英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

account: account: [14] Account is of Old French origin. It was formed from compter, conter ‘count’ (which derived from Latin computāre) and the prefix a-. Its original meaning in English, too, was ‘count’ or ‘count up’; this had disappeared by the end of the 18th century, but its specialized reference to the keeping of financial records is of equal antiquity. Account for, meaning ‘explain’, arose in the mid 18th century.
=> count
acrid: acrid: [18] Acrid is related to acid, and probably owes its second syllable entirely to that word. It is based essentially on Latin acer ‘sharp, pungent’, which, like acid, acute, oxygen, and edge, derives ultimately from an Indo-European base *ak- meaning ‘be pointed or sharp’. When this was imported into English in the 18th century, the ending -id was artificially grafted on to it, most likely from the semantically similar acid.
=> acid, acrylic, acute, edge, eglantine, oxygen, paragon
act: act: [14] Act, action, active, actor all go back to Latin agere ‘do, perform’ (which is the source of a host of other English derivatives, from agent to prodigal). The past participle of this verb was āctus, from which we get act, partly through French acte, but in the main directly from Latin. The Latin agent noun, āctor, came into the language at about the same time, although at first it remained a rather uncommon word in English, with technical legal uses; it was not until the end of the 16th century that it came into its own in the theatre (player had hitherto been the usual term).

Other Latin derivatives of the past participial stem āct- were the noun āctiō, which entered English via Old French action, and the adjective āctīvus, which gave English active. See also ACTUAL.
=> action, active, agent, cogent, examine, prodigal
adolescent: adolescent: [15] The original notion lying behind both adolescent and adult is of ‘nourishment’. The Latin verb alere meant ‘nourish’ (alimentary and alimony come from it, and it is related to old). A derivative of this, denoting the beginning of an action, was alēscere ‘be nourished’, hence ‘grow’. The addition of the prefix ad- produced adolēscere.

Its present participial stem, adolēscent- ‘growing’, passed into English as the noun adolescent ‘a youth’ (the adjective appears not to have occurred before the end of the 18th century). Its past participle, adultus ‘grown’, was adopted into English as adult in the 16th century.
=> adult, alimentary, alimony, coalesce, coalition, proletarian, prolific
adultery: adultery: [14] Neither adultery nor the related adulterate have any connection with adult. Both come ultimately from the Latin verb adulterāre ‘debauch, corrupt’ (which may have been based on Latin alter ‘other’, with the notion of pollution from some extraneous source). By the regular processes of phonetic change, adulterāre passed into Old French as avoutrer, and this was the form which first reached English, as avouter (used both verbally, ‘commit adultery’, and nominally, ‘adulterer’) and as the nouns avoutery ‘adultery’ and avouterer ‘adulterer’.

Almost from the first they coexisted in English beside adult- forms, deriving either from Law French or directly from Latin, and during the 15th to 17th centuries these gradually ousted the avout- forms. Adulter, the equivalent of avouter, clung on until the end of the 18th century, but the noun was superseded in the end by adulterer and the verb by a new form, adulterate, directly based on the past participle of Latin adulterāre, which continued to mean ‘commit adultery’ until the mid 19th century.
=> alter
advice: advice: [13] Like modern French avis, advice originally meant ‘opinion’, literally ‘what seems to one to be the case’. In Latin, ‘seem’ was usually expressed by the passive of the verb vidēre ‘see’; thus, vīsum est, ‘it seems’ (literally ‘it is seen’). With the addition of the dative first person pronoun, one could express the notion of opinion: mihi vīsum est, ‘it seems to me’.

It appears either that this was partially translated into Old French as ce m’est a vis, or that the past participle vīsum was nominalized in Latin, making possible such phrases as ad (meum) vīsum ‘in (my) view’; but either way it is certain that a(d)- became prefixed to vīs(um), producing a new word, a(d)vis, for ‘opinion’.

