- badger
[badger 词源字典] - badger: [16] The Old English term for a ‘badger’ was brock, a word of Celtic origin, and badger does not begin to appear, somewhat mysteriously, until the early 16th century. The name has never been satisfactorily explained, but perhaps the least implausible explanation is from the word badge, in reference to the white stripes on the animal’s forehead, as if it were wearing a badge (a term originally applied to a distinctive device worn by a knight for purposes of recognition); the early spelling bageard suggests that it may have been formed with the suffix -ard, as in dullard and sluggard. (Badge itself is of even more obscure origin; it first turns up in Middle English, in the mid 14th century.) Other early terms for the badger were bauson (14th– 18th centuries), from Old French bausen, and grey (15th–17th centuries).
[badger etymology, badger origin, 英语词源] - bridge
- bridge: [OE] A distant relative of bridge, Old Slavic bruvino ‘beam’, coupled with the meaning of the cognate Old Norse bryggja ‘gangway’, suggest that the underlying etymological meaning of the word is not ‘spanning structure’ but ‘road or structure made of logs’. The Norse word, incidentally, produced the Scottish and northern English brig ‘bridge’.
The card game bridge is first unambiguously mentioned in English in the 1880s, and its name has no connection with the ‘spanning’ bridge. The earliest recorded form of the word is biritch. Its source has never been satisfactorily explained, but since a game resembling bridge is known to have been played for many centuries in the Middle East, it could well be that the name originated in that area.
One suggestion put forward is that it came from an unrecorded Turkish *bir-ü, literally ‘one-three’ (one hand being exposed during the game while the other three are concealed).
- cricket
- cricket: English has two completely unrelated words cricket. The name of the small grasshopper-like insect [14] comes from Old French criquet, a derivative of the verb criquer ‘click, creak’, which no doubt originated as an imitation of the sound itself. The origins of the name of the game cricket [16] have never been satisfactorily explained. One explanation often advanced is that it comes from Old French criquet ‘stick’, or its possible source, Flemish krick, although it is not clear whether the original reference may have been to the stick at which the ball was aimed (the forerunner of the modern stumps) or to the stick, or bat, used to hit the ball.
Another possible candidate is Flemish krickstoel, a long low stool with a shape reminiscent of the early types of wicket.
- domino
- domino: [18] The word domino was borrowed from French, where it originally signified (in the 16th century) a sort of hooded cloak worn by priests. It presumably represents a form of Latin dominus ‘lord, master’, but the reason for the application has never been satisfactorily explained (one suggestion is that it comes from the ritual formula benedicamus Domino ‘let us bless the Lord’).
By the time English acquired it, it had come to mean ‘hooded cloak with a halfmask, worn at masquerades’, and by the 19th century it was being used for the mask itself. It is far from clear whether the application to the game played with small rectangular blocks, which dates in English from the 19th century, represents a new use of the same word or a return to the original Latin, but either way the reason behind the usage is not known.
A possibility that has been advanced is that the winner of the game originally shouted domino! ‘lord!’.
- dread
- dread: [12] Old English had the verb ondrǣdan ‘fear’. Its first syllable is generally taken to be the prefix *and- ‘against’, which is related to German ent- ‘away, un-’ and Greek anti- (source of English anti-) and appears also in English answer. The second part, however, remains a mystery. There are one or two related forms in other West Germanic languages, such as Old High German intrātan, but where they come from has never been established satisfactorily. By the end of the Old English period this obsolete prefix had shrunk to a- (adread survived until around 1400), and in the 12th century it started to disappear altogether.
- envelope
- envelope: [18] English borrowed envelope from French enveloppe in the sense ‘wrapper’, and more specifically ‘cover for a letter’, at the start of the 18th century. It was a derivative of the verb envelopper ‘wrap’, whose ancestor, envoloper, gave English envelop in the 14th century. As in the case of its first cousin develop, the origin of the verb remains a mystery.
It is a compound formed from the prefix en- ‘in’ and voloper ‘wrap’, but the source of voloper has never been satisfactorily explained. It may come from a hypothetical Celtic base *vol- ‘roll’, but an equally good candidate is late Latin *faluppa ‘husk’, from which come Italian viluppo ‘bundle’ and viluppare ‘wrap’.
