英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

aeroplane [aeroplane 词源字典]: 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[aeroplane etymology, aeroplane origin, 英语词源]
aim: aim: [14] Etymologically, aim is a contraction of estimate (see ESTEEM). The Latin verb aestimāre became considerably shortened as it developed in the various Romance languages (Italian has stimare, for instance, and Provençal esmar). In Old French its descendant was esmer, to which was added the prefix a- (from Latin ad- ‘to’), producing aesmer; and from one or both of these English acquired aim. The notion of estimating or calculating was carried over into the English verb, but died out after about a hundred years. However, the derived sense of calculating, and hence directing, one’s course is of equal antiquity in the language.
=> esteem, estimate
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.
allege: allege: [14] Allege is related to law, legal, legislation, legation, and litigation. Its original source was Vulgar Latin *exlitigāre, which meant ‘clear of charges in a lawsuit’ (from ex- ‘out of’ and litigāre ‘litigate’). This developed successively into Old French esligier and Anglo- Norman alegier, from where it was borrowed into English; there, its original meaning was ‘make a declaration before a legal tribunal’.

Early traces of the notion of making an assertion without proof can be detected within 50 years of the word’s introduction into English, but it took a couple of centuries to develop fully. The hard g of allegation suggests that though it is ultimately related to allege, it comes from a slightly different source: Latin allēgātiō, from allēgāre ‘adduce’, a compound verb formed from ad- ‘to’ and lēgāre ‘charge’ (source of English legate and legation).
=> law, legal, legation, legislation, litigation
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
apparatus: apparatus: [17] Etymologically, apparatus is ‘equipment that has been prepared for a particular use’. The word is borrowed from Latin apparātus, the past participle of the compound verb apparāre, formed from the prefix ad- and parāre ‘make ready’ (source of prepare ‘make ready in advance’, and related to parent). At the beginning of the 17th century, the related but anglicized form apparate put in a brief appearance in the language (possibly borrowed from French apparat), but within 20 years apparatus had supplanted it.
=> parent, prepare
asparagus: asparagus: [15] Asparagus comes ultimately from Greek aspáragos (a word related to the Greek verb spargan ‘swell’, to the Latin verb spargere ‘scatter’ – ultimate source of English sparse, disperse, and aspersions – and also to English spark), and has over the past 150 years or so returned to the full Latin form, asparagus, in which it was originally borrowed by English.

In the intervening centuries, however, it went through several metamorphoses: in the 16th century, the truncated medieval Latin variant sparagus was current (it also occurs in one isolated example from a book of Anglo-Saxon remedies of around 1000 AD); from then until the 18th century an anglicized version, sperage, was used; and in the 17th century folk etymology (the process by which an unfamiliar word is assimilated to one more familiar) turned asparagus into sparrowgrass.

This gradually died out during the 19th century, but the abbreviation grass remains current in the jargon of the grocery trade.
=> aspersion, spark
axle: axle: [17] The word axle emerges surprisingly late considering the antiquity of axles, but related terms had existed in the language for perhaps a thousand years. Old English had eax, which came from a hypothetical Germanic *akhsō, related to Latin axis. This survived in the compound ax-tree until the 17th century (later in Scotland); tree in this context meant ‘beam’.

But from the early 14th century the native ax-tree began to be ousted by Old Norse öxultré (or as it became in English axle-tree); the element öxull came from a prehistoric Germanic *akhsulaz, a derivative of *akhsō. Axle first appeared on its own in the last decade of the 16th century (meaning ‘axis’, a sense it has since lost), and became firmly established in the early 17th century.
bamboozle: bamboozle: [18] Bamboozle is a mystery word. It first appears in 1703, in the writings of the dramatist Colly Cibber, and seven years later it was one of a list of the latest buzzwords cited by Jonathan Swift in the Tatler (others included bully, mob, and sham). It is probably a ‘cant’ term (a sort of low-life argot), and may perhaps be of Scottish origin; there was a 17th-century Scottish verb bombaze ‘perplex’, which may be the same word as bombace, literally ‘padding, stuffing’, but metaphorically ‘inflated language’ (the variant form bombast has survived into modern English).
=> bombast
barge: barge: [13] Barge comes in the first instance from Old French barge, but speculation has pushed it further back to medieval Latin *barica, which would have derived from báris, a Greek word for an Egyptian boat. This hypothetical *barica would have been a by-form of late Latin barca, which came into English via Old French as barque, also spelled bark, ‘sailing vessel’ [15] (source of embark). The metaphorical use of the verb barge, ‘move clumsily or rudely’, is barely a hundred years old; it comes from the ponderous progress made by barges.
=> bark, barque, embark
behave: behave: [15] To ‘behave oneself’ originally meant literally to ‘have oneself in a particular way’ – have being used here in the sense ‘hold’ or ‘comport’. The be- is an intensive prefix. Of particular interest is the way in which the word preserves in aspic the 15th-century pronunciation of have in stressed contexts. For much of its history behave has been used with reference to a person’s bearing and public dignity (‘He was some years a Captain, and behaved himself with great gallantry in several engagements’, Richard Steele, Spectator Number 2, 1711), and the modern connotations of propriety, of ‘goodness’ versus ‘naughtiness’, are a relatively recent, 19th-century development.