It was originally borrowed into English without the d, but learned influence had restored the Latin spelling by the end of the 15th century. As to its meaning, ‘opinion’ was obsolete by the mid 17th century, but already by the late 14th century the present sense of ‘counsel’ was developing. The verb advise [14] probably comes from Old French aviser, based on avis.
=> vision, visit
aeolian harp: aeolian harp: [18] Aeolus was the Greek god of the winds (the form of the name is Latin; the original Greek was Aiolos, deriving from the adjective aiolos ‘quick-moving’). Hence the application of the epithet to a musical instrument whose strings are sounded by the breeze blowing over them. The term is first recorded in the writings of Erasmus Darwin, at the end of the 18th century.
aggravate: aggravate: [16] Aggravate originally meant literally ‘to weigh down’ or ‘to make heavier’ (it was modelled on Latin aggravare ‘to make heavier’, which in turn was based on gravis ‘heavy’, source of English gravity and grief; its first cousin is aggrieve [13], which came via Old French agrever). From the first it was generally used in a metaphorical sense, and by the end of the 16th century the meaning ‘to make worse’ was well established. The sense ‘to annoy’, which some purists still object to, dates from at least the early 17th century.
=> grave, gravity, grief
ague: ague: [14] In its origins, ague is the same word as acute. It comes from the Latin phrase febris acuta ‘sharp fever’ (which found its way into Middle English as fever agu). In the Middle Ages the Latin adjective acuta came to be used on its own as a noun meaning ‘fever’; this became aguē in medieval French, from which it was borrowed into English. From the end of the 14th century ague was used for ‘malaria’ (the word malaria itself did not enter the language until the mid 18th century).
=> acute
algebra: algebra: [16] Algebra symbolizes the debt of Western culture to Arab mathematics, but ironically when it first entered the English language it was used as a term for the setting of broken bones, and even sometimes for the fractures themselves (‘The helpes of Algebra and of dislocations’, Robert Copland, Formulary of Guydo in surgery 1541). This reflects the original literal meaning of the Arabic term al jebr, ‘the reuniting of broken parts’, from the verb jabara ‘reunite’.

The anatomical connotations of this were adopted when the word was borrowed, as algebra, into Spanish, Italian, and medieval Latin, from one or other of which English acquired it. In Arabic, however, it had long been applied to the solving of algebraic equations (the full Arabic expression was ’ilm aljebr wa’lmuqābalah ‘the science of reunion and equation’, and the mathematician al- Khwarizmi used aljebr as the title of his treatise on algebra – see ALGORITHM), and by the end of the 16th century this was firmly established as the central meaning of algebra in English.
alibi: alibi: [18] In Latin, alibi means literally ‘somewhere else’. It is the locative form (that is, the form expressing place) of the pronoun alius ‘other’ (which is related to Greek allos ‘other’ and English else). When first introduced into English it was used in legal contexts as an adverb, meaning, as in Latin, ‘elsewhere’: ‘The prisoner had little to say in his defence; he endeavoured to prove himself Alibi’, John Arbuthnot, Law is a bottomless pit 1727.

But by the end of the 18th century it had become a noun, ‘plea of being elsewhere at the time of a crime’. The more general sense of an ‘excuse’ developed in the 20th century. Another legal offspring of Latin alius is alias. This was a direct 16th-century borrowing of Latin aliās, a form of alius meaning ‘otherwise’.
=> alias, else
alligator: alligator: [16] The Spanish, on encountering the alligator in America, called it el lagarto ‘the lizard’. At first English adopted simply the noun (‘In this river we killed a monstrous Lagarto or Crocodile’, Job Hortop, The trauailes of an Englishman 1568), but before the end of the 16th century the Spanish definite article el had been misanalysed as part of the noun – hence, alligator. Spanish lagarto derived from Latin lacerta ‘lizard’, which, via Old French lesard, gave English lizard.
=> lizard
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
aluminium: aluminium: [19] Aluminium comes from a coinage by the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy, who discovered the metal. His first suggestion was alumium, which he put forward in Volume 98 of the Transactions of the Royal Society 1808: ‘Had I been so fortunate as … to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should have proposed for them the names of silicium, alumium, zirconium, and glucium’.

