. And in fact, the underlying etymological meaning of apocalypse is literally ‘revelation’.

It comes, via Old French and ecclesiastical Latin, from Greek apokálupsis, a derivative of the verb apokalúptein ‘uncover, reveal’, which was formed from the prefix apo- ‘away, off’ and the verb kalúptein ‘cover’ (related to English conceal).
=> conceal
apothecary: apothecary: [14] Originally, an apothecary was simply a shopkeeper – the word comes via Old French from late Latin apothēcārius, which was based on Greek apothékē ‘storehouse’ (source, via French, of boutique [18] and via Spanish of bodega [19]), a derivative of the verb apotithénai ‘put away’ (formed from the prefix apo- ‘away’ and the verb tithénai ‘put’ – source of thesis).

By the time the word entered English it was reserved to shopkeepers who sold non-perishable groceries, such as spices – and herbal and other remedies. Gradually, apothecaries began to specialize more and more in drugs, so that in 1617 a formal separation took place between the Apothecaries’ Company of London and the Grocers’ Company. Apothecary remained the general term for a ‘druggist’ until about 1800, when chemist began to take over.
=> bodega, boutique, thesis
apprehend: apprehend: [14] The underlying notion in apprehend is of ‘seizing’ or ‘grasping’; it comes ultimately from the Latin verb prehendere ‘seize’ (source also of comprehend, predatory, and prehensile). Latin apprehendere ‘lay hold of’, formed with the prefix ad-, developed the metaphorical meaning ‘seize with the mind’ – that is, ‘learn’; and that was the earliest meaning apprehend had in English when it was borrowed either directly from Latin or via French appréhender: John de Trevisa, for instance, in his translation of De proprietatibus rerum 1398 writes ‘he holds in mind … without forgetting, all that he apprehends’.

More familiar modern senses, such as ‘arrest’ and ‘understand’, followed in the 16th century. A contracted form of the Latin verb, apprendere, became Old French aprendre, modern French apprendre ‘learn’. This provided the basis for the derivative aprentis ‘someone learning’, from which English gets apprentice [14]; and its past participle appris, in the causative sense ‘taught’, was the source of English apprise [17].

The chief modern meaning of the derived noun apprehension, ‘fear’, arose via the notion of ‘grasping something with the mind’, then ‘forming an idea of what will happen in the future’, and finally ‘anticipation of something unpleasant’.
=> apprentice, comprehend, impregnable, predatory, prehensile
armour: armour: [13] Armour comes ultimately from Latin armātūra ‘armour, equipment’, a derivative of the verb armāre ‘arm’ (the direct English borrowing armature [15] originally meant ‘armour’ or ‘weapons’, but the ‘protective’ notion of armour led to its application in the 18th century to ‘metal covering the poles of a magnet’). In Old French armātūra became armeure, and subsequently armure, the form in which it was borrowed into English (the -our ending was artificially grafted on in the 14th century on the model of other Latin-based words such as colour and odour). Armoury is French in origin: Old French armoier ‘coat of arms’ was a derivative of arme ‘weapon’; this became armoirie, which was borrowed into English in the 15th century as armory, meaning ‘heraldry’, but also, owing to their formal similarity, came to be used with the same sense as armour – ‘protective metal suit’ or ‘weapons’.

