- pallet
[pallet 词源字典] - pallet: see pale
[pallet etymology, pallet origin, 英语词源] - pallid
- pallid: see pale
- palm
- palm: Palm the tree [OE] and the palm of the hand [14] are effectively distinct words in English, but they have the same ultimate source: Latin palma. This originally meant ‘palm of the hand’ (it is related to Irish lám ‘hand’ and Welsh llaw ‘hand’), and the application to the tree is a secondary one, alluding to the shape of the cluster of palm leaves, like the fingers of a hand.
The Latin word was borrowed into the Germanic dialects in prehistoric times in the tree sense, and is now widespread (German palme and Dutch and Swedish palm as well as English palm). English acquired it in the ‘hand’ sense via Old French paume, with subsequent reversion to the Latin spelling. The French diminutive palmette denotes a stylized palm leaf used as a decorative device, particularly on cornices.
It was borrowed into English in the mid-19th century, and is thought to have formed the basis of English pelmet [20].
=> pelmet - palpable
- palpable: [14] Latin palpāre meant ‘touch, stroke’ (it may be related to English feel). From it in post-classical times was derived the adjective palpābilis ‘touchable’ – whence English palpable. Other derivatives were the verb palpitāre ‘tremble, throb’ (from which English gets palpitate [17]) and the noun palpus ‘touching’ (source of English palp [19]).
=> palpitate - pamphlet
- pamphlet: [14] The original ‘pamphlet’ was Pamphilus, a short anonymous Latin love poem of the 12th century. It was very popular and widely reproduced, and its name was adapted in the vernacular to Pamflet; and by the end of the 14th century this was being used generically for any text shorter than a book. The word’s more restricted modern connotations (‘unbound’ and ‘dealing with controversial subjects’) developed gradually over the centuries.
- pan
- pan: [OE] Pan is a general West Germanic word, with relatives in German (pfanne) and Dutch (pan), and also, by borrowing, in Swedish (panna) and Danish (pande). It may have been borrowed into Germanic from Latin patina ‘dish’ (source of English paten [13] and patina [18]), which itself went back to Greek patánē ‘plate, dish’.
The verbal use pan out ‘turn out, succeed’ is an allusion to the getting of a result when ‘panning’ for gold – washing gold-bearing gravel, silt, etc in a shallow pan to separate out the metal. (Pan ‘move a camera’ [20], incidentally, is a different word altogether. It is an abbreviation of panorama.)
=> paten, patina; panorama - panache
- panache: see pin
- pancreas
- pancreas: [16] Etymologically, pancreas means ‘all-flesh’. It is a modern Latin adaptation of Greek págkreas, a compound formed from the prefix pan- ‘all’ and kréas ‘flesh’. This was presumably an allusion to the homogeneous substance of the organ. The term sweetbread, denoting the ‘pancreas used as food’, also dates from the 16th century. The -bread element may represent Old English brǣd ‘flesh’ rather than modern English bread.
=> raw - pandemonium
- pandemonium: [17] Pandemonium was coined by John Milton as the name for the capital of Hell in his poem Paradise lost 1667: ‘Meanwhile the winged heralds … throughout the host proclaim a solemn council forthwith to be held at Pandaemonium, the high capital of Satan and his peers’. He formed it from the prefix pan- ‘all’ and Greek daímōn ‘demon’ – hence ‘place of all the demons’. The modern colloquial use of the word for ‘uproar’ developed in the mid-19th century.
=> demon - pander
- pander: [16] Pandaro was a character in Boccaccio’s Filostrato. He was the cousin of Cressida, and acted as go-between in her affair with Troilus. Chaucer took him over in his Troilus and Criseyde as Pandarus, changing him from cousin to uncle but retaining his role. His name came to be used as a generic term for an ‘arranger of sexual liaisons’ (‘If ever you prove false to one another, since I have taken such pains to bring you together, let all pitiful goersbetween be call’d to the world’s end after my name: call them all Panders’, says Pandarus in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida 1606), and by the mid-16th century was already well on the downward slope to ‘pimp, procurer’.
Its modern use as a verb, meaning ‘indulge’, dates from the 19th century.
- panel
- panel: [13] Etymologically, a panel is nothing more than a ‘small pane’. It comes via Old French from Vulgar Latin *pannellus, a diminutive form of Latin pannus ‘rag’ (source of English pane [13]). Both panel and pane entered English with their original ‘cloth’ connotations intact, but they have now virtually died out, surviving only in the compound counterpane (which is actually an alteration of an earlier counterpoint), and ‘shape’ has taken over from ‘substance’ as the word’s key semantic feature.
