英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

admonish [admonish 词源字典]: admonish: [14] In Middle English times this verb was amoneste. It came, via Old French amonester, from an assumed Vulgar Latin verb *admonestāre, an alteration of Latin admonēre (monēre meant ‘warn’, and came from the same source as English mind). The prefix ad- was reintroduced from Latin in the 15th century, while the -ish ending arose from a mistaken analysis of -este as some sort of past tense inflection; the t was removed when producing infinitive or present tense forms, giving spellings such as amonace and admonyss, and by the 16th century this final -is had become identified with and transformed into the more common -ish ending.
=> mind[admonish etymology, admonish origin, 英语词源]
affinity: affinity: [14] The abstract notion of ‘relationship’ in affinity was originally a more concrete conception of a border. The word comes, via Old French afinite, from the Latin adjective affinis, which meant literally ‘bordering on something’. It was formed from the prefix ad- ‘to’ and the noun finis ‘border’ (from which English also gets finish, confine, and define).
=> confine, define, finish, paraffin, refine
aluminium: aluminium: [19] Aluminium comes from a coinage by the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy, who discovered the metal. His first suggestion was alumium, which he put forward in Volume 98 of the Transactions of the Royal Society 1808: ‘Had I been so fortunate as … to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should have proposed for them the names of silicium, alumium, zirconium, and glucium’.

He based it on Latin alūmen ‘alum’ (alum is a sulphate of aluminium, and the word alum, a 14th-century borrowing from French, derives ultimately from alūmen; alumina is an oxide of aluminium, and the word alumina is a modern Latin formation based on alūmen, which entered English at the end of the 18th century); and alūmen may be linked with Latin alūta ‘skins dried for making leather, using alum’.

Davy soon changed his mind, however, and in 1812 put forward the term aluminum – which remains the word used in American English to this day. British English, though, has preferred the form aluminium, which was mooted contemporaneously with aluminum on grounds of classical ‘correctness’: ‘Aluminium, for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound’, Quarterly Review 1812.
=> alum
ammonia: ammonia: [18] Ammonia gets its name ultimately from Amon, or Amen, the Egyptian god of life and reproduction. Near the temple of Amon in Libya were found deposits of ammonium chloride, which was hence named sal ammoniac – ‘salt of Amon’. The gas nitrogen hydride is derived from sal ammoniac, and in 1782 the Swedish chemist Torbern Bergman coined the term ammonia for it.
ammonite: ammonite: [18] Like ammonia, the ammonite gets its name from a supposed connection with Amon, or Amen, the Egyptian god of life and reproduction. In art he is represented as having ram’s horns, and the resemblance of ammonites to such horns led to their being named in the Middle Ages cornu Ammōnis ‘horn of Amon’. In the 18th century the modern Latin term ammonītēs (anglicized as ammonite) was coined for them. Earlier, ammonites had been called snake stones in English, a term which survived dialectally well into the 19th century.
ammunition: ammunition: [17] Ammunition is one of many words which resulted from a mistaken analysis of ‘article’ plus ‘noun’ (compare ADDER). In this case, French la munition ‘the munitions, the supplies’ was misapprehended as l’ammunition, and borrowed thus into English. At first it was used for military supplies in general, and it does not seem to have been until the beginning of the 18th century that its meaning became restricted to ‘bullets, shells, etc’.

The word munition itself was borrowed into English from French in the 16th century. It originally meant ‘fortification’, and came from the Latin noun mūnītiō; this was a derivative of the verb munīre, ‘defend, fortify’, which in turn was based on the noun moenia ‘walls, ramparts’ (related to mūrus ‘wall’, the source of English mural).

