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porthole [porthole 词源字典]: porthole: see port
[porthole etymology, porthole origin, 英语词源]
portico: portico: see porch
portly: portly: see port
portmanteau: portmanteau: [16] A portmanteau is etymologically something for ‘carrying one’s mantle’ in. The word was borrowed from French portemanteau, a compound formed from porter ‘carry’ and manteau ‘cloak’ (source of English mantle). This originally denoted a ‘court official whose duty was to carry the king’s cloak’, but it was also applied to the bag in which he carried it, and hence eventually to any bag for carrying clothes and other items needed on a journey.
=> mantle, port
portrait: portrait: [16] Portrait was borrowed from French portrait, which originated as the past participle of the verb portraire ‘depict’ (source of English portray [14]). This was descended from Latin prōtrahere, a compound verb formed from the prefix prō- ‘forth’ and trahere ‘draw’ (source of English tractor). This originally meant ‘draw out, reveal’, and also ‘lengthen’ (it has given English protract [16]), but in medieval Latin it came to be used for ‘depict’.
=> portray, protract, tractor
pose: pose: [16] Pose and pause come ultimately from the same source. This was late Latin pausāre ‘stop, pause’. In Vulgar Latin it came to be associated with pōnere ‘put’, and particularly, owing to the similarity of form, with its past participle positum (source of English position), and gradually started to take over its meaning. Hence Old French poser, source of the English word, meant ‘put, place’. The noun pose is a modern acquisition from French, dating from the early 19th century.
=> pause
posh: posh: [20] Although it only appeared as recently as the early 20th century, posh is one of the oldest chestnuts of English etymology. The story got around that it was an acronym for port out, starboard home, an allusion to the fact that wealthy passengers could afford the more expensive cabins on the port side of the ships going out to India, and on the starboard side returning to Britain, which kept them out of the heat of the sun.

Pleasant as this story is, though, it has never been substantiated. Another possibility is that posh may be the same word as the now obsolete posh ‘dandy, swell’, a slang term current around the end of the 19th century. This too is of unknown origin, but it has been tentatively linked with the still earlier 19thcentury slang term posh ‘halfpenny’, hence broadly ‘money’, which may have come ultimately from Romany posh ‘half’.
position: position: [15] Position comes via Old French from Latin positiō, a noun formed from posit-, the past participial stem of Latin pōnere ‘put, place’. This was also the source of English posit [17], positive [13] (which etymologically means ‘placed down, laid down’, hence ‘emphatically asserted’), post (in the senses ‘mail’ and ‘job’), and posture [17].

And in addition it lies behind a wealth of English verbs (compose, depose, dispose [14], expose [15], impose, interpose [16], oppose, repose, suppose, transpose [14], etc) whose form underwent alteration by association with late Latin pausāre ‘stop’ (see POSE); postpone exceptionally has retained its link with pōnere.
=> compose, depose, dispose, expose, impose, oppose, positive, post, postpone, repose, suppose, transpose
posse: posse: [17] Posse was the Latin verb for ‘be able’. It was a conflation of an earlier expression potis esse ‘be able’; and potis ‘able’ was descended from an Indo-European base *potthat also produced Sanskrit pati- ‘master, husband’ and Lithuanian patis ‘husband’. In medieval Latin posse came to be used as a noun meaning ‘power, force’.

It formed the basis of the expression posse comitātus, literally ‘force of the county’, denoting a body of men whom the sheriff of a county was empowered to raise for such purposes as suppressing a riot. The abbreviated form posse emerged at the end of the 17th century, but really came into its own in 18th- and 19th-century America.
=> possible, potent
possess: possess: [15] Latin potis ‘able, having power’ (source of English posse and potent) was combined with the verb sīdere ‘sit down’ (a relative of English sit) to form a new verb possīdere. This meant literally ‘sit down as the person in control’, hence by extension ‘take possession of’ and ultimately ‘have, own’. It passed into English via Old French possesser.
=> possible, potent, sit
possible: possible: [14] Latin posse ‘be able’ (source of English posse) produced the derived adjective possibilis ‘that can be done’, which came into English via Old French possible. (Its antonym impossible reached English at roughly the same time.)
=> posse, potent
post: post: Including the prefix post-, English has four different words post. The oldest, ‘long upright piece of wood, metal, etc’ [OE], was borrowed from Latin postis. From it was derived the verb post ‘fix to a post’, which in turn produced poster [19], denoting a placard that can be ‘posted’ up. Post ‘mail’ [16] comes via French poste and Italian posta from Vulgar Latin *posta, a contracted version of posita, the feminine form of the past participle of Latin pōnere ‘put, place’ (source of English position).

The notion underlying the sense ‘mail’ is of riders ‘placed’ or stationed at intervals along a road so as to carry letters at speed by a relay system. Post ‘job’ [16] reached English via a very similar route, this time from the neuter form of the Latin past participle, positum. This became *postum in Vulgar Latin, which produced Italian posto, French poste, and English post.

Here again the word’s original meaning, ‘position where a soldier is placed’, reflects that of its Latin source pōnere. The prefix post- comes from the Latin preposition post ‘after’. It occurs in a number of English words that go back to Latin ancestors (including posterior [16], posthumous, postpone [16], postscript [16], and the more heavily disguised preposterous), as well as being widely used to create new coinages (such as postgraduate [19] and postwar [20]).
=> position
posthumous: posthumous: [17] Latin postumus functioned as a superlative form of post ‘after’, and meant ‘last of all’. It was often applied to a child ‘born after the death of its father’, as being the final offspring that man could possibly have, and so began to pick up associations with the ‘period after death’. This led in turn to the perception of a link with humus ‘ground’ (source of English humble and humus) and humāre ‘bury’, and so postumus became posthumus. English adapted it direct from Latin.
postpone: postpone: see post
postscript: postscript: see post
postulate: postulate: [16] The noun postulate originally meant ‘demand, request’. It was an anglicization of postulātum, a noun use of the past participle of postulāre ‘demand, request’. It was used in the mid-17th century by mathematicians and logicians for a proposition that (because it was a simple or uncontentious one) ‘demanded’ to be taken for granted for the sake of further reasoning, and from this it spread to more general usage. The notion of ‘requesting’ is better preserved in postulant [18], from the present participle of the Latin verb.
posture: posture: see position
posy: posy: see poem
pot: pot: [OE] Pot was borrowed in the late Old English period from medieval Latin *pottus, which also produced French pot ‘pot’. This may have been an alteration of pōtus ‘drinking-cup’, which in classical Latin meant simply ‘drink’ (it was derived from the same stem as produced pōtiō ‘drink’, source of English poison and potion). Related or derived forms in English include porridge, potash, poteen [19] (etymologically spirits distilled in a ‘little pot’ – Irish poitín is a diminutive of pota ‘pot’), potpourri [18] (literally in French ‘rotten pot’), pottery [15], and putty.
=> porridge, potage, potash, poteen, pottage, putty
potable: potable: see potion