He based it on Latin alūmen ‘alum’ (alum is a sulphate of aluminium, and the word alum, a 14th-century borrowing from French, derives ultimately from alūmen; alumina is an oxide of aluminium, and the word alumina is a modern Latin formation based on alūmen, which entered English at the end of the 18th century); and alūmen may be linked with Latin alūta ‘skins dried for making leather, using alum’.

Davy soon changed his mind, however, and in 1812 put forward the term aluminum – which remains the word used in American English to this day. British English, though, has preferred the form aluminium, which was mooted contemporaneously with aluminum on grounds of classical ‘correctness’: ‘Aluminium, for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound’, Quarterly Review 1812.
=> alum
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
amble: amble: [14] The ultimate source of amble (and of perambulator [17], and thus of its abbreviation pram [19]) is the Latin verb ambulāre ‘walk’. This was a compound verb, formed from the prefix ambi- (as in AMBIDEXTROUS) and the base *el- ‘go’, which also lies behind exile and alacrity [15] (from Latin alacer ‘lively, eager’, a compound of the base *el- and ācer ‘sharp’ – source of English acid).

Latin ambulāre developed into Provençal amblar, which eventually reached English via Old French ambler. At first the English word was used for referring to a particular (leisurely) gait of a horse, and it was not until the end of the 16th century that it began to be used of people.
=> acid, alacrity, exile, perambulator
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
annihilate: annihilate: [16] Annihilate comes from the past participle of the late Latin verb annihilāre, meaning literally ‘reduce to nothing’ (a formation based on the noun nihil ‘nothing’, source of English nihilism and nil). There was actually an earlier English verb, annihil, based on French annihiler, which appeared at the end of the 15th century, but it did not long survive the introduction of annihilate.
=> nihilism, nil
antique: antique: [16] Originally, in Latin, antique was an adjectivized version of the adverb and preposition ‘before’: to ante ‘before’ was added the adjective suffix -īcus, to produce the adjective antīquus (somewhat later an exactly parallel formation, using the suffix -ānus rather than -īcus, produced the adjective which became English ancient).

English acquired the word either via French antique or directly from Latin. To begin with, and until relatively recently, it meant simply ‘ancient’, or specifically ‘of the ancient world’; it was only towards the end of the 18th century that the modern sense ‘made long ago and therefore collectable’ began to become established. In Italian, antico (from Latin antīquus) was often applied to grotesque carvings found in ancient remains.

It was borrowed into English in the 16th century as an adjective, antic, meaning ‘bizarre’, but also as a noun, usually used in the plural, in the sense ‘absurd behaviour’.
=> ancient, antic
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
apocryphal: apocryphal: [16] Apocryphal is a ‘secondgeneration’ adjective; the original adjective form in English was apocrypha (‘The writing is apocrypha when the author thereof is unknown’, John de Trevisa 1387). This came, via ecclesiastical Latin, from Greek apókruphos ‘hidden’, a derivative of the compound verb apokrúptein ‘hide away’, which was formed from the prefix apo- ‘away, off’ and the verb krúptein ‘hide’ (source of English crypt and cryptic).

It was applied as a noun to writings in general that were of unknown authorship, and in the 16th century came to be used specifically as the collective term for the uncanonical books of the Old Testament. It was perhaps confusion between the adjectival and nominal roles of apocrypha that led to the formation of the new adjective apocryphal towards the end of the 16th century.
=> crypt, cryptic
aristocracy: aristocracy: [16] Greek áristos meant ‘best’; hence aristocracy signifies, etymologically, ‘rule by the best’ (the suffix -cracy derives ultimately from Greek krátos ‘strength, power’, a relative of English hard). The term aristokratíā was used by Aristotle and Plato in their political writings, denoting ‘government of a state by those best fitted for the task’, and English writers perpetuated the usage when the word was borrowed from French aristocratie: Thomas Hobbes, for instance, wrote ‘Aristocracy is that, wherein the highest magistrate is chosen out of those that have had the best education’, Art of Rhetoric 1679.