Also from munīre, via medieval Latin mūnīmentum, comes muniment [15], a legal term for ‘title deed’; the semantic connection is that a title deed is a means by which someone can ‘defend’ his or her legal right to property.
=> muniment, munition, mural
anachronism: anachronism: [17] The Greek prefix anameant ‘up’, and hence, in terms of time, ‘back’; Greek khrónos meant ‘time’ (as in English chronicle): hence Greek anakhronismós ‘reference to a wrong time’. From the point of view of its derivation it should strictly be applied to the representation of something as happening earlier than it really did (as if Christ were painted wearing a wristwatch), but in practice, ever since the Greek term’s adoption into English, it has also been used for things surviving beyond their due time.
=> chronicle
animal: animal: [14] Etymologically, an animal is a being which breathes (compare DEER). Its immediate source was the Latin adjective animālis ‘having a soul’, a derivative of the noun anima ‘breath, soul’ (which also gave English the verb and adjective animate [15]). Anima is a member of a set of related words in which the notions of ‘breath, wind’ and ‘spirit, life’ are intimately connected: for instance, Greek ánemos ‘wind’ (possible source of English anemone), Latin animus ‘spirit, mind, courage, anger’ (source of English animosity [15] and animus [19]), Sanskrit ániti ‘breathe’, Old English ōthian ‘breathe’, Swedish anda ‘breath, spirit’, and Gothic usanan ‘breathe out’.

The ‘breath’ sense is presumably primary, the ‘spirit, life’ sense a metaphorical extension of it.
=> anemone, animate, animosity, animus
annihilate: annihilate: [16] Annihilate comes from the past participle of the late Latin verb annihilāre, meaning literally ‘reduce to nothing’ (a formation based on the noun nihil ‘nothing’, source of English nihilism and nil). There was actually an earlier English verb, annihil, based on French annihiler, which appeared at the end of the 15th century, but it did not long survive the introduction of annihilate.
=> nihilism, nil
anniversary: anniversary: [13] Like annual, anniversary is based ultimately on Latin annus ‘year’. The underlying idea it contains is of ‘yearly turning’ or ‘returning’; the Latin adjective anniversārius was based on annus and versus ‘turning’ (related to a wide range of English words, from verse and convert to vertebra and vertigo). This was used in phrases such as diēs anniversāria ‘day returning every year’, and eventually became a noun in its own right.
=> annual, convert, verse
antagonist: antagonist: [16] Greek agón (source of English agony) meant ‘contest, conflict’. Hence the concept of ‘struggling against (anti-) someone’ was conveyed in Greek by the verb antagōnízesthai. The derived noun antagōnistés entered English via French or late Latin.
=> agony
arsenic: arsenic: [14] The term arsenic was originally applied to the lemon-yellow mineral arsenic trisulphide, and its history reveals the reason: for its appears to be based ultimately on Persian zar ‘gold’ (related forms include Sanskrit hari ‘yellowish’, Greek khlōros ‘greenish-yellow’, and English yellow itself). The derivative zarnīk was borrowed into Arabic as zernīkh, which, as usual with Arabic words, was perceived by foreign listeners as constituting an indivisible unit with its definite article al ‘the’ – hence azzernīkh, literally ‘the arsenic trisulphide’.

This was borrowed into Greek, where the substance’s supposed beneficial effects on virility led, through association with Greek árrēn ‘male, virile’, to the new forms arrenikón and arsenikón, source of Latin arsenicum and, through Old French, of English arsenic. The original English application was still to arsenic trisulphide (orpiment was its other current name), and it is not until the early 17th century that we find the term used for white arsenic or arsenic trioxide.

