英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

accolade: accolade: [17] Accolade goes back to an assumed Vulgar Latin verb *accollāre, meaning ‘put one’s arms round someone’s neck’ (collum is Latin for ‘neck’, and is the source of English collar). It put in its first recorded appearance in the Provençal noun acolada, which was borrowed into French as accolade and thence made its way into English. A memory of the original literal meaning is preserved in the use of accolade to refer to the ceremonial striking of a sword on a new knight’s shoulders; the main current sense ‘congratulatory expression of approval’ is a later development.
=> collar
alabaster: alabaster: [14] Chaucer was the first English author to use the word alabaster: in the Knight’s Tale (1386) he writes of ‘alabaster white and red coral’. It comes, via Old French and Latin, from Greek alábast(r)os, which may be of Egyptian origin. Scottish English used the variant from alabast until the 16th century (indeed, this may predate alabaster by a few years); and from the 16th to the 17th century the word was usually spelled alablaster, apparently owing to confusion with arblaster ‘crossbowman’.

The use of alabaster for making marbles (of the sort used in children’s games) gave rise to the abbreviation alley, ally ‘marble’ in the early 18th century.
alexandrine: alexandrine: [16] An alexandrine is a line of verse of 12 syllables, characteristic of the classic French drama of the 17th century. The term derives from the use of this metre in Alexandre, a 12th-or 13th-century Old French romance about Alexander the Great.
anecdote: anecdote: [17] In Greek, anékdotos meant ‘unpublished’. It was formed from the negative prefix an- and ékdotos, which in turn came from the verb didónai ‘give’ (a distant cousin of English donation and date) plus the prefix ek- ‘out’ – hence ‘give out, publish’. The use of the plural anékdota by the 6th-century Byzantine historian Procopius as the title of his unpublished memoirs of the life of the Emperor Justinian, which revealed juicy details of court life, played a major part in the subsequent use of Latin anecdota for ‘revelations of secrets’, the sense which anecdote had when it first came into English.

The meaning ‘brief amusing story’ did not develop until the mid 18th century.
=> date, donation
artery: artery: [14] Artery is a direct borrowing from Latin artēria, which in turn came from Greek artēria. This appears to have been based on the root *ar- ‘lift’. A parallel formation is thus aorta ‘main coronary artery’ [16], which comes from Greek aortē, a derivative of aeírein ‘lift’ – again ultimately from the root *ar-.

The notion underlying aortē seems to be that the heart was thought of by the ancients as in some sense suspended from it, as if from a strap (Greek aortés ‘strap’), so that it was ‘held up’ or ‘raised’ by the aortē (the aorta emerges from the top of the heart). The Greeks, of course, did not know about the circulation of the blood, and since arteries contain no blood after death it was supposed that their function was conveying air.

Hence Hippocrates’ application of the term aorta to branches of the windpipe, and the use of artery for ‘windpipe’ in English up until as late as the mid 17th century: ‘[The lungs] expel the air: which through the artery, throat and mouth, makes the voice’, Francis Bacon, Sylva sylvarum 1626.
=> aorta
bald: bald: [14] In Middle English times, bald was ballede, which suggests that it may have been a compound formed in Old English with the suffix -ede ‘characterized by, having’. It has been conjectured that the first element in the compound was Old English *ball-, meaning ‘white patch’ or ‘blaze’ on an animal’s head; this may be supported by isolated examples of the use of the adjective to mean (of a horse) ‘whitefaced’ from the 16th to the 18th centuries, and by the obsolete dialectal ball meaning both ‘white patch on the head’ and ‘white-faced horse’.