The noun behaviour [15] was formed on analogy with the verb from an earlier haviour, a variant of aver ‘possession’ [14], from the nominal use of the Old French verb aveir ‘have’.
=> have
beverage: beverage: [13] Beverage goes back to Latin bibere ‘drink’, from which English also gets imbibe [14], bibulous [17], beer, and probably bibber. From the verb was formed the Vulgar Latin noun *biberāticum ‘something to drink’, and hence, via Old French bevrage, English beverage. The colloquial abbreviation bevvy is at least 100 years old (it has been speculated, but never proved, that bevy ‘large group’ [15] comes from the same source).
=> beer, bevy, bib, bibulous, imbibe
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.
breast: breast: [OE] Breast can be traced back via prehistoric Germanic *breustam to an Indo- European base *bhrus- or *bhreus-, whose other descendants, including Old Saxon brustian ‘bud’, Middle High German briustern ‘swell’, and Irish brú ‘abdomen, womb’, suggest that the underlying reference contained in the word may be to the growth and swelling of the female breasts. By the time it reached Old English, as brēost, it had already developed a more general, non-sex-specific sense ‘chest’, but the meaning element ‘mammary gland’ has remained throughout, and indeed over the past two hundred years ‘chest’ has grown steadily more archaic.
bulimia: bulimia: [19] The condition now called ‘bulimia’ – in which bouts of overeating are followed by bouts of purging – was recognized and so named in the 1970s. The word used to name it, however, is much more ancient than that. It goes back to Greek boulimia, which meant ‘ravenous hunger’ (it was formed from limos ‘hunger’, with the prefix bou-; this may well have been adapted from bous ‘ox’, in which case the word would have meant literally ‘the hunger of an ox’).

It originally came into English, via medieval Latin, in the late 14th century, and for many hundred years its standard form was bulimy. It was applied to a sort of hunger so extreme that it could be categorized as an illness.
carry: carry: [14] For such a basic and common word, carry has a surprisingly brief history. It does not go back to some prehistoric Indo-European root, but was formed less than 1000 years ago in Anglo-Norman or Old Northern French, on the basis of carre or car (immediate source of English car). The verb carier thus meant literally ‘transport in a wheeled vehicle’. This sense was carried over into English, and though it has since largely given way to the more general ‘convey’, it is preserved in the derivative carriage, in such expressions as ‘carriage paid’.
=> car, carriage
castle: castle: [11] Castle was one of the first words borrowed by the English from their Norman conquerors: it is mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle only nine years after the battle of Hastings. It comes via Anglo-Norman castel from Latin castellum, a diminutive form of castrum ‘fort’ (which was acquired by Old English as ceaster, and now appears in English place-names as -caster or -chester). The Old French version of castel, chastel, produced modern French château, and also its derivative châtelaine, borrowed into English in the 19th century.
=> château
century: century: [16] Latin centuria meant ‘group of one hundred’ (it was a derivative of centum ‘hundred’). Among the specialized applications of this general sense, the most familiar to us today is that of a division of the Roman army consisting originally of a hundred soldiers (the title of its commander, centurion [14] – Latin centuriō – derives from centuria). When English took the word over, however, it put it to other uses: it was first applied to ‘period of 100 years’ in the early 17th century, while ‘score of 100 or more in cricket’ comes from the mid 19th century.
=> cent, centurion
cesspool: cesspool: [17] Cesspool has no direct etymological connection with pool. It comes from Old French suspirail ‘ventilator, breathing hole’, a derivative of souspirer ‘breathe’ (this goes back to Latin suspīrāre, source of the archaic English suspire ‘sigh’). This was borrowed into English in the early 15th century as suspiral ‘drainpipe’, which in the subsequent two hundred years appeared in a variety of spellings, including cesperalle.