The element arsenic itself was isolated and so named at the start of the 19th century.
=> chlorine, yellow
banish: banish: see bandit
banister: banister: see baluster
bikini: bikini: [20] For Frenchmen, the sight of the first minimal two-piece swimming costumes for women produced by fashion designers in 1947 was as explosive as the test detonation of an atom bomb by the USA at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, in the western Pacific Ocean, in July 1946. Hence their naming it the ‘Bikini’, the first record of which is in the August 1947 issue of Le Monde Illustré. English acquired the word in 1948. The monokini, essentially a braless bikini, first appeared in 1964, the inspiration for its name being the accidental resemblance of the element bi- in bikini to the prefix bi- ‘two’.
bunion: bunion: [18] Bunion is probably a modification of the East Anglian dialect word bunny ‘lump, swelling’, representing a 15th-century form bony, glossed in a contemporary English-Latin dictionary as ‘great knob’. This was apparently borrowed from Old French hugne ‘bump on the head’.
burnish: burnish: see brown
callisthenics: callisthenics: see kaleidoscope
canine: canine: see kennel
cannibal: cannibal: [16] Cannibal was originally a proper name, applied by the Spaniards to the Carib people of the West Indies (whom they regarded as eaters of human flesh). It is a variant, originally used by Christopher Columbus, of Caribes, which comes from Carib, a word of Carib origin in the Arawakan language of northern South America and the Caribbean. It is related to the Caribs’ name for themselves, Galibi, literally ‘strong men’.
carnival: carnival: [16] Etymologically, carnival means ‘raising flesh’ – that is, the ‘removal of meat’ from the diet during Lent (carnival was originally a period of merrymaking preceding Lent). It comes from medieval Latin carnelevāmen, a compound noun made up of carō ‘flesh’ (source of English carnal) and levāmen, a derivative of the verb levāre ‘lighten, raise’ (source of English lever, levity, and levy).
=> carnal, carrion, lever, levy
chauvinism: chauvinism: [19] Chauvinism in its original sense of ‘blind patriotism’ was coined in French from the name of one Nicholas Chauvin of Rochefort, a (possibly legendary) French soldier and veteran of Napoleon’s campaigns noted for his patriotic zeal. He was taken up and ridiculed as the type of the old soldier forever harking back to the glories of Napoleon’s times, and became widely known particularly through the play La cocarde tricolore 1831 by the brothers Cogniard, in which there occurs the line ‘Je suis français, je suis Chauvin’.

Hence French chauvinisme, which first appeared in English in 1870. The word’s more general application to an unreasoning belief in the superiority of one’s own group (particularly in the context male chauvinism) arose around 1970.
chenille: chenille: see kennel
chronicle: chronicle: [14] English has a number of words derived from Greek khrónos ‘time’, among them chronology [16], chronometer ‘timepiece’ [18], and crony. And from its adjective kronikós ‘of time’ comes English chronic [15], by way of Latin chronicus, which in medieval times picked up the medical connotations which characterize the word today.

Greek bíblia khroniká meant ‘books about time’; hence khroniká came to be used on its own for ‘historical records’, passing via Latin chronica and Old French chronique to Anglo-Norman, where it acquired a new ending, cronicle. English took it over, and restored the Latin ch- spelling in the 16th century.
=> anachronism, chronic, chronology
clinic: clinic: [17] Etymologically, a clinic is a place with ‘beds’. It comes ultimately from Greek klínē ‘bed’, which goes back to the Indo-European base *kli- ‘lean, slope’ (source also of English lean) and hence was originally ‘something on which one reclines’. The adjective derived from this, klīnkós, reached English via Latin clīnicus, having become specialized in meaning from ‘bed’ in general to ‘sick-bed’. Clinic was replaced as an adjective by clinical in the 18th century, but it continued on as a noun, originally in the sense ‘sick or bedridden person’.

This survived into the 19th century (‘You are free to roam at large over the bodies of my clinics’, E Berdoe, St Bernard’s 1887), and the modern sense ‘hospital’ did not arrive until the late 19th century, borrowed from French clinique or German klinik.
=> decline, lean
cognizance: cognizance: [14] Latin gnōscere meant ‘know’ (it is related to know and notion). From it was derived the compound verb cognōscere ‘get to know, recognize, acknowledge’. Its present participial stem cognōscent- formed the basis of a Vulgar Latin noun *connōscentia, which passed into Old French as connoissance. English borrowed this as conisance, restoring the Latin g to the spelling in the 15th century, which eventually affected the word’s pronunciation.

Also from the Latin present participle came Italian conoscente, which in its latinized form was borrowed into English as cognoscente in the 18th century. Meanwhile, the past participial stem of the Latin verb, cognit-, produced the noun cognitiō, source of English cognition [15]. The infinitive form of the Latin verb passed into Old French as connoître, from which was derived the agent noun connoisseur, borrowed into English in the 18th century (modern French has connaisseur).
=> cognition, connoisseur, know, notion, recognize, reconnaissance, reconnoitre
companion: companion: [13] Etymologically, your companion is someone who shares your ‘bread’ with you. It comes, via Old French compaignon, from Vulgar Latin *compāniō, a compound noun formed from Latin com- ‘with’ and pānis ‘bread’. The Old French stem compaign- also formed the basis of compaignie, from which English gets company [13].