But from the first the term was also used in English for ‘rule by a privileged class’, and by the mid 17th century this had begun to pass into ‘the privileged class’ itself, ‘the nobility’. The derived aristocrat appeared at the end of the 18th century; it was a direct borrowing of French aristocrate, a coinage inspired by the French Revolution.
=> hard
army: army: [14] Latin armāta ‘armed’, the past participle of the verb armāre, was used in postclassical times as a noun, meaning ‘armed force’. Descendants of armāta in the Romance languages include Spanish armada and French armée, from which English borrowed army. In early usage it could (like Spanish armada) mean a naval force as well as a land force (‘The King commanded that £21,000 should be paid to his army (for so that fleet is called everywhere in English Saxon) which rode at Greenwich’, Marchamont Needham’s translation of Selden’s Mare clausum 1652), but this had virtually died out by the end of the 18th century.
=> arm, armada
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
arsenal: arsenal: [16] The word arsenal has a complicated history, stretching back through Italian to Arabic. The Arabic original was dāras- sinā‘ah, literally ‘house of the manufacture’. This seems to have been borrowed into Venetian Italian, somehow losing its initial d, as arzaná, and been applied specifically to the large naval dockyard in Venice (which in the 15th century was the leading naval power in the Mediterranean).

The dockyard is known to this day as the Arzenale, showing the subsequent addition of the -al ending. English acquired the word either from Italian or from French arsenal, and at first used it only for dockyards (‘making the Arsenal at Athens, able to receive 1000 ships’, Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Natural history 1601); but by the end of the 16th century it was coming into more general use as a ‘military storehouse’.

The English soccer club Arsenal gets its name from its original home in Woolwich, south London, where there used to be a British government arsenal.
aspirin: aspirin: [19] The word aspirin was coined in German towards the end of the 19th century. It is a condensed version of the term acetylierte spirsäure ‘acetylated spiraeic acid’. Spiraeic acid is a former term for ‘salicylic acid’, from which aspirin is derived; its name comes from the spiraea, a plant of the rose family.
=> spiraea
assert: assert: [17] Assert comes ultimately from Latin asserere, which meant literally ‘join oneself to something’. It was a compound verb formed from the prefix ad- ‘to’ and serere ‘join’ (source of English series and serial), and it came to take on various metaphorical connotations: if one ‘joined oneself to’ a particular thing, one ‘declared one’s right to’ it, and if one ‘joined oneself to’ a particular point of view, one ‘maintained’ it, or ‘claimed’ it.

The verb was used in both these senses when English acquired it, from the Latin past participial stem assert-, but the former had more or less died out by the end of the 18th century.
=> serial, series
bad: bad: [13] For such a common word, bad has a remarkably clouded history. It does not begin to appear in English until the end of the 13th century, and has no apparent relatives in other languages (the uncanny resemblance to Persian bad is purely coincidental). The few clues we have suggest a regrettably homophobic origin. Old English had a pair of words, bǣddel and bǣdling, which appear to have been derogatory terms for homosexuals, with overtones of sodomy.

The fact that the first examples we have of bad, from the late 13th and early 14th centuries, are in the sense ‘contemptible, worthless’ as applied to people indicates that the connotations of moral depravity may have become generalized from an earlier, specifically anti-homosexual sense.
bamboo: bamboo: [16] Bamboo appears to come from a Malay word mambu. This was brought back to Europe by the Portuguese explorers, and enjoyed a brief currency in English from the 17th to the 18th century. However, for reasons no one can explain, the initial m of this word became changed to b, and it acquired an s at the end, producing a form found in Latin texts of the time as bambusa. This appears to have passed into English via Dutch bamboes, so the earliest English version of the word was bambos. As so often happens in such cases, the final s was misinterpreted as a plural ending, so it dropped off to give the new ‘singular’ bamboo.
barnacle: barnacle: [12] The term barnacle was originally applied to a type of goose, Branta leucopsis, which according to medieval legend grew on trees or on logs of wood. Various fanciful versions of its reproductive cycle existed, among them that it emerged from a fruit or that it grew attached to a tree by its beak, but the most tenacious was that it developed inside small shellfish attached to wood, rocks, etc by the seashore.