This would have produced the Old English adjective *bællede or *beallede, which, from ‘having a white blaze’, progressed naturally in meaning to ‘hairless’. The compounds piebald [16] and skewbald [17] are both based on bald: piebald means ‘having black and white patches like a magpie’, while skewbald may be based on Middle English skew ‘(cloudy) skies’ or on Old French escu ‘shield’.
=> piebald, skewbald
ball: ball: There are two distinct words ball in English. The ‘round object’ [13] comes via Old Norse böllr from a prehistoric Germanic *balluz (source also of bollock [OE], originally a diminutive form). A related form was Germanic *ballōn, which was borrowed into Italian to give palla ‘ball’, from which French probably acquired balle.

Derivatives of this branch of the family to have reached English are balloon [16], from French ballon or Italian ballone, and ballot [16], from the Italian diminutive form ballotta (originally from the use of small balls as counters in secret voting). The Germanic stem form *bal-, *bul- was also the ultimate source of English bowl ‘receptacle’.

The ‘dancing’ ball [17] comes from French bal, a derivative of the now obsolete verb bal(l)er ‘dance’, which was descended via late Latin ballāre from Greek ballízein ‘dance’. Related words in English include ballad(e) [14], which came via Old French from Provençal balada ‘song or poem to dance to’, and ballet.
=> ballon, ballot, bollock; ballad, ballet
bathos: bathos: [18] Bathos, the descent from the sublime to the commonplace, means etymologically ‘depth’. It represents Greek báthos, a derivative of the adjective bathús ‘deep’ (which has also given English such technical terms as bathyal ‘of the deep sea’, bathymetry, bathyscaphe, and bathysphere). The use of the word in English seems to have been initiated by the poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744), in his Bathos.
bead: bead: [13] The word bead originally meant ‘prayer’. It comes ultimately from Germanic *beth-, source also of English bid. This passed into Old English as gebed, which by the 13th century had lost its prefix to become bede. (German has the parallel gebet ‘prayer’.) The modern sense ‘small pierced decorative ball’ developed in the 14th century, from the use of a string of rosary beads for counting while saying one’s prayers.
=> bid
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.
bitch: bitch: [OE] The antecedents of Old English bicce ‘female dog’ are obscure. It may come from a prehistoric Germanic *bekjōn-, but the only related form among other Germanic languages appears to be Old Norse bikkja. The superficially similar French biche means ‘female deer’, and is probably not related. The use of the word as a derogatory term for ‘woman’ seems to have originated in the 14th century.
body: body: [OE] For a word so central to people’s perception of themselves, body is remarkably isolated linguistically. Old High German had potah ‘body’, traces of which survived dialectally into modern times, but otherwise it is without known relatives in any other Indo- European language. Attempts have been made, not altogether convincingly, to link it with words for ‘container’ or ‘barrel’, such as medieval Latin butica. The use of body to mean ‘person in general’, as in somebody, nobody, got fully under way in the 14th century.
boxer: boxer: [15] Boxer is a much travelled word. In its original sense ‘fighter’ it comes of course from the verb box, the origins of which remain mysterious. German borrowed the name for a new breed of dog, a sort of elongated, more elegant version of a bulldog – presumably either in tribute to its supposed pugnaciousness or because its flattened nose looked like that of an unsuccessful boxer.

Then in the 1930s English acquired this new application back from German. The use of ‘Boxer’ for the Chinese rebels around the turn of the 20th century who attempted to drive out all foreigners is based on their Chinese name, yi hé quán, literally ‘righteous harmonious fists’.
brass: brass: [OE] Related forms occur in one or two other Germanic languages (such as Middle Low German bras, which meant simply ‘metal’), but essentially brass is a mystery word, of unknown ancestry. Its association with ‘effrontery’ begins in the late 16th century, prefigured by Shakespeare’s ‘face of brass’ in Love’s Labours Lost 1580, and by the first instances of the use of the derived adjective brazen to mean ‘shameless’ (the underlying notion is probably of a face as hard as brass, and therefore unable to show shame). Brass ‘high-ranking people’, as in top brass, comes from brass hat [19], a derogatory slang term for a senior military officer with golden insignia on his cap.
bruise: bruise: [OE] Modern English bruise is a blend of words from two sources. The main contributor is Old English brysan, which as well as ‘bruise’ meant ‘crush to pieces’, and is related to Latin frustum ‘piece broken or cut off’. But then in the early Middle English period we begin to see the influence of the unrelated Old French verb bruisier ‘break’ and its Anglo-Norman form bruser (which in modern French has become briser).

