英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

damson [damson 词源字典]: damson: see damask
[damson etymology, damson origin, 英语词源]
dance: dance: [13] The history of the word dance, now widespread amongst European languages (French dansir, Spanish danzar, Italian danzare, German tanzen, Swedish dansa, Russian tancovat’), is disappointingly obscure. All these forms, including the English word, stem from an original Old French danser. This developed from an assumed Vulgar Latin *dansāre, which may have been borrowed from a Frankish *dintjan (Frisian dintje ‘tremble’ has been compared).
dandelion: dandelion: [13] Dandelion means literally ‘lion’s tooth’. It was borrowed from French dent-de-lion, which itself was a translation of medieval Latin dēns leōnis. It was presumably so called from the toothlike points of its leaves (although some have speculated that the name comes from the long taproot). The plant has a variety of local dialectal names, many of them (clock, farmer’s clocks, schoolboy’s clock, telltime, time flower) reflecting the traditional practice of telling the time by blowing off all the plant’s tufted seeds (the number of puffs needed indicates the hour). Piss-a-bed, like its French counterpart pissenlit, betrays the plant’s diuretic properties.
=> dentist, lion
dandruff: dandruff: [16] The word dandruff (or dandriff, as it commonly used to be) first appears, out of the blue, in the mid 16th century, with no known relatives. Its first element, dand-, remains utterly obscure, but the second part may have been borrowed from Old Norse hrufa or Middle Low German rōve, both meaning ‘scab’ (Middle English had a word roufe ‘scab, scurf’, and modern Dutch has roof).
dandy: dandy: [18] The first record of the word dandy comes in Scottish border ballads of the late 18th century, but by the early 19th century it had become a buzz term in fashionable London society. It is generally explained as being an abbreviation of jack-a-dandy ‘affected man’, a word first recorded in the 17th century which apparently incorporates Dandy, a colloquial Scottish abbreviation of the name Andrew. The word’s adjectival use started in the 19th century in close semantic relationship to the noun – ‘affectedly trim or neat’ – but American English has rehabilitated it to ‘excellent’ in the 20th century.
=> andrew
danger: danger: [13] Etymologically, danger is a parallel formation to dominion. It comes ultimately from Vulgar Latin *domniārium ‘power or sway of a lord, dominion, jurisdiction’, a derivative of Latin dominus ‘lord, master’. English acquired the word via Old French dangier and Anglo- Norman daunger, retaining the word’s original sense until the 17th century (‘You stand within his [Shylock’s] danger, do you not?’ says Portia to Antonio in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice).

But things had been happening to its meaning in Old French, particularly in the phrase estre en dangier ‘be in danger’. The notions of being in someone’s danger (that is, ‘in his power, at his mercy’) and of being in danger of something (that is, ‘liable to something unpleasant, such as loss or punishment’ – a sense preserved in the 1611 translation of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment’, Matthew 5:22) led directly to the sense ‘peril’, acquired by English in the 14th century.
=> dame, dome, dominate, dominion, dungeon
dapper: dapper: [15] Modern English dapper connotes neatness, alertness, and liveliness, but its etymological significance as revealed by distant relatives such as Old High German tapfar ‘heavy’, Old Prussian debīkan ‘large’, and Old Slavic debelu ‘thick’, is ‘heavy’. The notion of ‘weightiness’ spread to ‘firmness, endurance in battle’, and hence ‘courage’ (German tapfer and Dutch dapper both mean ‘brave’). English acquired the word, with an apparently ironical change of meaning, from Middle Dutch or Middle Low German dapper ‘heavy, stout, bold’.
dapple: dapple: [14] Dapple is a puzzling word. It is presumably derived from or linked in some way to its contemporary dapple-grey (although this has never been proved), which has formal and semantic links with several colour terms in other Germanic languages (such as Old Norse apalgrár, German apfelgrau, and Dutch appelgrauw) that are surely too strong to be coincidental.

They all mean literally ‘applegrey’. Add to this such forms as French grispommelé, again literally ‘applegrey’, and Russian yablokakh ‘dappled’, a derivative of yábloko ‘apple’, and the inference becomes even more compelling – that dappled is related in some way as yet unexplained to apple. Many of the above terms were applied specifically to grey horses marked with round blotches, and so perhaps the word had its beginnings in a perceived resemblance in shape between such markings and apples.
dare: dare: [OE] Dare used to be a widespread Germanic verb, with relatives in Old High German (giturran) and Gothic (gadaursan), but today it survives only in English (the similarlooking Danish turde and Swedish töras are probably not related). It comes via Germanic *ders- from an Indo-European *dhers-, which also produced Greek thrasús ‘bold’ and Old Slavic druzate ‘be bold’.

