- jungle
[jungle 词源字典] - jungle: [18] Not surprisingly, jungle is a tropical word, but its ancestor denoted quite the opposite of the lush vegetation it now refers to. It comes from Sanskrit jangala, which originally meant ‘dry’, and hence ‘desert’. Its Hindi descendant jangal was used for an ‘area of wasteland’, and hence ‘such an area overgrown with scrub’, and when it was taken over into Anglo-Indian it was gradually extended to an ‘area of thick tangled trees’.
[jungle etymology, jungle origin, 英语词源] - jungle (n.)
- 1776, from Hindi jangal "desert, forest, wasteland, uncultivated ground," from Sanskrit jangala-s "arid, sparsely grown with trees," of unknown origin. Specific sense of "land overgrown by vegetation in a wild, tangled mass" is first recorded 1849; meaning "place notoriously lawless and violent" is first recorded 1906, from Upton Sinclair's novel (compare asphalt jungle, 1949, William R. Burnett's novel title, made into a film 1950 by John Huston; blackboard jungle, 1954, Evan Hunter's novel title, movie in 1955). Jungle gym was a trademark name, 1923, by Junglegym Inc., Chicago, U.S. Jungle bunny, derogatory for "black person," attested from 1966.