This was what armoury meant when it came into English in the 14th century (and the sense survived long enough to be used by Wordsworth in a sonnet to ‘Liberty’ 1802: ‘In our halls is hung armoury of invincible knights of old’). The meaning ‘place for keeping weapons’ developed in the 16th century.
=> armature
around: around: [14] Around was formed in Middle English from the prefix a- ‘on’ and the noun round (perhaps influenced by the Old French phrase a la reonde ‘in the round, roundabout’). It was slow to usurp existing forms such as about – it does not occur in Shakespeare or the 1611 translation of the Bible – and it does not seem to have become strongly established before the end of the 17th century. The adverb and preposition round may be a shortening of around.
=> round
arrant: arrant: [16] Arrant is an alteration of errant, as in knight errant. This originally meant ‘roaming, wandering’, but its persistent application to nouns with negative connotations, such as rogue and thief, gradually drove its meaning downwards by association, to ‘notorious’.
=> errant
arthritis: arthritis: [16] Greek árthron meant ‘joint’ (it is used in various technical terms in biology, such as arthropod ‘creature, such as an insect, with jointed limbs’). It came from the Indo-European root *ar- ‘put things together, join, fit’, which also produced Latin artus ‘limb’ (source of English article) and English arm, as well as art. The compound arthritis is a Greek formation (-itis was originally simply an adjectival suffix, so arthritis meant ‘of the joints’ – with ‘disease’ understood; its application to ‘inflammatory diseases’ is a relatively modern development); it reached English via Latin.
=> arm, art, article
ask: ask: [OE] The Old English ancestor of ask existed in two main forms: āscian and ācsian. The first produced descendants such as asshe, which died out in the 16th century; the second resulted in axe (still extant in some dialects), which by metathesis – the reversal of the consonant sounds k and s – became modern English ask. Ultimately the word comes from a prehistoric West Germanic verb *aiskōjan (source of German heischen, a poetical term for ‘ask’); cognates in other, non-Germanic, Indo- European languages include Latin aeruscāre ‘beg’ and Sanskrit iccháti ‘seek’.
atom: atom: [16] Etymologically, atom means ‘not cut, indivisible’. Greek átomos ‘that which cannot be divided up any further’ was formed from the negative prefix a- ‘not’ and the base *tom- ‘cut’ (source also of English anatomy and tome), and was applied in the Middle Ages not just to the smallest imaginable particle of matter, but also to the smallest imaginable division of time; an hour contained 22,560 atoms.

Its use by classical writers on physics and philosophy, such as Democritus and Epicurus, was sustained by medieval philosophers, and the word was ready and waiting for 19th-century chemists when they came to describe and name the smallest unit of an element, composed of a nucleus surrounded by electrons.
=> anatomy, tome
attack: attack: [16] Attack reached English via French attaquer from Italian attaccare ‘attach, join’, which, like Old French atachier (source of English attach) was based on a hypothetical Germanic *stakōn (from which English gets stake). Phrases such as attaccare battaglia ‘join battle’ led to attaccare being used on its own to mean ‘attack’. Attach and attack are thus ‘doublets’ – that is, words with the same ultimate derivation but different meanings.
=> attach, stake
attract: attract: [15] Etymologically, attract means literally ‘pull something towards one’. It comes from attract-, the past participial stem of the Latin verb attrahere, a compound formed from the prefix ad- ‘to’ and the verb trahere ‘pull’. It was quite a late formation, of around the mid 15th century, coined on the model of other English verbs, such as abstract and contract, deriving ultimately from Latin trahere.
=> abstract, contract, retract, subtract
back: back: [OE] Back goes back to a prehistoric West and North Germanic *bakam, which was represented in several pre-medieval and medieval Germanic languages: Old High German bah, for example, and Old Norse bak. In most of them, however, it has been ousted by relatives of English ridge, originally ‘spine’ (such as German rücken and Swedish rygg), and only English retains back.
=> bacon
bag: bag: [13] English acquired bag from Old Norse baggi ‘bag, bundle’, but it does not appear in any other Germanic language, which suggests that it may have been borrowed at some point from a non-Germanic language. Forms such as Old French bague, Italian baga, and Portuguese bagua show that it existed elsewhere. A derivative of the Old French word was bagage, from which in the 15th century English got baggage; and Italian baga may have led, by a doubling of diminutive suffixes, to bagatella ‘insignificant property, trifle’, which entered English in the 17th century via French bagatelle (although this has also been referred to Latin bacca ‘berry’ – see BACHELOR).
=> bagatelle, baggage
bar: bar: [12] The history of bar cannot be traced back very far. Forms in various Romance languages, such as French barre (source of the English verb) and Italian and Spanish barra, point to a Vulgar Latin *barra, but beyond that nothing is known. The original sense of a ‘rail’ or ‘barrier’ has developed various figurative applications over the centuries: in the 14th century to the ‘rail in a court before which a prisoner was arraigned’ (as in ‘prisoner at the bar’); in the 16th century to a ‘partition separating qualified from unqualified lawyers in hall’ (as in ‘call to the bar’); and also in the 16th century to a ‘counter at which drink is served’.

Related nouns include barrage [19], originally an ‘artificial obstruction in a waterway’, and barrier [14], from Anglo- Norman barrere.
=> barrage, barrel, barrier, barrister, embargo
bath: bath: [OE] Bath is a word widely dispersed among the Germanic languages (German has bad, as does Swedish). Like the others, Old English bæth goes back to a hypothetical Germanic *batham, which perhaps derives from the base *ba- (on the suffix -th see BIRTH). If this is so, it would be an indication (backed up by other derivatives of the same base, such as bake, and cognate words such as Latin fovēre ‘heat’, source of English foment) that the original notion contained in the word was of ‘heat’ rather than ‘washing’.