By the early 16th century we find evidence of its being used not just for a pipe to drain matter away, but also for a well or tank to receive matter thus drained (originally any effluent, not just sewage). The way was thus open for a ‘reinterpretation’ of the word’s final element as pool (by the process known as folk etymology), and in the late 17th century the form cesspool emerged.

By analogy, as if there were really a word cess ‘sewage’, the term cesspit was coined in the mid-19th century.
=> suspire
champagne: champagne: [17] Champagne comes (as does campaign) from late Latin campānia, a derivative of Latin campus ‘open field’ (source of English camp). This passed into Old French as champagne ‘open country’, a word borrowed into English in the 14th century as champaign (now archaic). It came to be applied specifically to a province of northeastern France (an area largely of open rolling countryside) and hence to the wine produced in that area.

There are references to ‘brisk Champagne’ and ‘sparkling Champagne’ in English from the 1660s and 1670s, but it was not until about two hundred years ago that modern champagne, produced by secondary fermentation in bottle, was invented (according to legend, by the monk Dom Perignon).
=> camp, campaign, champion
chestnut: chestnut: [16] The Greek word for ‘chestnut’ was kastanéā, which appears to have meant originally ‘nut from Castanea’ (in Pontus, Asia Minor) or ‘nut from Castana’ (in Thessaly, Greece). It came into English via Latin castanea and Old French chastaine, which in the 14th century produced the Middle English form chasteine or chesteine. Over the next two hundred years this developed to chestern, and in due course had nut added to it to produce the modern English form. Castana, the Spanish descendant of Latin castanea, is the source of castanet.
=> castanet
chow mein: chow mein: [20] Most Chinese culinary vocabulary in English arrived after World War II, but chow mein is part of an earlier influx, which was brought by Chinese-speakers who found themselves on the west coast of the USA in the early years of the 20th century. In the Cantonese (Guangdong) dialect it means literally ‘fried noodles’ – a minimalist description of a dish which usually also contains chopped meat and vegetables.
cinema: cinema: [20] The cinema is so named because it shows moving pictures. The Greek verb for ‘move’ was kīnein (source of English kinetic and, via the related Latin cīre, a range of -cite words, including excite, incite, and recite). Its noun derivative was kínēma ‘movement’, from which in 1896 Auguste and Louis Jean Lumière coined the French term cinématographe for their new invention for recording and showing moving pictures.

This and its abbreviated form cinéma soon entered English, the latter in 1909. In early years the graecized form kinema had some currency in English, but this had virtually died out by the 1940s.
=> cite, excite, kinetic, incite, recite
college: college: [14] College comes from the same source as colleague. Latin collēga, literally ‘one chosen to work with another’, a compound based on the stem of lēgāre ‘choose’. An ‘association of collēgae, partnership’ was thus a collēgium, whence (possibly via Old French college) English college. For many hundreds of years this concept of a ‘corporate group’ was the main semantic feature of the word, and it was not really until the 19th century that, via the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge universities, the notion of ‘academic institution’ overtook it.
=> colleague, delegate, legal, legitimate
creature: creature: [13] Creature and creator, both 13thcentury borrowings from Old French, predate the introduction of the verb create into English by about a hundred years. This was a verbal use of an earlier adjective create, borrowed directly from Latin creātus, the past participle of creāre ‘produce’ (which in turn may have been a causative derivative of the verb crēscere ‘grow’, source of English crescent). Another descendant of Latin creāre was Portuguese criar ‘breed, nurse’, the probable ancestor of English creole [17].
=> create, creole, crescent, croissant, increase
dodo: dodo: [17] When Portuguese explorers first encountered the unfortunate dodo on the island of Mauritius, it struck them as a clumsy and foolish bird, so they applied to it the Portuguese word doudo ‘simpleton’. The name has stuck in English (although in the 17th century it had some competition from the French and Dutch term dronte). The first record of the simile ‘dead as a dodo’ comes from 1904, over 200 years after the extinction of the species, although the word had been used since the late 19th century as a metaphor for someone or something hopelessly out of date: ‘He belongs to the Dodo race of real unmitigated toryism’, Lisle Carr, Judith Gwynne 1874.
drab: drab: [16] Drab is a variant of the now obsolete form drap, which was borrowed from Old French drap ‘cloth’ (source also of English drape, draper, and trappings). It was originally a noun meaning ‘cloth’ in English too, but the beginnings of its transition to the modern English adjective meaning ‘faded and dull’ can be seen in the 17th century.