Hence by the end of the 16th century the term had come to be applied to these shellfish, and today that is its main sense. The word was originally bernak (it gained its -le ending in the 15th century) and came from medieval Latin bernaca, but its ultimate source is unknown.
barrister: barrister: [16] A barrister is a lawyer who has been ‘called to the bar’ – that is, admitted to plead as an advocate in the superior courts of England and Wales. This notion derives from the ancient practice of having in the inns of court a partition separating senior members from students, which barrier the students metaphorically passed when they qualified. The ending -ister was probably added on the analogy of such words as minister and chorister.
=> bar
bean: bean: [OE] The word bean (Old English bēan) has relatives in several Germanic languages (German bohne, Dutch boon, Swedish böna), pointing to a common West and North Germanic source *baunō, but that is as far back in history as we can pursue it. Beanfeast [19] apparently derived from the practice of serving bacon and beans (or, according to some, bean geese, a species of goose) at the annual dinners given by firms to their employees in the 19th century. Beano, originally a printers’ abbreviation, appears towards the end of the 19th century.
because: because: [14] Because originated in the phrase by cause, which was directly modelled on French par cause. At first it was always followed by of or by a subordinate clause introduced by that or why: ‘The Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified’, St John’s Gospel, 7:39, 1611. But already by the end of the 14th century that and why were beginning to be omitted, leaving because to function as a conjunction, a move which would perhaps have exercised contemporary linguistic purists as much as ‘The reason is because …’ does today. The abbreviated form ’cause first appears in print in the 16th century.
=> cause
behalf: behalf: [14] Behalf was compounded from the prefix be- ‘by’ and the noun half, in the sense ‘side’. The latter had been used in such phrases as on my half, that is, ‘on my side, for my part’, since late Old English times, and the new compound began to replace it in the 14th century. (That particular use of half had died out by the end of the 16th century.) The modern sense of ‘representing or in the interests of someone’ was present from the beginning.
=> half
benzene: benzene: [19] The original name given to this hydrocarbon, by the German chemist Eilhardt Mitscherlich in 1833, was benzine. He based it on the term benzoic acid, a derivative of benzoin, the name of a resinous substance exuded by trees of the genus Styrax. This came ultimately from Arabic lubān-jāwī, literally ‘frankincense of Java’ (the trees grow in Southeast Asia).

When the expression was borrowed into the Romance languages, the initial lu- was apprehended as the definite article, and dropped (ironically, since in so many Arabic words which do contain the article al, it has been retained as part and parcel of the word – see ALGEBRA). This produced a variety of forms, including French benjoin, Portuguese beijoim, and Italian benzoi.

English probably acquired the word mainly from French (a supposition supported by the folketymological alteration benjamin which was in common use in English from the end of the 16th century), but took the z from the Italian form. Meanwhile, back with benzine, in the following year, 1834, the German chemist Justus von Liebig proposed the alternative name benzol; and finally, in the 1870s, the chemist A W Hofmann regularized the form to currently accepted chemical nomenclature as benzene.
=> benzol
bias: bias: [16] English acquired bias from Old French biais, but its previous history is uncertain. It probably came via Old Provençal, but where from? Speculations include Latin bifacem ‘looking two ways’, from bi- ‘two’ and faciēs ‘face’, and Greek epikársios ‘oblique’. When the word first entered English it meant simply ‘oblique line’, but by the end of the 16th century it was being applied more specifically to the game of bowls, in the sense of the ‘bowl’s curved path’, and also the ‘unequal weighting given to the bowl in order to achieve such a path’.