Their main effect has been on the spelling of the word, although the use of bruise for ‘break’ from the 14th to the 17th century seems to have been due to French influence too, rather than a survival of the Old English meaning: ‘Had his foot once slipped … he would have been bruised in pieces’, The most dangerous and memorable adventure of Richard Ferris 1590. Bruiser ‘large rough man’ originated in an 18th-century term for a prizefighter.
=> débris
carat: carat: [16] The carat gets its name from the use of carob beans as standard weights for measuring the heaviness of small quantities. The Greek name for the elongated seed pod of the carob tree was kerátion, a derivative of kéras ‘horn’ (related to English horn). This passed into Arabic as qīrāt, where it became formalized in a system of weights and measures as ‘four grains’. It passed into English via Italian carato and French carat.
=> horn
castor: castor: There are two distinct words castor in English. The older originally meant ‘beaver’ [14], and was early used with reference to a bitter pungent substance secreted by glands near the beaver’s anus, employed in medicine and perfumery. The term castor oil [18] probably comes from the use of this oil, derived from the seed of a tropical plant, as a substitute for castor in medicine.

The more recent castor [17] is simply a derivative of the verb cast; it was originally (and still often is) spelled caster. Its use for sprinkling or ‘throwing’ sugar is obvious (the term castor sugar dates back to the mid 19th century), but its application to a ‘small swivelling wheel’ is less immediately clear: it comes from a now obsolete sense of the verb, mainly nautical, ‘veer, turn’: ‘Prepare for casting to port’, George Nares, Seamanship 1882.
=> cast
cent: cent: [16] Centum is the Latin word for ‘hundred’ – indeed both come ultimately from the same Indo-European source, *kmtóm. It first appeared in English in the form cent in the phrase per cent (originally used apparently by the financier Sir Thomas Gresham in a letter of 1568: ‘the interest of xij per cent by the year’); this was probably borrowed from Italian per cento (it is not a genuine Latin phrase). The use of cent for a unit of currency dates from the 1780s, when it was adopted by the newly founded USA; its status as one hundredth of a dollar was officially ordained by the Continental Congress on 8 August 1786.
=> century
chair: chair: [13] Chair comes ultimately from Greek kathédrā ‘seat’ (source also of cathedral, of course), which was a compound originally meaning literally ‘something for sitting down on’ – it was formed from katá- ‘down’ and *hed- ‘sit’. It produced Latin cathedra, which in Old French became chaiere, the source of the English word.

The use of chair specifically for the seat occupied by someone presiding at a meeting dates from the mid 17th century, and its metaphorical extension to the person sitting in it, as symbolizing his or her office – as in ‘address one’s remarks to the chair’ – is virtually contemporary (‘The Chair behaves himself like a Busby amongst so many schoolboys’, Thomas Burton’s Diary, 23 March 1658); but its use as a synonym for chairperson, to avoid a distinction on grounds of sex, is a late 20th-century development.
=> cathedral
compass: compass: [13] The notion underlying compass is of ‘measuring out with paces’. It originated as a verb, Vulgar Latin *compassāre ‘pace out’, a compound formed from the Latin intensive prefix com- and passus (source of English pace). This passed into Old French as compasser ‘measure’, and thence into English. The derived Old French noun compas was early applied to a pivoted two-armed measuring and drawing instrument, presumably inspired equally by the ideas ‘stepping’ and ‘measuring’, and English acquired this sense in the 14th century.