The word came to be used particularly for natural undyed cloth, of a dull yellowish-brown colour, and hence for the colour itself (an application best preserved in the olive-drab colour of American service uniforms). The figurative development to ‘dull and faded’ is a comparatively recent one, first recorded a little over a hundred years ago.
=> drape, trappings
drudge: drudge: [15] No one is quite sure where drudge comes from. It is first recorded, as a noun, towards the end of the 15th century, and the verb followed about fifty years later. One possible source may be the Middle English verb drugge ‘pull laboriously’, a possible relative of English drag; another suggestion is the Old English verb drēogan ‘work’.
duet: duet: [18] The original term for ‘two musicians’ was Italian duo, a descendant of Latin duo ‘two’. English acquired this in the 16th century. But Italian (the major source of Western musical vocabulary) also produced a diminutive form duetto, literally ‘little duo’, which English borrowed either directly (the unanglicized form duetto was used in English for about a hundred years from the 1720s) or perhaps via German duett.
=> two
elope: elope: [17] Etymologically, elope signifies ‘leap away’. It was originally an Anglo-Norman legal term applied to a married woman running off with a lover, and only in the past couple of hundred years has it come to be applied to a couple leaving home to get married when parental permission is denied. It is thought that the Anglo-Norman term was an adaptation of Middle English *alopen, past participle of an unrecorded verb *alepen ‘run away’, which would have been formed from the prefix a- ‘away’ and lepen ‘run, leap’ (source of modern English leap and related to lope and German laufen ‘run’).
=> leap, lope
equestrian: equestrian: [17] Equestrian was adapted from Latin equester, an adjective derived from eques ‘horseman’. Eques in turn was based on equus ‘horse’ (source of English equine [18]). This was the Latin descendant of *ekwos, the prehistoric Indo-European term for ‘horse’, which was once found in all the daughter languages of Indo- European except for the Slavic branch: Old English had eoh, for example, Old Irish ech, Sanskrit avás, and ancient Greek híppos (source of English hippodrome and hippopotamus).

It is a remarkable circumstance, however, that over the past thousand years equus and its relatives have (other than in derivatives such as equine) died out, to be replaced by secondary terms such as French cheval (from Latin caballus, probably a non-Indo-European borrowing), German pferd (from late Latin paraverēdus ‘extra post-horse’, source also of English palfrey), and English horse.
=> equine, hippopotamus
ermine: ermine: [12] The term ermine was introduced to English from Old French as a name for the ‘stoat’, but as in the case of other words of French origin like mutton and pork which soon came to be used for the dead animals’ product rather than the live animals themselves, it was not long (about a hundred years in fact) before ermine was being applied to the stoat’s fur, and specifically to its white winter fur.

The source of the French word is not entirely clear. One school of thought derives it from medieval Latin mūs Armenius ‘Armenian mouse’, on the assumption that this denoted a ‘stoat’ or ‘weasel’, but an alternative possibility is Germanic origin.
ethical: ethical: [17] The underlying meaning of Greek ēthos was ‘personal disposition’. It came ultimately from prehistoric Indo-European *swedh-, a compound formed from the reflexive pronoun *swe- ‘oneself’ and dhē- ‘put’ (from which English gets do). Gradually the meaning broadened out to ‘trait, character’ and then ‘custom’, or in the plural ‘manners’ or ‘morals’.

English acquired it, in the sense ‘distinctive characteristic’ (based on the usage of Aristotle), in the 19th century. The Greek derived adjective ēthikós entered English, via Latin ēthicus, as ethic in the 16th century. This had largely been replaced by ethical by the end of the 17th century, but it has survived as a noun (as in ‘the work ethic’), which actually predates the adjective in English by about two hundred years.

