英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

put [put 词源字典]: put: [12] Put is one of the commonest of English verbs, but its origins are uncertain. It goes back to an Old English *putian, never actually recorded but inferred from the verbal noun putung ‘instigation’, but where that came from is not known. It was presumably related to Old English potian ‘push, thrust’, whose Middle English descendant pote formed the basis of modern English potter [16]. The golfing term putt [18] is essentially the same word as put, differentiated in spelling and pronunciation.
=> potter, putt[put etymology, put origin, 英语词源]
putrid: putrid: see pus
putty: putty: [17] Etymologically, putty is something that comes from a pot. It was borrowed from French potée ‘contents of a pot’, a derivative of pot ‘pot’. By the time English acquired it, it had come to be applied to a powder made from heated tin, used by jewellers for polishing, and for a cement made from lime and water, used as a top coating on plaster – both substances made in pots. The latter led on in English in the 18th century to the now familiar application to the window-pane sealant.
=> pot
puzzle: puzzle: [16] The origin of puzzle is, appropriately, a puzzle. One suggestion is that it may be derived from the now obsolete verb pose ‘interrogate, perplex’ (which survives in poser ‘difficult question or problem’), a shortened form of appose ‘interrogate or question severely’. This came from Old French aposer, a variant of oposer, from which English gets oppose. Another possibility is some connection with the Old English verb puslian ‘pick out the best bits’, which is reminiscent of puzzle out ‘find or solve by laborious reasoning’ (although that sense of puzzle is not recorded until the end of the 18th century).
pygmy: pygmy: [14] Greek pugmé meant ‘fist’ (it may have been related to Latin pugnus ‘fist’, source of English pugnacious). By extension, it was used for a ‘measure of length equal to the distance from the elbows to the knuckles’. From it was derived pugmaíos ‘dwarfish’, which passed into English via Latin pygmaeus. In ancient and medieval times it was used as a noun to designate various apocryphal or mythical races of short stature, but it was not until the late 19th century that it was applied to the people of equatorial Africa who now bear the name.
=> pugnacious
pyjama: pyjama: [18] Pyjamas are etymologically ‘leggarments’ – that is, ‘trousers’. The word comes from Hindi pāejāma, a compound formed from Persian pāī ‘foot’, hence ‘leg’ (which goes back to the same Indo-European ancestor as English foot) and jāmah ‘clothing’. It denoted the loose trousers worn in India and the Middle East. Europeans living in that part of the world took to wearing them, especially for sleeping in. They brought them back to Europe, where, for reasons of temperature or propriety, a jacket was added to the trousers, in due course being subsumed under the term pyjama.
=> foot, pedal
pyorrhoea: pyorrhoea: see pus
pyramid: pyramid: [16] Egypt seems a likely ultimate source for pyramid, but its earliest known ancestor is Greek puramís, which passed into English via Latin pyramis. Pediment ‘triangular gable’ [17] probably originated as a garbling of pyramid, later influenced by ped-, the stem of Latin pēs ‘foot’.
=> pediment
pyrotechnic: pyrotechnic: [18] The Greek word for ‘fire’ was pūr (it came from the same prehistoric Indo- European source as English fire). It underlies a range of English words, including pyracantha [17] (etymologically ‘fire-thorn’), pyre [17], pyrethrum [16], and pyrites [16]. Pyrotechnic itself was derived from an earlier pyrotechny, which was originally used for the ‘manufacture of gunpowder, firearms, bombs, etc’. The application to ‘fireworks’ did not emerge until the 17th century.
=> fire, pyre, pyrites
python: python: [19] The original Python was a fabulous serpent said to have been hatched from the mud of Deucalion’s flood (Deucalion was the Greek counterpart of Noah) and slain by Apollo near Delphi in ancient Greece. Its name, in Greek Pūthōn, may be related to Pūthó, an old name for Delphi; and that in turn, it has been speculated, may derive from púthein ‘rot’, as the serpent supposedly rotted there after its demise.

Female soothsayers served at the Delphi oracle, and English adopted pythoness [14] as a general term for such ancient priestesses; and the four-yearly athletic contests held at Delphi in honour of Apollo were known as the Pythian Games (they were second in importance only to the Olympic Games). The scientific application of the name python to a genus of large Old World constricting snakes (now its most familiar role) dates from the 1830s.

Then, in the late 1960s, a chance decision brought python a more left-field career move: after considering and rejecting several alternatives, a group of young comic writer-performers called their new surreally humorous BBC television series Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–74), and by the mid-1970s Pythonesque was being used generically to suggest surreality or absurdity.
pyx: pyx: see box
P: a rare letter in the initial position in Germanic, in part because by Grimm's Law PIE p- became Germanic f-; even with the early Latin borrowings in Old English, -p- takes up a little over 4 pages in J.R. Clark Hall's "Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary," compared to 31 pages for B and more than 36 for F. But it now is the third-most-common initial letter in the English vocabulary, and with C and S comprises nearly a third of the dictionary, a testimony to the flood of words that have entered the language since 1066 from Latin, Greek, and French.

To mind one's Ps and Qs (1779), possibly is from confusion of these letters among children learning to write. Another theory traces it to old-time tavern-keepers tracking their patrons' bar tabs in pints and quarts. But see also to be P and Q (1610s), "to be excellent," a slang phrase said to derive from prime quality.
p wave (n.): 1908 in geology, the p representing primary (adj.).
p.a. (n.): abbreviation of "public address" (system), attested from 1936.
P.C.: abbreviation for personal computer is from 1978; abbreviation for politically correct is by 1990.
P.C.P.: also pcp, 1960s, from animal tranquilizer phencyclidine.
P.D.Q.: also pdq, initialism (acronym) for pretty damn quick, attested from 1875.
p.m.: abbreviation of Latin post meridiem "after noon."
p.o.v.: also pov, initialism (acronym) for point of view, by 1973.
P.S.: 1610s, abbreviation of Latin post scriptum (see postscript).