This is preserved in the steam bath and the Turkish bath. The original verbal derivative was bathe, which goes back to Germanic *bathōn (another derivative of which, Old Norse batha, had a reflexive form bathask, which probably lies behind English bask); use of bath as a verb dates from the 15th century.
=> bask, bathe
battle: battle: [13] English acquired battle via Old French bataille and Vulgar Latin *battālia from late Latin battuālia ‘fencing exercises’. This was a derivative of the verb battuere ‘beat’ (source also of English batter and battery), which some have viewed as of Celtic origin, citing Gaulish andabata ‘gladiator’, a possible relative of English bat.

Related words include battalion [16], ultimately from Italian battaglione, a derivative of battaglia ‘battle’; battlements [14], from Old French batailler ‘provide with batailles – fortifications or battlements’; and derivatives such as abate, combat, and debate.
=> abate, bat, battalion, battery, combat, debate
beam: beam: [OE] In Old English times the word bēam (like modern German baum) meant ‘tree’ – a signification preserved in tree-names such as hornbeam and whitebeam. But already before the year 1000 the extended meanings we are familiar with today – ‘piece of timber’ and ‘ray of light’ – had started to develop. Related forms in other Germanic languages (which include, as well as German baum, Dutch boom, from which English gets boom ‘spar’ [16]) suggest a West Germanic ancestor *bauma, but beyond that all is obscure.
=> boom
beech: beech: [OE] Like many other tree-names, beech goes back a long way into the past, and is not always what it seems. Among early relatives Latin fāgus meant ‘beech’ (whence the tree’s modern scientific name), but Greek phāgós, for example, referred to an ‘edible oak’. Both come from a hypothetical Indo-European *bhagos, which may be related to Greek phagein ‘eat’ (which enters into a number of English compounds, such as phagocyte [19], literally ‘eating-cell’, geophagy [19], ‘earth-eating’, and sarcophagus).

If this is so, the name may signify etymologically ‘edible tree’, with reference to its nuts, ‘beech mast’. The Old English word bēce’s immediate source was Germanic *bōkjōn, but this was a derivative; the main form bōkō produced words for ‘beech’ in other Germanic languages, such as German buche and Dutch beuk, and it survives in English as the first element of buckwheat [16], so named from its three-sided seeds which look like beech nuts.

It is thought that book may come ultimately from bōk- ‘beech’, on the grounds that early runic inscriptions were carved on beechwood tablets.
=> book, buckwheat, phagocyte, sarcophagus
belt: belt: [OE] Old English belt and related Germanic forms such as Swedish bälte point to a source in Germanic *baltjaz, which was borrowed from Latin balteus, possibly a word of Etruscan origin. The verbal idiom belt up ‘be quiet’ appears to date from just before World War II.
berth: berth: [17] Like birth, berth appears to be based on the verb bear, although it is a separate and much later formation. At first it meant ‘safe manoeuvring distance at sea’ (from which we get the metaphorical ‘give a wide berth to’); this seems to have come from the nautical sense of bear ‘steer in a particular direction’ as in bear away (from which we get bear down on, as well as more general applications, such as ‘bear left’). This led, via ‘convenient space for a ship to moor’, to, in the 18th century, the more familiar modern senses ‘sleeping place on a ship’ and ‘job, situation (originally on board ship)’.
=> bear, birth
beside: beside: [13] Beside was a Middle English lexicalization of the Old English phrase be sīdan, literally ‘by the side of’. The -s of besides is a survival of the genitive ending added to certain adverbs in the Old English and early Middle English period (such as always). The metaphorical beside oneself originated in the 15th century.
=> side
bible: bible: [13] Greek ta biblía meant literally ‘the books’. This was borrowed into ecclesiastical Latin as biblia, where the plural form came to be misanalysed as a feminine singular; hence Old French, and through it English, received bible as a singular noun. Greek biblía itself was the plural of biblíon ‘book’ (whence English bibliography [17]), which was originally a diminutive form of bíblos or búblos. This was used for ‘book’, and for the book’s forerunners, such as scrolls and papyri. It may come from Bublos, an ancient Phoenician port from which papyrus was exported to Greece.
=> bibliography