The plural usage ethics ‘science of morals’ dates from the beginning of the 17th century.
=> do
garter: garter: [14] The ultimate source of garter was probably an unrecorded Gaulish word meaning ‘leg’ (related to Welsh gar ‘leg’). It was borrowed into Old French at some point and used as the basis of the noun garet, which (in relation to people) meant ‘place where the leg bends, knee’. From this in turn was derived Old French gartier ‘band just above or below the knee’, source of English garter.

The British Order of the Garter dates, according to the medieval French chronicler Jean Froissart, from around 1344. The story of its origin, not recorded until over 250 years later and never authenticated, is that while the Countess of Salisbury was dancing with King Edward III, her garter fell off; the king picked it up and put it on his own leg, remarking somewhat cryptically in Anglo-French ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ – ‘Shamed be he who thinks evil of it’, and named the order of knighthood which he founded after this very garter.
get: get: [13] Get, now one of the most pervasive of English words, has only been in the language for the (comparatively) short period of 800 years. It was borrowed from Old Norse geta (although a related, hundred-per-cent English -get, which occurs in beget and forget, dates back to Old English times). Both come via a prehistoric Germanic *getan from Indo-European *ghed-, which signified ‘seize’ (guess is ultimately from the same source). Gotten is often quoted as an American survival of a primeval past participle since abandoned by British English, but in fact the original past participle of got was getten, which lasted into the 16th century; gotten was a Middle English innovation, based on such models as spoken and stolen. Got originated as an abbreviated form of gotten, which in due course came to be used, on both sides of the Atlantic, as the past tense of the verb (replacing the original gat).
=> beget, forget, guess
ghost: ghost: [OE] In Old English times, ghost was simply a synonym for ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ (a sense preserved in Holy Ghost); it did not acquire its modern connotations of the ‘disembodied spirit of a dead person appearing among the living’ until the 14th century. However, since it has been traced back to Indo-European *ghois- or *gheis-, which also produced Old Norse geisa ‘rage’, Sanskrit hédas ‘anger’, and Gothic usgaisjan ‘terrify’, it could well be that its distant ancestor denoted as frightening concept as the modern English word does.

The Old English form of the word was gāst, which in Middle English became gost; the gh- spelling, probably inspired by Flemish gheest, first appeared at the end of the 15th century, and gradually established itself over the next hundred years.
=> poltergeist
goon: goon: [20] The antecedents of goon are murky. It may have been inspired by goony ‘simpleton’, which is first recorded in the 1890s and which may well be the same word as the much earlier gony with the same meaning, which in turn goes right back to the 16th century and could be related to Scottish gonyel ‘fool’. An ultimate connection with the obsolete verb gane ‘yawn’ has been suggested, but all we know for certain about goon itself is that it was introduced to the English language at large in America in 1921 by Frederick Lewis Allen, writing in Harper’s Magazine.

He claimed that it had been in use in his family for some years, with the meaning ‘stolid person’, but he had no suggestions to offer as to its origins. It then disappears from the record until the 1930s, when its resurrection seems to have been set in train by ‘Alice the Goon’, a slow-witted, muscular character in the comic strip ‘Thimble Theater, featuring Popeye’ by E.C. Segar, which first came out in 1933 (it is not clear whether Segar knew about the earlier, 1920s usage).

Taken up enthusiastically in student slang, by the end of the decade goon was firmly established in the senses ‘fool’ and ‘thug, strong-arm man’. During World War II it was applied by Allied prisoners of war to their German guards, and it has often been suggested that that was the inspiration for the goon of The Goon Show (originally Crazy People), the popular BBC radio comedy programme of the 1950s.

Its creator, Spike Milligan, denied this, and said that he got the idea from the ‘Goon’ of the Popeye cartoons. Either way, it is the show’s particular brand of comical surreality that colours today’s meaning of the word.
graft: graft: [15] Graft, in its original sense ‘plant part inserted into a living plant’ (the application to skin and other animal tissue is a late 19thcentury development), came from its resemblance in shape to a pencil. Greek graphíon meant ‘writing implement, stylus’ (it was a derivative of the verb gráphein ‘write’, source of English graphic). It passed via Latin graphium into Old French as grafe, gradually changing in its precise application with the advance of writing technology.