The use of the word for a magnetic direction indicator, which dates from the 16th century, may be due to the device’s circular container.
=> pace
conker: conker: [19] A conker was originally a ‘snail shell’. Small boys tied them on to pieces of string and played a game involving trying to break their opponent’s shell (another method of playing was simply to press two shells together and see which one broke). The first record of the use of horse chestnuts instead of snail shells is from the 1880s, but in the succeeding century this has established itself as the word’s sole application.

It is not entirely clear where it originally came from. The connection with molluscs has inevitably suggested a derivation from conch (itself ultimately from Greek kónkhē), but early 19th-century spellings of the game as conquering, and of conker as conqueror, point to a simpler explanation, that the stronger snail shell defeated, or ‘conquered’, the weaker.
cork: cork: [14] The earliest ascertainable ancestor of cork is Spanish alcorque ‘cork sole’, which passed into English via Dutch kork. The initial al-, of course, suggests that this was of Arabic origin (al being the Arabic definite article), and it seems likely that it represents Arabic al-qūrq, which some have suggested came from Latin cortex ‘bark’, source of English cortex [17]. The use of cork for a bottle-stopper made from cork dates from the early 16th century.
=> cortex
crown: crown: [12] Crowns appear to have been named essentially from their circular shape. The word’s ultimate source, Greek korónē, simply meant ‘something curved’ (it came from the adjective korōnos ‘curved’, which was a relative of Latin curvus ‘curved’). Latin borrowed it as corōna ‘circular garland’, and passed it on via Old French corone and Anglo-Norman corune to English.

Latin also derived a verb from it, corōnāre, which ultimately became the English verb crown and also, of course, formed the basis of English coronation [14]. Other English descendants of Latin corōna (which itself became an English word in the 16th century) are the two diminutives coronet [15] and corolla [17] (source of corollary), coroner [14] (originally an ‘officer of the crown’), and coronary.

The use of crown for certain coins (based of course on their being stamped with the figure of a crown) dates in English from the 14th century; it is also reflected in such coin names as Swedish krona and Danish and Norwegian krone.
=> corollary, coronation, coroner, coronet, curve
dash: dash: [13] Dash is probably of Scandinavian origin – Danish daske ‘beat’ has been compared – but whether it was a borrowing or a home- grown word, it was no doubt formed in imitation of rapid impulsive violent movement. Its original sense in English was ‘hit, smash’ (now rather eclipsed, put preserved in such phrases as ‘dash someone’s hopes’). ‘Move quickly and violently’ followed in the 14th century, and the noun sense ‘stroke of a pen’ in the 16th century (this probably gave rise to the use of the word as a euphemism for damned, from the replacement of that word in print with a dash).
diploma: diploma: [17] Etymologically, a diploma is a ‘folded paper’. It comes via Latin diplōma from Greek díplōma; this was a derivative of the verb diploun ‘fold’, which in turn came from diplous ‘double’ (a distant cousin of English double). Since official letters tended to be folded over, díplōma eventually came to mean ‘document, especially one issued by the government’ – the sense in which the word was acquired by English.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the use of the derived Latin adjective diplōmaticus ‘relating to official documents’ with specific reference to the field of international relations led eventually to its French descendant, diplomatique, coming to mean ‘relating to international relations’. English acquired the word as diplomatic in the 18th century.
=> double
doss: doss: [18] The use of doss in senses associated with ‘lying down on a bed’ comes from an earlier notion of ‘lying on one’s back’. In the 18th century the word was dorse, a borrowing from Latin dorsum ‘back’, but by the 19th century it had become doss, perhaps owing to the influence of French dos. Other English words from the same source include endorse, the adjective dorsal [15], and dossier [19]. This was acquired from French dossier, a derivative of dos, which originally signified a ‘bunch of papers with a label on the back’.
=> dorsal, dossier, endorse
drape: drape: [15] The verb drape originally meant ‘weave wool into cloth’. It was borrowed from Old French draper, which was a derivative of drap ‘cloth’ (source of English drab). This in turn came from late Latin drappus, which was ultimately of Celtic origin. Other offspring of drap which found their way into English are draper [14], drapery [14], and trappings. The use of drapery for ‘loose voluminous cloth covering’ eventually fed back into the verb drape, producing in the 19th century its current sense ‘cover loosely with cloth’.
=> drab, draper, trappings
dumb: dumb: [OE] The notion underlying dumb is of ‘sensory or mental impairment’. It goes back to a nasalized version of prehistoric Indo-European *dheubh-, denoting ‘confusion, stupefaction, or dizziness’, which was also the ultimate source of English deaf. This developed two stands of meaning. The first, through association of ‘sensory or mental impairment’ and ‘slowwittedness’, led to forms such as German dumm and Dutch dom, which mean ‘stupid’ (the use of dumb to mean ‘stupid’ did not develop until the 19th century, in American English, presumably under the influence of the German and Dutch adjectives).