=> develop - form
- form: [13] Form comes via Old French forme from Latin forma ‘shape, contour’, a word whose origins have never been satisfactorily explained. Its semantic similarity to Greek morphé ‘form, shape’ (source of English morphology [19]) is striking, and has led some etymologists to suggest that the Latin word may be an alteration of the Greek one, presumably by metathesis (the reversal of sounds, in this case /m/ and /f/).
Another possibility, however, is that it comes from ferīre ‘strike’, from the notion of an impression, image, or shape being created by beating. Of the word’s wide diversity of modern senses, ‘school class’, a 16th-century introduction, was inspired by the late Latin usage forma prima, forma secunda, etc for different orders of clergy, while ‘bench’ may go back to the Old French expression s’asseoir en forme ‘sit in a row’.
Amongst forma’s derivatives that have found their way into English are formal [14], format [19], formula [17] (from a Latin diminutive form), and uniform.
=> formal, format, formula, inform, uniform - frantic
- frantic: [14] Frantic comes via Old French frenetique and Latin phreneticus from late Greek phrenētikús, a derivative of phrenítis ‘delirium’. This in turn was based on Greek phrén ‘mind’ (source also of English phrenology ‘study of cranial bumps to determine intelligence, character, etc’ [19]). The Old French form split into two virtually distinct words once English got hold of it: in one, the French three-syllable form was preserved, and even partially remodelled on its Latin ancestor, to give what has become modern English phrenetic, while in the other it was reduced to frentik which, for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, subsequently became frantic.
The related noun frenzy [14] retains the original vowel.
=> frenzy, phrenology - fuck
- fuck: [16] The most celebrated of the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ four-letter words goes back in written form no further than the early 16th century – a far cry from the Old English period. A personal name John le Fucker, however, recorded from 1278, shows that it was around before 1500 (perhaps not committed to paper because even then it was under a taboo). There is little doubt that it is of Germanic origin, but its precise source has never been satisfactorily identified.
All the earliest known examples of the word come from Scotland, which may suggest a Scandinavian source, related to Norwegian dialect fukka ‘copulate’, and Swedish dialect focka ‘copulate, hit’ and fock ‘penis’.
- gooseberry
- gooseberry: [16] Probably, when all is said and done, gooseberry is simply a compound of goose and berry. But no one has ever been able to explain satisfactorily why the gooseberry should have been named after the goose, and there has been no lack of alternative etymological suggestions for the word – notably that goose is an alteration of an old dialect word for the ‘gooseberry’, such as groser or gozell, borrowed ultimately from French groseille ‘gooseberry’.
The quaint alteration goosegog dates from at least the early 19th century. Play gooseberry ‘be an uncomfortably superfluous third person with two lovers’ also goes back to the early 19th century, and may have originated in the notion of a chaperone (ostensibly) occupying herself with picking gooseberries while the couple being chaperoned did what they were doing (gooseberry-picker was an early 19th-century term for a ‘chaperone’).
- groom
- groom: [13] No one has ever been able satisfactorily to explain where the word groom came from. It suddenly appears in early Middle English, meaning ‘boy, male servant’ (the sense ‘one who takes care of horses’ is a 17th-century development), and none of the words with a superficial similarity to it, such as Old French grommet ‘servant’ and Old Norse grómr ‘man’, can be shown to be related. Bridegroom is a 14th-century alteration of Old English brydguma (the element guma ‘man’ is related to Latin homō ‘man’) under the influence of groom.
- heaven
- heaven: [OE] The precise origins of the word heaven have never been satisfactorily explained. Could it perhaps be related in some way to Greek kamára ‘vault, covering’, and thus originally have denoted ‘sky thought of as arching over or covering the earth’ (‘sky’ is at least as ancient a meaning of heaven as ‘abode of god(s)’, although it now has an archaic air)? Are the tantalizingly similar German, Swedish, and Danish himmel and Dutch hemel related to it (going back perhaps to a common Germanic source *hibn- in which the /b/ sound, which became /v/ in English, was lost – as in e’en for even – and a suffix *-ila- was adopted rather than the *-ina- that produced English heaven), or are they completely different words? The etymological jury is still out.
- jump
- jump: [16] Until the early modern English period, the words for ‘jump’ were leap and spring. Then, apparently out of nowhere, the verb jump appeared. Its provenance has never been satisfactorily explained, and etymologists fall back on the notion that it may originally have been intended to suggest the sound of jumping feet hitting the ground (the similar-sounding bump and thump are used to support this theory).