Compare MATE. The companion of companionway ‘stairway on a ship’ [18] is of similar but distinct origin. It comes ultimately from Vulgar Latin *compānia, a compound noun meaning ‘what one eats with bread’, formed from Latin com- ‘with’ and pānis ‘bread’. In Italian this became campagna ‘provisions’, which was used in the phrase camera della campagna ‘(ship’s) storeroom’.

The meaning of the phrase eventually passed to campagna on its own, and was carried via Old French compagne to Dutch kompanje, which meant ‘quarterdeck’. English borrowed this, and adapted it to the more familiar English pattern companion.
=> company, pannier
coniferous: coniferous: see cone
convenient: convenient: [14] Convenient comes from Latin conveniēns, the present participle of convenire ‘come together, be suitable, agree’, a compound verb formed from the prefix com- ‘together’ and venire ‘come’ (a distant relative of English come). Convenient reflects the more figurative of convenire’s meanings, as ultimately does covenant, but its original literal sense ‘assemble’ is preserved in convene [15], convention [15], convent, and coven.
=> convent, convention, coven, covenant, venue
crinite: crinite: see crest
cunning: cunning: [13] Cunning did not always have its present-day negative connotations. At first it was a term of approval, meaning ‘learned’. It is connected in some way to the verb can, which originally meant ‘know’, although it is not altogether clear whether it is a direct use of the present participle of the English verb, or whether it was borrowed from the related Old Norse kunnandi, present participle of kunna ‘know’. Either way, it is a parallel formation to canny [16]. The sense ‘skilfully deceitful’ developed towards the end of the 16th century.
=> canny
cynic: cynic: [16] Originally, the Cynics were a group of ascetic philosophers in ancient Greece. Their founder, around 400 BC, was Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates. They advocated the view that virtue and self-control are the highest good and, particularly under their later leader Diogenes, came to exhibit a contempt for the frailties of their fellow human beings that is traditionally said to have earned them their name: Greek kúōn meant ‘dog’ (it is related to English hound), and the philosophers were allegedly dubbed kunikós on account of their ‘dog-like’ sneering.

A more prosaic but more likely explanation of the term is that it comes from the Kunósarge, the gymnasium where Antisthenes taught (perhaps later influenced by kúōn). English acquired the word via Latin cynicus.
delphinium: delphinium: see dolphin
denigrate: denigrate: [16] To denigrate people is literally to ‘blacken’ them. The word comes from Latin dēnigrāre ‘blacken’, a compound verb formed from the intensive prefix dē- and niger ‘black’. This adjective, which is of unknown origin, also produced French noir ‘black’ and Italian nero ‘black’, and is the source (via Spanish negro) of English negro [16] and the now taboo nigger [18]. Denigrate originally meant ‘physically turn something black’ as well as the metaphorical ‘defame, belittle’: ‘This lotion will denigrate the hairs of hoary heads’, Richard Tomlinson, Renodaeus’ Medicinal dispensatory 1657.
=> negro, nigger
denim: denim: [17] The name of the fabric from which jeans are made had its origins in a sort of serge produced in the southern French town of Nîmes. The French naturally enough called it serge de Nîmes, but the original meaning of this soon became lost when English borrowed it as serge de Nim, and the last two words came to be run together as denim.
denizen: denizen: [15] Etymologically, denizen means ‘someone who is inside’, and it is related to French dans ‘in’. It comes from Anglo-Norman deinzein, a derivative of Old French deinz ‘inside’. This had grown out of the Latin phrase dē intus, literally ‘from inside’. Hence denizen’s original meaning of someone who lives ‘in’ a country, as opposed to a foreigner. In the 16th and 17th centuries the verb denize existed, coined by back-formation from denizen; it meant roughly the same as modern English naturalize.
dignity: dignity: [13] Dignity comes via Old French dignete from Latin dignitās, a derivative of dignus ‘worthy’. Also from the same source was Latin dignāre (source of English deign and its derivative disdain) and late Latin dignificāre (source of English dignify [15]). Dignus itself probably came from an earlier unrecorded *decnus ‘suitable, fitting’, a derivative of the verb decere, which produced English decent. Other related words in English include condign [15] and indignant [16], while dignitās also produced, via a different line of descent, English dainty.
=> condign, dainty, deign, disdain, indignant
diminish: diminish: [15] Diminish is a hybrid verb, the result of a marriage between the now obsolete diminue [14] and the virtually obsolete minish [14], both of which meant ‘make smaller’. Diminue came via Old French diminuer from Latin dīminuere ‘break into small pieces’; it was a compound verb formed from the prefix dē- ‘from’ and minuere ‘lessen’ (source of English minute). Minish came via Old French menuiser from Vulgar Latin *minūtiāre, a derivative of Latin minūtus ‘small’; this, bringing the history of diminish full circle, was an adjectival use of the past participle of minuere.
=> minute
dominion: dominion: [15] Dominion, in common with demesne, domain, dominant, dominate, domineer, dominie, domino, and don, and indeed danger and dungeon, comes ultimately from Latin dominus ‘lord, master’. This was a derivative of Latin domus ‘house’ (source of English dome) and, like the parallel Greek formation despótēs (source of English despot), originally meant ‘master of the house’.