The other was semantic specialization to a particular sort of mental impairment, the inability to speak, which produced Gothic dumbs, Old Norse dumbr, and English dumb. (The German word for ‘dumb’, stumm, is related to English stammer and stumble, as are Dutch stom and Swedish stum.) Dummy [16] is a derivative; it originally meant ‘dumb person’.
=> deaf, dummy
easel: easel: [17] Easel was borrowed from Dutch ezel, which means literally ‘donkey’ (it is related to English ass). The notion of loading a painting on to a stand, much as a burden is loaded on to a donkey, is echoed in the use of clotheshorse for a stand for hanging clothes on to dry or air.
=> ass
economy: economy: [16] The underlying notion contained in the word economy is of ‘household management’. It comes, via French or Latin, from Greek oikonomíā, a derivative of oikonómos, a term for the ‘steward of a household’. This was a compound noun formed from oikos ‘house’ (a word related to the -wich element in many English place-names) and némein ‘manage’ (ultimate source of English antinomian and nomad).

The original sense ‘household management’ was carried through into English. It broadened out in the 17th century to the management of a nation’s resources (a concept at first termed more fully political economy), while the use of the derivative economics for the theoretical study of the creation and consumption of wealth dates from the early 19th century.
=> antinomian, ecology, nomad
erect: erect: [14] Erect was borrowed from Latin ērectus, the past participle of ērigere ‘raise up, set up’. This was a compound verb formed from the prefix ex- ‘out, up’ and regere ‘keep straight, set, direct’ (source of English regent, region, etc). The use of the derivative erection [15] for the enlargement of the penis dates from the 16th century.
=> correct, direct, regent, region
ether: ether: [17] Greek aithér denoted the ‘upper atmosphere’, and by extension the ‘substance that permeated the cosmos’, from which the stars and planets were made. It was a derivative of the verb aíthein ‘ignite, blaze, shine’, a relative of Latin aestās ‘summer’, from which English gets aestivate [17]. It passed into English via Latin aethēr, and to begin with was used in its original Greek senses. Its application to the liquid with anaesthetic properties dates from the mid 18th century, the use of its first syllable in the names of organic compounds in the bicarbon series (such as ethyl and ethane) from the mid 19th century.
=> aestivate, ethyl
except: except: [14] If you except something, you literally ‘take it out’. The verb comes from exceptus, the past participle of Latin excipere, a compound formed from the prefix ex- ‘out’ and capere ‘take’ (source of English capture). The use of the word as a preposition, and subsequently as a conjunction, arose from the adjectival use of the Latin past participle exceptus for ‘excepted, excluded’ (as in modern English ‘present company excepted’).
=> captive, capture, chase, heave
excite: excite: [14] The use of the word excite to convey ‘agitated elation’ is a comparatively recent development, first recorded from the mid 19th century. Before that it was a fairly neutral verb, meaning ‘produce a response, provoke’ (as in the rather formal ‘excite much comment’). It comes, perhaps via Old French exciter, from Latin excitāre ‘call forth, arouse, produce’. This was a variant of exciēre, a compound verb formed from the prefix ex- ‘out’ and ciēre ‘move, call’ (source also of English cite, incite, recite, and solicit).
=> cite, incite, recite, solicit
explode: explode: [16] The use of explode to mean ‘burst with destructive force’ is a comparatively recent, late 19th-century development. The Latin verb explōdere, from which it comes, signified something quite different – ‘drive off the stage with hisses and boos’ (it was a compound formed from the prefix ex- ‘out’ and plaudere ‘clap’, source of English applaud and plaudits).