By the time it reached Old French it denoted a ‘pencil’, and it was then that the resemblance to two artificially united plant stems was noted and the metaphor born. English took the word over as graff in the late 14th century (it actually survived in that form into the 19th century), and within a hundred years had added a -t to the end to give modern English graft. Graft ‘corruption’, first recorded in mid 19th-century America, may be the same word, perhaps derived from the notion of a graft as an ‘insertion’, hence ‘something extra, on the side’. Graft ‘hard work’ [19], on the other hand, is probably a different word, perhaps based on the English dialect verb graft ‘dig’, an alteration of grave ‘dig’.
=> graphic
gruesome: gruesome: [16] The novels of Sir Walter Scott had an enormous influence in introducing Scotticisms into the general English language, and gruesome is a case in point. It was apparently coined in the 16th century from an earlier verb grue ‘be terrified’, which was probably of Scandinavian origin. For over 200 years it remained restricted in distribution to Scotland and northern England, but Scott started using it (‘He’s as grave and grewsome an auld Dutchman as e’er I saw’, Old Mortality 1816), immediately ensuring it an entrée into homes all over Britain thanks to Scott’s huge readership. It has never looked back.
howitzer: howitzer: [17] Czech houfnice denotes a ‘large catapult’ for hurling stones at the enemy. It was borrowed into German as houfenitz, and this made its way into English as howitz at the end of the 17th century. This had died out within a hundred years, but at around the same time English acquired howitzer, probably via Dutch houwitser, which has stood the test of time.
interest: interest: [15] The Latin verb interesse meant literally ‘be between’ (it was a compound of inter ‘between’ and esse ‘be’). It was used metaphorically for ‘be of concern, be important, matter’, and appears to have been borrowed into Anglo-Norman as a noun, meaning ‘what one has a legal concern in or share of’. English took this over in the 14th century as interesse, but it gradually changed over the next hundred years or so into interest, mainly due to the influence of Old French interest ‘damage’, which came from the third person present singular form of the Latin verb.

The main modern sense ‘curiosity’ developed towards the end of the 18th century.
jet: jet: English has two distinct words jet. The older, which denotes a type of black stone used in jewellery [14], comes via Old French jaiet and Latin gagātēs from Greek gagátēs, which denoted ‘stone from Gagai’, a town in Lycia, in Asia Minor, where it was found. The jet of ‘jet engines’ [16] goes back ultimately to a word that meant ‘throw’ – Latin jacere (from which English also gets inject, project, reject, etc).

A derivative of this was jactāre, which also meant ‘throw’. It passed via Vulgar Latin *jectāre into Old French as jeter, and when English took it over it was originally used for ‘protrude, stick out’: ‘the houses jetting over aloft like the poops of ships, to shadow the streets’, George Sandys, Travels 1615. This sense is perhaps best preserved in jetty ‘projecting pier’, and in the variant form jut [16], while the underlying meaning ‘throw’ is still present in jettison ‘throw things overboard’ and its contracted form jetsam.

But back with the verb jet, in the 17th century it began to be used for ‘spurt out in a forceful stream’. The notion of using such a stream to create forward motion was first encapsulated in the term jet propulsion in the mid 19th century, but it did not take concrete form for nearly a hundred years (the term jet engine is not recorded until 1943).
=> inject, jetsam, jettison, jetty, jut, project, reject, subject
jubilee: jubilee: [14] Despite their similarity, jubilee has no etymological connection with jubilation [14] and jubilant [17]; but they have exerted a considerable influence on it over the centuries. It was originally a Hebrew word: Hebrew yōbhēl meant ‘leading animal, ram’, and by extension ‘ram’s horn’, and since a ram’s horn was blown to announce the start of a special year (set aside once every fifty years according to ancient Hebrew law) in which slaves were freed, land left untilled, etc, the term yōbēl came to be used for the year itself.

Greek took it over as ióbēlos and formed an adjective from it, iōbēlaios. This was passed on to Latin, and it was here that jubilation took a hand. Latin jūbilāre (source of English jubilation) originally meant simply ‘call out’, but early Christian writers used it for ‘shout for joy’. Under its influence Greek iōbēlaios became Latin jūbilaeus, which was used in the expression annus jūbilaeus to denote this special Jewish year.