And certainly one of the earliest known instances of the word’s use connotes as much ‘making heavy contact’ as ‘rising’: ‘The said anchor held us from jumping and beating upon the said rock’, Sir Richard Guylforde, Pilgrimage to the Holy Land 1511. Jumper ‘sweater’ [19], incidentally, appears to have no etymological connection with jump. It was probably derived from an earlier dialectal jump or jup, which denoted a short coat for men or a sort of woman’s underbodice.
This in turn was borrowed from French juppe, a variant of jupe ‘skirt’, whose ultimate source was Arabic jubbah, the name of a sort of loose outer garment.
- letter
- letter: [13] The distant ancestry of the word letter has never been satisfactorily explained. One possible candidate as a source that has been put forward is Greek diphthérai ‘writing tablets’. But the earliest precursor that can be positively identified is Latin littera. This meant ‘alphabetic symbol’, or in the plural ‘document’ and ‘epistle’. English acquired it via Old French lettre. Also from Latin littera are English literature and obliterate [16], which means etymologically ‘remove letters’.
=> literature, obliterate - person
- person: [13] Latin persōna originally denoted a ‘mask, particularly one worn by an actor’ (it may have been borrowed from Etruscan phersu ‘mask’). It gradually evolved through ‘character played by an actor’ (a meaning preserved in English persona [20], a term introduced by Jungian psychology) to ‘individual human being’. It entered English via Old French persone, and by the normal processes of phonetic development has become parson.
But this in the Middle English period was hived off (for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained) to ‘priest’, and the original Latinate spelling person was restored for ‘human being’. Other derivatives to have reached English include impersonate [17], personage [15], personal [14], personality [14], and, via French, personnel [19].
=> impersonate, parson, personnel - quiz
- quiz: [19] No one has ever been able satisfactorily to explain the origins of quiz. A word of that form first appeared at the end of the 18th century, meaning ‘odd person’ or, as a verb, ‘make fun of’ (in the early 19th century it was claimed to have been coined by a Dublin theatre proprietor by the name of Daly, but no proof has ever been found for this). The verb later came to be used for ‘look at mockingly or questioningly through a monocle’, and it may be that this led on (perhaps helped by associations with inquisitive or Latin quis? ‘who?, what?’) to the sense ‘interrogate’.
- risk
- risk: [17] The ultimate origins of risk have never been satisfactorily explained. English acquired it via French risque from Italian risco, a derivative of the verb riscare ‘run into danger’, but there speculation takes over. One persistent theory is that its ancestral meaning is ‘sail dangerously close to rocks’, and attempts have been made to link it with Greek rhīza ‘cliff’ and Latin resegāre ‘cut off short’ (from the notion of coastal rocks being ‘cut off sharply’ or ‘sheer’). English acquired the French past participial form risqué in the 19th century.
- wash
- wash: [OE] Etymologically, to wash something is probably to clean it with ‘water’. Like German waschen, Dutch wasschen, and Swedish vaska, it goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *waskan, which seems to have been derived from *wat-, the base which produced English water. (Washer ‘small disc with a hole’ [14] is usually assumed to come from the same source, but its semantic link with wash has never been satisfactorily explained.)
=> water - well
- well: English has two distinct words well, both of ancient ancestry. The adverb, ‘satisfactorily’ [OE], has relatives throughout the Germanic languages (German wohl, Dutch wel, Swedish väl, and Danish vel), and probably goes back ultimately to the Indo-European base *wel-, *wol-, which also gave English voluntary, wealth, and will.
It was not used as an adjective until the 13th century. Well ‘water-hole’ [OE] is descended from the Germanic base *wal-, *wel- ‘roll’ (source also of English wallet, wallow, waltz, welter, etc), and so etymologically denotes a place where water ‘bubbles’ up. This original notion of turbulent overflowing liquid is better preserved in the related verb well ‘gush’ [OE], which to begin with meant ‘boil’, and hence ‘melt metal’ (‘He made him drink welled lead’, Holy Rood 1300), and produced English weld.
=> voluntary, wealth, will; volume, wallow, waltz, weld, welter - will
- will: Will the noun [OE] and the two verbs will [OE] all go back ultimately to the Indo- European base *wel-, *wol- ‘be pleasing’, which also produced English voluntary, voluptuous, wealth, well ‘satisfactorily’, etc. From it was derived a noun, *weljon, which evolved into English will, and also German wille, Dutch wil, Swedish vilja, and Danish vilje.