From this developed the figurative sense ‘reject, disapprove’, which was how the word was used when it was first taken over into English: ‘Not that I wholly explode Astrology; I believe there is something in it’, Thomas Tryon, Miscellanea 1696 (the modern notion of ‘exploding a theory’ is descended from this usage). In the 17th century, however, the Latin verb’s original sense was reintroduced, and it survived into the 19th century: ‘In the playhouse when he doth wrong, no critic is so apt to hiss and explode him’, Henry Fielding, Tom Jones 1749.

Towards the end of the 17th century we find the first traces of a metaphorical use that combines the notion of ‘driving out, expelling’ with ‘loud noise’ (‘the effects of Lightning, exploded from the Clouds’, Robert Plot, Natural History of Staffordshire 1679), but it was not to be for more than a century that the meaning element ‘drive out’ was replaced by the ‘burst, shatter’ of present-day English explode (Dr Johnson makes no mention of it in his Dictionary 1755, for example) Today the notion of ‘bursting violently’ is primary, that of ‘loud noise’ probably secondary, although still present.
=> applause, plaudits
extreme: extreme: [15] Etymologically, extreme is the latinate equivalent of the native English utmost. It comes via Old French extreme from Latin extrēmus ‘farthest, last, excessive’, which began life as a superlative form based on Latin ex ‘out’ – hence originally ‘most out, utmost’. The underlying notion of ‘furthest outlying’ still survives in, for example, the use of extremities for the ‘hands’ or ‘feet’.
fake: fake: [19] The use of fake for ‘produce a fraudulent copy of’ is a comparatively recent development. It used to mean ‘do up something spurious to make it seem genuine’, and in this sense seems to be a descendant of the longobsolete verb feague [16]. Essentially it is a piece of underworld slang, and as such has a rather slippery semantic history. In the 19th century it was used, like its ancestor feague, for any number of nefarious operations, including beating up and killing (‘to fake a man out and out, is to kill him’, J H Vaux, Vocabulary of the Flash Language 1812), but its current sense leads back in a straight line to its probable ultimate source, German fegen ‘polish, refurbish’.

This (like English fig ‘clothes, array’) was a derivative of the prehistoric Germanic base *feg-, a variant of *fag-, from which English gets fair ‘beautiful’.
=> fair, feast, fig
fast: fast: [OE] Widely dissimilar as they now seem, fast ‘quick’ and fast ‘abstain from food’ in fact come from the same ultimate source. This was Germanic *fastuz, which denoted ‘firm’. That underlying sense persists in various contexts, such as ‘hold fast’ and ‘fast friend’. The verbal application to ‘eating no food’ originated in the notion of ‘holding fast to a particular observance’ – specifically, abstinence from food.

The use of fast for ‘quick’ is a much later development, dating from the 13th century. It probably comes from a perception of fast ‘firm’ containing an underlying connotation of ‘extremity’ or ‘severity’.
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
filibuster: filibuster: [16] Filibuster and freebooter [16] are doublets: that is to say, they come from the same ultimate source, but have subsequently diverged. Freebooter ‘pirate’ was borrowed from Dutch vrijbuiter, a compound formed from vrij ‘free’ and buiter ‘plunderer’ (this was a derivative of buit ‘loot’, to which English booty is related).