Its most direct descendant in modern English is don [17]. This is the Spanish reflex of Latin dominus, used as a title of respect for Spanish lords or gentlemen, and has been applied since the mid 17th century (originally as a piece of university slang) to university teachers. Of derivatives, dominion comes from Latin dominium ‘property’ (of which a post-classical descendant was dominiō or domniō, source of English dungeon); dominate [17] and dominant [15] come from the verb dominārī ‘be lord and master’; domineer [16] is also from dominārī, via French dominer and early modern Dutch domineren; and dominie [17], a Scottish term for a ‘schoolmaster’, probably comes from the Latin vocative case dominē.
=> dame, danger, demesne, despot, dome, domestic, dominate
draconian: draconian: [18] Draconian ‘excessively harsh’ is a monument to the severe code of laws drawn up in 621 BC by the Athenian statesman Draco. Its purpose was to banish inequities in the system which were leading at the time to rumblings and threats of rebellion among the common people, and to an extent it succeeded, but all it is now remembered for is its almost pathological harshness: the most trivial infraction was punished with death. When taxed with his laws’ severity, Draco is said to have replied ‘Small crimes deserve death, and for great crimes I know of no penalty severer’.
enigma: enigma: [16] Enigma comes, via Latin, from Greek aínigma ‘riddle, obscure statement’. This was a derivative of the verb ainíssesthai ‘talk in riddles’, which in turn came from the noun ainos ‘tale, story’. Its modern English use for ‘something puzzling’ dates from the early 17th century.
ethnic: ethnic: [14] Greek éthnos meant ‘nation, people’. However, its use in the Septuagint (the early Greek translation of the Old Testament) to render the Hebrew word for ‘gentile’ led to its derived adjective ethnikós, and hence Latin ethnicus, meaning virtually ‘heathen’. It was in this sense that English first acquired the word (‘an ethnic and a pagan king’, Nicholas Udall, Paraphrase of Erasmus 1545); indeed, early etymologists thought that English heathen came from éthnos. The word’s modern anthropological sense is a mid-19th-century return to its roots.
evening: evening: [OE] Evening is a derivative of even [OE], a word for ‘evening’ now restricted to bad poetry. This came ultimately from an Indo- European base, whose general meaning of ‘lateness’ is pointed up by other descendants such as Sanskrit apara- ‘later, western’, Greek opsé ‘late’, and Gothic iftuma ‘following, later’. The specific application to ‘latter part of the day’ seems only to have occurred in the Germanic languages, where it is represented in German abend and Dutch avond, and also possibly in Swedish afton and Danish aften (although these could be from another source).

