quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- magpie[magpie 词源字典]
- magpie: [17] The original name of the magpie was simply pie, which came via Old French from Latin pīca. This is thought to go back ultimately to Indo-European *spi- or *pi-, denoting ‘pointedness’, in reference to its beak (the Latin masculine form, pīcus, was applied to a ‘woodpecker’). Pie arrived in English as long ago as the 13th century, but not until the 16th century do we begin to find pet-forms of the name Margaret applied to it (one of the earliest was maggot-pie).
By the 17th century magpie had become the institutionalized form. Some etymologists consider that the term for the edible pie comes from the bird’s name, based on a comparison of the miscellaneous contents of pies with the board of assorted stolen treasures supposedly accumulated by the magpie.
=> pie[magpie etymology, magpie origin, 英语词源] - migraine
- migraine: [14] The earliest English forms of this word were mygrame and mygrane, but eventually it became institutionalized as megrim. Not until the 18th century did what is now the standard form, migraine, begin to appear on the scene, probably as a reborrowing of the word’s original source, French migraine. This came via late Latin hēmicrānia from Greek hēmikrāníā, literally ‘half-skull’ (krāníon is the source of English cranium [16], and is distantly related to English horn). The etymological idea underlying the word is of ‘pain in one side of the head’.
=> cranium, horn - queen
- queen: [OE] Queen goes back ultimately to prehistoric Indo-European *gwen- ‘woman’, source also of Greek guné ‘woman’ (from which English gets gynaecology), Persian zan ‘woman’ (from which English gets zenana ‘harem’), Swedish kvinna ‘woman’, and the now obsolete English quean ‘woman’. In its very earliest use in Old English queen (or cwēn, as it then was) was used for a ‘wife’, but not just any wife: it denoted the wife of a man of particular distinction, and usually a king. It was not long before it became institutionalized as ‘king’s wife’, and hence ‘woman ruling in her own right’.
=> gynaecology, quean, zenana - institutionalize (v.)
- "to put into institutional life" (usually deprecatory), 1905; see institution. Related: Institutionalized. Earlier (1865) it meant "to make into an institution."