But English was not the only language to adopt it; French wanted it too, but mangled it somewhat in the borrowing, to flibustier. It was then handed on to Spanish, as filibustero. It is not clear where the 16th-century English use of the word with an l spelling rather than an r spelling (which is recorded in only one text) comes from. The French form flibustier was borrowed towards the end of the 18th century, and presentday filibuster came from the Spanish form in the mid-19th century.

The use of the term for ‘obstructing a legislature with an overlong speech’ (which has now virtually obliterated its former semantic equivalence to freebooter) originated in the USA in the 1880s.
=> booty, free, freebooter
filter: filter: [14] Ultimately, filter is the same word as felt – and indeed that is what it first meant in English (‘They dwell all in tents made of black filter’, John Mandeville, Travels 1400). It comes via Old French filtre from medieval Latin filtrum, which was borrowed from prehistoric West Germanic *filtiz, source of English felt. The modern sense of filter did not develop until the 17th century; it came from the use of felt for removing impurities from liquid. The derivative infiltrate dates from the 18th century. (The homophonic philtre [16] is not related; it comes ultimately from Greek phílos ‘beloved’.)
=> felt, infiltrate
flagrant: flagrant: [15] Etymologically, flagrant means ‘burning, blazing’. It comes, via French, from the present participle of Latin flagrāre ‘burn’ (source of English conflagration [16]). This in turn went back to Indo-European *bhleg-, which also produced English flame. The use of flagrant for ‘shameless, shocking’, an 18th-century development, comes from the Latin phrase in flagrante delicto ‘red-handed’, literally ‘with the crime still blazing’.
=> conflagration, flame
focus: focus: [17] Latin focus meant ‘fireplace’, and in post-classical times it came to be used for ‘fire’ itself – hence French feu, Italian fuoco, Spanish fuego, all meaning ‘fire’, and hence too the English derivatives fuel and fusillade. The first writer known to have used it in its modern sense ‘point of convergence’ was the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, in 1604, but the reason for his choice of word is not clear.

It may have been some metaphorical notion of the ‘hearth’ symbolizing the ‘centre of the home’, but it has also been suggested that it may have been preceded and inspired by the use of focus for the ‘burning point’ of a mirror (not actually recorded until somewhat later). The philosopher Thomas Hobbes appears to have introduced the term into English, in 1656. A medieval Latin derivative of focus was focārius, from which French got foyer ‘hearth, home’, borrowed by English in the 19th century for a public entrance hall or lobby.
=> foyer, fuel, fusillade
gabardine: gabardine: [16] The use of gabardine for a sort of worsted material is an early 20th-century development, but the word itself has been around much longer than that. Its central meaning (for which the usual spelling is gaberdine) is ‘long coarse outer garment’. English acquired it from Old French gauvardine, which was a development of an earlier gallevardine. This was probably derived from Middle High German wallevart ‘pilgrimage’ (a compound formed from wallen ‘roam’ and vart ‘journey, way’), and hence etymologically meant ‘pilgrim’s garment’.
germane: germane: [19] Germane is an alteration of german ‘closely related’ [14], which now survives only in the rather archaic expression cousin-german. This came via Old French germain from Latin germānus, which meant ‘of the same race’ (it was a derivative of germen ‘sprout, offspring’, from which English gets germ). The use of germane for ‘relevant’ as opposed to simply ‘related’ seems to have been inspired by Hamlet’s comment that a remark of Osric’s would have been ‘more german to the matter, if we could carry cannon by our sides’. (The nationality term German [16], incidentally, is probably of Celtic origin, and has no etymological connection with germane.)
=> germ
glass: glass: [OE] The making of glass goes back to ancient Egyptian times, and so most of the words for it in the various Indo-European languages are of considerable antiquity. In those days, it was far easier to make coloured glass than the familiar clear glass of today. In particular, Roman glass was standardly bluish-green, and many words for ‘glass’ originated in colour terms signifying ‘blue’ or ‘green’.