=> pane - panic
- panic: [17] Panic is etymologically ‘terror caused by the god Pan’. The ancient Greeks believed that he lurked in lonely spots, and would frighten people by suddenly appearing, or making noises. He was evidently invoked to account for alarming but harmless natural phenomena, and so the element of ‘irrationality’ in the English word was present from the beginning. English acquired it (originally as an adjective) via French panique and modern Latin pānicus from Greek pānikós ‘of Pan’.
=> pan - panjandrum
- panjandrum: [18] Panjandrum is an invented word, coined in 1755 by the English actor and playwright Samuel Foote (1720–77) to test the memory of the actor Charles Macklin, who claimed to be able to memorize and repeat anything said to him (it was one of several inventions in the same vein that Foote put to him: ‘And there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the Grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top’). It does not seem to have been taken up as a general comical term for a ‘pompous highranking person’ until the 19th century.
- pannier
- pannier: [13] Etymologically, a pannier is something for carrying ‘bread’ in. It comes via Old French pannier from Latin pānārium ‘breadbasket’, a derivative of pānis ‘bread’. This originally meant simply ‘food’ (it came from the same ultimate source as Latin pābulum ‘food’, borrowed into English in the 17th century, and English food); ‘bread’ was a secondary development. It is the ancestor of the modern Romance words for ‘bread’ (French pain, Italian pane, Spanish pan, etc), and also gave English pantry.
=> pantry - panoply
- panoply: [17] Panoply originally meant a ‘full suit of armour’; the modern sense ‘impressive array’ is a metaphorical extension that did not emerge until the 19th century. The word comes via French from Greek panoplíā, a compound formed from the prefix pan- ‘all’ and hópla ‘arms, weapons’.
- panorama
- panorama: [18] The word panorama was coined in the late 1780s by an Irish artist called Robert Barker for a method he had invented for painting a scene on the inside of a cylinder in such a way that its perspective would seem correct to someone viewing it from inside the cylinder. He put his invention into practice in 1793 when he opened his ‘Panorama’, a large building in Leicester Square, London where the public could come and gaze at such all-encompassing scenes. By the early years of the 19th century the word (formed from the prefix pan- ‘all’ and Greek hórāma ‘view’, a derivative of horān ‘see’) had acquired all its modern extended meanings.
- pansy
- pansy: [15] French pensée means literally ‘thought’, and it was presumably the pensive look of these flowers of the viola family that earned them the name. English originally took it over as pensee, but later anglicized it to pansy. The use of the word for an effeminate male homosexual dates from the 1920s. French pensée itself is the feminine past participle of penser ‘think’ (source also of English pensive [14]). This was descended from Latin pēnsāre ‘weigh’, which in post-classical times was used for ‘think’.
=> pensive - pant
- pant: [15] It is the shock that makes you ‘gasp’ that lies behind the word pant. It is closely related to English fancy, fantasy, and phantom. It comes from Anglo-Norman *panter, a condensed version of Old French pantaisier ‘gasp’. This in turn went back to Vulgar Latin phantasiāre ‘gasp in horror, as if at a nightmare or ghost’, a derivative of Latin phantasia ‘apparition’ (source of English fancy and fantasy and first cousin to phantom).
=> fancy, fantasy, phantom - pantechnicon
- pantechnicon: [19] The original Pantechnicon was a huge complex of warehouses, wine vaults, and other storage facilities in Motcomb Street, in London’s Belgravia. Built in 1830 and supposed to be fireproof, it was almost totally destroyed by fire in 1874. It seems originally to have been intended to be a bazaar, and its name was coined from the prefix pan- ‘all’ and Greek tekhnikón, the neuter form of tekhnikós ‘artistic’, denoting that all sorts of manufactured wares were to be bought there.
But it was its role as a furniture repository that brought it into the general language. Removal vans taking furniture there came to be known as pantechnicon vans, and by the 1890s pantechnicon was a generic term for ‘removal vans’.
=> architect, technical - pantomime
- pantomime: [17] In ancient Rome, a pantomīmus was a ‘mime artist’, a sort of Marcel Marceau performer who acted scenes, incidents, etc without words. The term was adopted from Greek pantómōmos ‘complete imitator’, a compound formed from panto- ‘all’ and mōmos ‘imitator, actor’ (source of English mime). English originally took the word over in this historical sense, and it was not until the early 18th century that it began to be used first for a sort of mime ballet and then for a play without words, relating a popular tale, which gradually developed into the Christmas fairy-tale pantomimes of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The abbreviation panto dates from the mid-19th century.
=> mime