The modern figurative senses ‘inclination’ and ‘prejudice’ derive from this.
birth: birth: [12] Old English had a word gebyrd ‘birth’ which survived until the end of the 13th century as birde, but it was quite distinct from (though related to) modern English birth, which was borrowed from Old Norse byrth. This came from the same Germanic stem (*ber-, *bur-) as produced bear, bairn, and indeed Old English gebyrd. The suffix -th denotes a process, or the result of a process: hence birth is ‘(the result of) the process of bearing a child’. Along with bath and death it is one of the most ancient words formed with -th.
=> bairn, bear, berth
bison: bison: [14] Bison appears to be of Germanic origin, from a stem *wisand- or *wisund-. This became Old English wesand, which did not survive; and it was acquired again in the 19th century as wisent, borrowed from German wisent, applied to the ‘aurochs’, an extinct species of European wild ox. The b- form came into English via Latin bison, a borrowing from the Germanic. Originally of course referring to the European bison, the term was first applied to the North American species at the end of the 17th century.
blister: blister: [13] Blister and its now extinct variant blester first appear in English at the end of the 13th century, possibly borrowed from Old French blestre, blostre. It seems that this in turn may have come from Middle Dutch bluyster ‘swelling’, but further back than that it has not proved possible to trace the word.
bluestocking: bluestocking: [18] The term bluestocking ‘female intellectual’ derives from the gatherings held at the houses of fashionable mid-18th- century hostesses to discuss literary and related topics. It became the custom at these not to put on full formal dress, which for gentlemen included black silk stockings. One habitué in particular, Mr Benjamin Stillingfleet, used to wear greyish worsted stockings, conventionally called ‘blue’.

This lack of decorum was looked on with scorn in some quarters, and Admiral Boscawan dubbed the participants the ‘Blue Stocking Society’. Women who attended their highbrow meetings thus became known as ‘Blue Stocking Ladies’ (even though it was a man who had worn the stockings), and towards the end of the century this was abbreviated to simply bluestockings.
bombast: bombast: [16] Bombast originally meant ‘cotton-wool’, especially as used for stuffing or padding clothes, upholstery, etc; hence, before the end of the 16th century, it had been transferred metaphorically to ‘pompous or turgid language’. The ultimate source of the word was Greek bómbux ‘silk, silkworm’, which came into English via Latin bombyx, bombax (source also of English bombazine [16]) and Old French bombace. The earliest English form was bombace, but it soon developed an additional final -t.
=> bombazine
bottom: bottom: [OE] Bottom is a word with cognates widely represented in other Indo-European languages. It comes ultimately from the Indo- European base *bhudh- or *bhundh- ‘base, foundation’, source of Latin fundus, from which English gets fund, fundamental, foundation, and founder ‘sink’. An extended form of the base passed into Germanic as *buthm- or *buthn-, which produced German boden ‘ground, earth’ and English bottom. The application of the word to the ‘buttocks’ seems to have arisen towards the end of the 18th century.
=> foundation, fund, fundamental
bramble: bramble: [OE] Bramble has several cognates in other Germanic languages, but as with many plant-names it does not always refer to the same plant. Old High German brāmma, for instance, is a ‘wild rose’; Old Saxon hiopbrāmio is a ‘hawthorn bush’; and then there is English broom. All come from a prehistoric Germanic *brāemoz ‘thorny bush’. In the case of bramble, Old English originally had brēmel, but the medial -b- had developed before the end of the Old English period. The bird-name brambling [16] is probably derived from it.
=> broom
broth: broth: [OE] Broth comes ultimately from the Indo-European base *bhreu- or *bhru- ‘heat, boil’, which also produced brew and fervent. Etymologically, therefore, it means ‘liquid in which something has been boiled’. The notion of ‘heating’ has now disappeared, but it seems to have survived into the modern English period, as is shown by such compounds as snow-broth ‘melted snow’, first recorded at the end of the 16th century.