In the case of glass, its distant ancestor was Indo-European *gel- or *ghel-, which produced a host of colour adjectives ranging in application from ‘grey’ through ‘blue’ and ‘green’ to ‘yellow’. Among its descendants was West Germanic *glasam, which gave German, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish glas and English glass. A secondary semantic development of the word’s base, glass being a shiny substance, was ‘shine, gleam’; this probably lies behind English glare [13], whose primary sense is ‘shine dazzlingly’ (the change of s to r is a well-known phonetic phenomenon, termed ‘rhoticization’).

Irish gloine ‘glass’ also comes from Indo-European *g(h)el-, and French verre and Italian vetro ‘glass’ go back to Latin vitrum ‘glass’ (source of English vitreous), which also meant ‘woad’, a plant which gives a blue dye. The use of the plural glasses for ‘spectacles’ dates from the mid-17th century. The verb glaze [14] is an English derivative of glass.
=> glaze
grape: grape: [13] Not surprisingly, given the northerliness of the British Isles, English does not have its own native word for ‘grape’. In Old English it was was called wīnberige, literally ‘wineberry’, and the Old French word grape which Middle English borrowed as grape meant ‘bunch of grapes’, not ‘grape’. It was probably a derivative of the verb graper ‘gather grapes’, which itself was based on the noun grape ‘hook’ (a relative of English cramp, crampon, and grapnel [14]).

The underlying notion is of a bunch of grapes being gathered with a sort of pruning hook. (The use of a word that originally meant ‘bunch’ for ‘grape’ is in fact fairly common: Czech hrozen, Romanian stugure, German traube, and Lithuanian keke all follow the same pattern, as does French raisin, source of English raisin.)
=> cramp, crampon, grapnel
guinea: guinea: [17] Guinea first emerged as the name of a section of the West Africa continent in the late 16th century (its origins are not known, but presumably it was based on an African word). In 1663 the Royal Mint began to produce a gold coin valued at 20 shillings ‘for the use of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading with Africa’. It had the figure of an elephant on it.

Straightaway it became known as a guinea, both because its use was connected with the Guinea coast and because it was made from gold obtained there. And what is more, the coins soon came to be much in demand for domestic use: on 29 October 1666 Samuel Pepys recorded ‘And so to my goldsmith to bid him look out for some gold for me; and he tells me that Ginnys, which I bought 2000 of not long ago, and cost me but 18½d. change, will now cost me 22d., and but very few to be had at any price.

However, some more I will have, for they are very convenient – and of easy disposal’. Its value fluctuated, and was not fixed at 21 shillings until 1717. The last one was minted in 1813, but guinea as a term for the amount 21 shillings stayed in use until the early 1970s, when the decimalization of British currency dealt it the deathblow. The guinea pig [17], incidentally, comes from South America, and its name probably arose from a confusion between Guinea and Guiana, on the northern coast of South America.
gut: gut: [OE] Gut probably comes ultimately from prehistoric Indo-European *gh(e)u- ‘pour’ (source also of English foundry, funnel, fusion, etc), and presumably has the underlying meaning ‘tube through which digested food flows’. From the same source came Greek khūmós ‘animal or plant juice’, from which English got the technical term chyme ‘mass of semidigested food in the stomach’ [17]. The use of the plural guts for ‘vigour’ or ‘courage’ dates from the late 19th century.
=> foundry, funnel, fusion
gutter: gutter: [13] Etymologically, a gutter is something along which ‘drops’ of water run. Its distant ancestor is Latin gutta ‘drop’ (source also of English gout). From it was formed the Vulgar Latin derivative *guttāria, which passed into English via Anglo-Norman gotere. The use of the word as a verb, meaning (of a flame) ‘flicker on the point of going out’, comes from the channel, or ‘gutter’, formed down one side of a candle by the melted wax flowing away.
=> gout