The Old English word was ǣfen, which formed the basis of a verb ǣfnian ‘become evening’; the verbal noun derived from this has become English evening. Eve [13], as in ‘Christmas eve’, is a Middle English reduction of even.
finish: finish: [14] The Latin verb *fīnīre, a derivative of fīnis ‘end, limit’, signified ‘limit’ as well as ‘complete’, but it is the latter which has come down to English via feniss-, the stem of Old French fenir. The Latin past participle, fīnītus, gave English finite [15].
=> final, finance, fine, finite
fornication: fornication: [13] Latin fornix denoted an ‘arch’ or ‘vault’, and hence came to be used in the late republican period for the sort of vaulted underground dwellings where the dregs of Roman society – tramps, prostitutes, petty criminals, etc – lived. Early Christian writers homed in on the prostitutes, and employed the term with the specific meaning ‘brothel’, whence the verb fornicārī ‘have illicit sexual intercourse’ and its derivative fornicatiō, source of English fornication.
fortnight: fortnight: [13] The ancient Germanic peoples recorded the passing of time in units of ‘nights’ rather than, as we do, in units of ‘days’: hence a period of two weeks was in Old English fēowertīene niht, or ‘fourteen nights’. By early Middle English times this was starting to be contracted to the single word fortnight. (The parallel sennight ‘week’ [15] – literally ‘seven nights’ – survived dialectally into the 20th century.)
=> fourteen
funicular: funicular: [19] A funicular railway is literally one that runs on a ‘rope’. The word was coined from Latin fūniculus, a diminutive form of fūnis ‘rope’ (a word of uncertain origin from which comes Italian fune ‘cable, rope’). Fūnus also gave English funambulist ‘tightrope walker’ [18].
=> funambulist
furnish: furnish: [15] Far apart as they may now seem, furnish is closely parallel in its development with frame. Both originated as verbs based on from, in its earliest signification ‘forward movement, advancement, progress’. Frame was a purely English formation, but furnish goes back beyond that to prehistoric Germanic, where it was formed as *frumjan. This was borrowed into Vulgar Latin as *fromīre, which in due course diversified to *formīre and *fornīre, the form adopted into Old French as furnir.

Its lengthened stem furniss- provided English with furnish. To begin with this retained the ancestral sense ‘advance to completion, accomplish, fulfil’ (‘Behight [promise] no thing but that ye may furnish and hold it’, Melusine 1500). However, this died out in the mid 16th century, leaving the field clear for the semantic extension ‘provide’. The derivative furniture [16] comes from French fourniture, but its main meaning, ‘chairs, tables, etc’, recorded from as early as the 1570s, is a purely English development (the majority of European languages get their word for ‘furniture’ from Latin mōbīle ‘movable’: French meubles, Italian mobili, Spanish muebles, German möbel, Swedish möbler, Dutch meubelen, Russian mebel’ – indeed, even Middle English had mobles, though it retained the broader meaning ‘movable property’).

By another route, Old French furnir has also given English veneer.
=> from, furniture, veneer
galvanize: galvanize: [19] The verb galvanize commemorates the work of Italian physicist Luigi Galvani (1737–98), who in 1762 discovered voltaic electricity by attaching the legs of dead frogs to pairs of different metals. It was first used literally, for the production of muscular spasms by electrical means (Sydney Smith in 1825: ‘Galvanize a frog, don’t galvanize a tiger’), but by the mid-19th century it was being employed figuratively, for ‘stimulate, spur’. The sense ‘coat electrolytically with metal’, dates from the 1830s.
garnish: garnish: [14] Garnish was originally a fairly utilitarian verb, meaning simply ‘fit out, equip, supply’ or ‘adorn’. Its modern culinary application did not develop until the late 17th century. It came from garniss-, the lengthened stem of the Old French verb garnir ‘equip, adorn’. This was borrowed from prehistoric Germanic *warnjan, which presumably came from the same base as produced *warnōjan ‘be cautious, guard, provide for’ (source of English warn).

The notion of ‘warning’ is preserved in the legal term garnishee [17], applied to someone who is served with a judicial warning not to pay their debt to anyone other than the person who is seeking repayment.
=> warn