The verb will ‘decide on or resolve by force of the will’ was formed in the prehistoric Germanic period from the noun. The auxiliary verb will, expressing intention or future time, comes from a prehistoric Germanic *weljan. Would evolved from its original Old English past form wolde.
=> voluntary, voluptuous, wealth, will, would - wimp
- wimp: [20] The first record of the word wimp ‘feeble ineffectual person’ is from as long ago as 1920, but it was not used at all widely until the early 1960s. Its origins have never been satisfactorily explained. It is tempting to link it with J. Wellington Wimpy, a curious little man with a moustache who featured in the Popeye cartoons, but he was not around in the 1920s.
Nor is it altogether plausible that it came from American slang gimp ‘lame or handicapped person’. Perhaps the least unlikely suggestion is that it is short for whimper. No connection with the now obsolete slang wimp ‘woman’ [20] (perhaps an alteration of women) has ever been demonstrated. In the 1980s WIMP was used as an acronym for ‘weakly interacting massive particle’ and for ‘widows/icon/mouse/pointer’, a computer term.
- hoodlum (n.)
- popularized 1871, American English, (identified throughout the 1870s as "a California word") "young street rowdy, loafer," especially one involved in violence against Chinese immigrants, "young criminal, gangster;" it appears to have been in use locally from a slightly earlier date and may have begun as a specific name of a gang:
The police have recently been investigating the proceedings of a gang of thieving boys who denominate themselves and are known to the world as the Hoodlum Gang. [San Francisco "Golden Era" newspaper, Feb. 16, 1868, p.4]
Of unknown origin, though newspapers of the day printed myriad fanciful stories concocted to account for it. A guess perhaps better than average is that it is from German dialectal (Bavarian) Huddellump "ragamuffin" [Barnhart].
What the derivation of the word "hoodlum" is we could never satisfactorily ascertain, though several derivations have been proposed; and it would appear that the word has not been very many years in use. But, however obscure the word may be, there is nothing mysterious about the thing; .... [Walter M. Fisher, "The Californians," London, 1876]
- satisfactory (adj.)
- mid-15c., "capable of atoning for sin," from Middle French satisfactoire (14c.) and directly from Late Latin satisfactorius, from Latin satisfactus, past participle of satisfacere (see satisfy). Meaning "adequate" is from 1630s. Related: Satisfactorily; satisfactoriness.
- time zone (n.)
- by 1885, from time (n.) + zone (n.). As in Britain and France, the movement to regulate time nationally came from the railroads.
Previous to 1883 the methods of measuring time in the United States were so varied and so numerous as to be ludicrous. There were 50 different standards used in the United States, and on one road between New York and Boston, whose actual difference is 12 minutes, there were three distinct standards of time. Even small towns had two different standards one known as "town" or local time and the other "railroad" time.
... At noon on November 18, 1883, there was a general resetting of watches and clocks all over the United States and Canada, and the four great time zones, one hour apart, into which the country was divided came into being. So smoothly did the plan work that the general readjustment was accomplished without great difficulty and it has worked satisfactorily ever since. ["Railroad Trainman," 1909]
- tomato (n.)
- 1753, earlier tomate (c. 1600), from Spanish tomate (mid-16c.) from Nahuatl (Aztecan) tomatl "a tomato," said to mean literally "the swelling fruit," from tomana "to swell." Spelling probably influenced by potato (1565). Slang meaning "an attractive girl" is recorded from 1929, on notion of juicy plumpness.
A member of the nightshade family, all of which contain poisonous alkaloids. Introduced in Europe from the New World, by 1550 they regularly were consumed in Italy but grown only as ornamental plants in England and not eaten there or in the U.S. at first. An encyclopedia of 1753 describes it as "a fruit eaten either stewed or raw by the Spaniards and Italians and by the Jew families of England." Introduced in U.S. 1789 as part of a program by then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, but not commonly eaten until after c. 1830.
Alternative name love apple and alleged aphrodisiac qualities have not been satisfactorily explained; perhaps from Italian name pomodoro, taken as from adorare "to adore," but probably rather from d'or "of gold" (in reference to color) or de Moro "of the Moors." - unsatisfactory (adj.)
- 1640s, from un- (1) "not" + satisfactory (adj.). Related: Unsatisfactorily; unsatisfactoriness.