The Germanic form *brotham was borrowed into Vulgar Latin as *brodo, which came via Old French broez into 13th-century English as broys or browes. This survives in Scottish English as brose ‘type of porridge’, as in Atholl brose.
=> brew, fervent, imbrue
candle: candle: [OE] Candle is one of the earliest English borrowings from Latin. It probably arrived with Christianity at the end of the 6th century, and is first recorded in a gloss from around the year 700. Latin candēla was a derivative of the verb candēre ‘be white, glow’, also the source of English candid and related to incandescent and incense. Candelabrum [19] is a Latin derivative. The Christian feast of Candlemas [OE] (February 2) gets its name from the blessing of church candles on that day.
=> candelabrum, candid, incandescent, incense
canopy: canopy: [14] Etymologically, a canopy is a ‘mosquito net’. The word comes ultimately from Greek kōnōpeion, a derivative of kónops ‘mosquito’. This passed via Latin cōnōpūum into medieval Latin as canopeum, which meant both ‘mosquito net’ and ‘couch with such a net’. English adopted it directly from Latin as canope or canape, meaning ‘covering suspended over a throne, bed, etc’.

The French version of the word, however, concentrated on other aspects of canopeum’s meaning; French canapé means ‘couch, sofa’. Its metaphorical extension, ‘piece of bread or biscuit with a savoury topping’, was borrowed into English towards the end of the 19th century.
=> canapé
capable: capable: [16] In common with a wide range of other English words, from capture to recuperate, capable comes from Latin capere ‘take’, a relative of English heave. An adjective derived from the verb was Latin capāx ‘able to hold much’, from which English gets capacious [17] and capacity [15]. From its stem capāci- was formed the late Latin adjective capābilis, also originally ‘able to contain things’.

This meaning still survived when the word passed, via French capable, into English (‘They are almost capable of a bushel of wheat’, Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind 1601), but by the end of the 18th century it had died out, having passed into the current ‘able to, susceptible of’.
=> capacious, capacity, capture, chase, heave, recuperate
carrion: carrion: [13] Ultimately, carrion is a derivative of Latin carō ‘flesh’ (source also of English carnal). This appears to have had a Vulgar Latin offshoot *carōnia, which entered English via Anglo-Norman caroine. At first it was used in English for ‘dead body’, but before the end of the 13th century the current sense ‘flesh unfit for human consumption’ had begun to establish itself.
=> carnal, crone
cavalier: cavalier: [16] Etymologically, a cavalier is a ‘horseman’. The word comes via French cavalier from Italian cavaliere, which was derived from Latin caballus ‘horse’, either directly or via late Latin caballārius ‘horseman, rider’. From the beginning in English its connotations were not those of any old horserider, but of a mounted soldier or even a knight, and before the end of the 16th century the more general meaning ‘courtly gentleman’ was establishing itself.

This led in the mid-17th century to its being applied on the one hand to the supporters of Charles I, and on the other as an adjective meaning ‘disdainful’. Italian cavaliere was also the source of cavalleria ‘body of horsesoldiers’, which was borrowed into English in the 16th century, via French cavallerie, as cavalry. (The parallel form routed directly through French rather than via Italian was chivalry.)
=> cavalry, chivalry
chalice: chalice: [13] Latin calix ‘cup’ and its relative, Greek kálux ‘pod’, perhaps hold the record for the words most often borrowed into English. Calix first made its appearance as part of the original West Germanic stratum of English, into which it had been borrowed from Latin; this was as Old English cælc. Then came cælic, which Old English independently acquired from Latin after the conversion of the English to Christianity.

Next was calice, whose source was an Old French dialectal form descended from Latin calix. And finally, at the end of the 13th century, the main Old French form chalice was adopted. The final twist in the story is that in the 17th century Latin calyx (a descendant of the related Greek kálux) was borrowed into English as a botanical term, ‘outer covering of a flower’.