It soon came to be used as a noun in its own right, and in this role passed via Old French jubile into English. By this time the ideas of ‘fifty years’ and ‘joy, celebration’ had mingled to such an extent that the word was being used for a ‘fiftieth anniversary’ or its celebration, a sense which remained current until the early 20th century (in present-day English it means simply ‘anniversary’, usually of a monarch’s accession, and the period involved has to be defined by golden, silver, etc).
jukebox: jukebox: [20] The jukebox – a coin-operated record-player – got its name from being played in jukes; and a juke (or juke-house, or jukejoint), in US Black English slang of the middle years of the 20th century, was a roadhouse providing food and drink, music for dancing, and usually the services of prostitutes. The word probably came from the adjective juke or joog, which meant ‘wicked’ or ‘disorderly’ in the Gullah language, a creolized English of South Carolina, Georgia and northern Florida; and that in turn may well have originated in some as yet unidentified West African language.
knight: knight: [OE] The word knight has come up in the world over the centuries. In the Old English period it simply meant ‘boy’ or ‘young man’. By the 10th century it had broadened out to ‘male servant’, and within a hundred years of that we find it being used for ‘military servant, soldier’. This is the general level or ‘rank’ at which the word’s continental relatives, German and Dutch knecht, have remained.

But in England, in the course of the early Middle Ages, knight came to denote, in the feudal system, ‘one who bore arms in return for land’, and later ‘one raised to noble rank in return for military service’. The modern notion of knighthood as a rung in the nobility, without any necessary connotations of military prowess, dates from the 16th century.
marathon: marathon: [19] According to tradition, when the Greek army defeated the Persians at Marathon, on the northeast coast of Attica, in 490 BC, the runner Pheidippides was dispatched to bring the good news to Athens (in fact there is no contemporary evidence for the story, which is not recorded until 700 years after the event). When the modern Olympic Games were first held, in Athens in 1896, a long-distance race was introduced to commemorate the ancient feat, run over a course supposedly equal in distance to that from Marathon to Athens (about 35 km/22 miles).

The present distance (42.195 km/26 miles 385 yards) was established at the 1908 London Olympics (the odd yards were added to bring the finishing line in front of the royal box).
master: master: [OE] The Latin word for ‘master, chief’ was magister (which is generally assumed to have been based on the root of Latin magis ‘more’ and magnus ‘big’, source of English magnify, magnitude, etc). Its more obvious English descendants include magistrate and magisterial, and indeed English originally acquired magister itself in the 10th century in the form mægister, but over the years (partly under the influence of Old French maistre) this developed to master.

The feminine counterpart mistress [14] was borrowed from Old French maistresse, a form maintained in English for some time. The alteration of mais- to mis- began in the 15th century, due probably to the weakly-stressed use of the word as a title (a phenomenon also responsible for the emergence of mister [16] from master). The abbreviated miss followed in the 17th century.
=> magistrate, magnitude, magnum, miss, mister, mistress
mile: mile: [OE] Latin mille denoted ‘thousand’ (it is the source of English millennium [17], etymologically a ‘thousand years’, and, via Italian and French, of million [14]). Its plural mīllia was used in ancient Rome for a measure of length equal to a thousand paces. This was borrowed into prehistoric West Germanic as *mīlja, which has subsequently differentiated into German meile, Dutch mijl, and English mile. (The English mile is over 100 yards longer than the Roman one was.)
=> millennium, million
morse: morse: [19] People had for some years been experimenting with the magnetic telegraph, but it was the American inventor Samuel Morse (1791–1872) who in 1836 produced the first workable system. And with his assistant Alexander Bain he devised a set of dots and dashes representing letters and numbers which could be used for transmitting messages, and which came to be known as the Morse code. In the first half of the 20th century morse was also used as a verb: ‘It can be used for Morsing instructions about breakfast to the cook’, Punch 31 March 1920.
ombudsman: ombudsman: [20] The word ombudsman, denoting an ‘investigator of public complaints’, was introduced into English from Swedish, and was first used as a quasi-official term in the 1960s: New Zealand was the first Englishspeaking country to introduce such a post, in 1962, and Britain followed four years later. The Swedish word is a descendant of Old Norse umbothsmathr, literally ‘administration-man’; and umboth was originally a compound of um ‘about’ and both ‘command’ (a relative of English bid).
=> bid