In Old English it was a conjugationally complex verb, with anomalous present and past forms, but most of its oddities have now been ironed out: the past form durst is now on its last legs, and only the 3rd present singular form remains unusual, especially in negative contexts and questions: she daren’t rather than she dares not.
dark: dark: [OE] Dark comes ultimately from a Germanic base *derk-, *dark-, which also produced Old High German tarchanjan ‘hide’ and Middle Low German dork ‘place where dirt collects’ (outside Germanic, Lithuanian dargus has been compared). In Old English the word usually denoted absence of light, particularly with reference to ‘night’; the application to colours did not develop until the 16th century.
darn: darn: English has two distinct words darn. The verb ‘mend with stitches’ [16] may come ultimately from an Old English verb diernan ‘hide’, a derivative of the adjective dierne ‘secret’, which in turn was descended from West Germanic *darnjaz. Darn the mild curse [18], which arose in American English, is usually taken to be a euphemistic alteration of damn, although it has been suggested, not very plausibly, that it too came from dern, the modern English descendant of Old English dierne, in the sense ‘dark, dreary’.
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).
date: date: Date ‘time of an event’ and date ‘fruit’ are distinct words in English, and perhaps unexpectedly the latter [13] entered the language a century before the former. It came via Old French date and Latin dactylus from Greek dáktulos, which originally meant literally ‘finger’ or ‘toe’. The term was originally applied from the supposed resemblance of a date to a little brown finger or toe. Date ‘time’ [14] was acquired from Old French date, a descendant of medieval Latin data, which represented a nominal use of the feminine form of Latin datus, the past participle of the verb dare ‘give’.

It originated in such phrases as data Romae ‘given at Rome’, the ancient Roman way of dating letters. (Data ‘information’ [17], on the other hand, is the plural of the neuter form of the past participle, datum.) Among the wide range of other English words descended from Latin dare (which can be traced back ultimately to an Indo- European base *dō-) are antidote [15] (etymologically ‘what is given against something’), condone [19], dado [17] (a borrowing from Italian, ‘cube’), dative [15], donation [15], dice, dowry and endow (both ultimately from Latin dōs ‘dowry’, a relative of dare), edit, and pardon [13].
=> pterodactyl; antidote, condone, data, dative, dice, donation, edit, endow, pardon
daub: daub: [14] The ultimate source of daub, Latin dēalbāre, meant literally ‘whiten’. It was derived from the adjective albus ‘white’, ancestor of English albino and album. It developed the specific meaning ‘cover with some white substance, such as whitewash or plaster’, and by the time it reached English, via Old French dauber, it referred to the applying of a coating of mortar, plaster, etc to a wall. This was generally a messy process (particularly in the smearing of a mixture of mud and dung on to a framework of laths to produce wattle-and-daub walls), and led in due course to the broader sense ‘apply crudely’.
=> albino, album, auburn
daughter: daughter: [OE] Daughter is an ancient word which goes back to Indo-European *dhughə tēr. Apart from Latin and the Romance languages (with filia and its descendants) and Celtic (Welsh has merch), all the Indo-European languages have inherited this form: Greek had thugátēr, Armenian dustr, Old Slavic dusti (whence Russian doch’), and Sanskrit duhitar-.

The prehistoric Germanic word was *dohtēr, which produced Gothic dauhtar, German tochter, Dutch dochter, Swedish dotter, Danish datter, and of course English daughter. It is not known where the Indo-European word ultimately came from, although correspondences have been suggested with Sanskrit duh- ‘milk’ and Greek teúkho ‘make’.
daunt: daunt: see tame
dauphin: dauphin: [15] The eldest sons of the French king were from 1349–1830 designated by a title which is essentially the same word as English dolphin. It was originally applied to the lords of the Viennois, an area in the southeast of France, whose coat of arms incorporated three dolphins. After the Viennois province of Dauphiné was sold by Charles of Valois to the French crown in 1343, the king gave it to his eldest son, and from then on all eldest sons inherited it along with the title dauphin.
=> dolphin
dawn: dawn: [15] Dawn was originally formed from day. The Old English word dæg ‘day’ formed the basis of dagung, literally ‘daying’, a word coined to designate the emergence of day from night. In Middle English this became daiing or dawyng, which in the 13th to 14th centuries evolved to dai(e)ning or dawenyng, on the model of some such Scandinavian form as Old Swedish daghning. Then in the 15th century the -ing ending was dropped to produce dawn.
=> day
day: day: [OE] Day and its Germanic relatives (German tag, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish dag, and Gothic dags) come from a prehistoric Germanic *dagaz. It seems likely that the ultimate source of this was the Indo-European base *dhegh-, which also produced Sanskrit dah- ‘burn’ and nidāgha- ‘heat, summer’, and that the underlying etymological meaning of day is thus ‘time when the sun is hot’.
=> dawn
dead: dead: [OE] Dead is part of a Germanic family of adjectives (including also German tot, Dutch dood, Swedish död, and Gothic dauths) which come from a prehistoric Germanic adjective *dauthaz. This in turn came from an earlier *dhautós, which was the past participle of the verb base that eventually produced English die (thus etymologically dead is in effect a precursor of died). The word’s ultimate source was Indo- European *dheu-, which some have linked with Greek thánatos ‘dead’.
=> die