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balance [balance 词源字典]: balance: [13] The underlying etymological meaning of balance is of a weighing apparatus with ‘two pans’ for holding things. In Latin this was a lībra bilanx, literally ‘scales with two pans’ – bilanx being compounded from bi- ‘two’ and lanx ‘plate, pan’. Bilanx passed, in its stem from bilanc-, via Vulgar Latin *bilancia into Old French balance, the source of the English word.
[balance etymology, balance origin, 英语词源]
balcony: balcony: [17] Balcony entered English from Italian balcone, but it seems to be ultimately of Germanic origin. It was probably borrowed into Old Italian, with the meaning ‘scaffold’. from Germanic *balkon ‘beam’, source of English balk – perhaps from the notion of a platform or scaffold being built from beams of timber, although the connection is not altogether clear.
=> balk
bald: bald: [14] In Middle English times, bald was ballede, which suggests that it may have been a compound formed in Old English with the suffix -ede ‘characterized by, having’. It has been conjectured that the first element in the compound was Old English *ball-, meaning ‘white patch’ or ‘blaze’ on an animal’s head; this may be supported by isolated examples of the use of the adjective to mean (of a horse) ‘whitefaced’ from the 16th to the 18th centuries, and by the obsolete dialectal ball meaning both ‘white patch on the head’ and ‘white-faced horse’.

This would have produced the Old English adjective *bællede or *beallede, which, from ‘having a white blaze’, progressed naturally in meaning to ‘hairless’. The compounds piebald [16] and skewbald [17] are both based on bald: piebald means ‘having black and white patches like a magpie’, while skewbald may be based on Middle English skew ‘(cloudy) skies’ or on Old French escu ‘shield’.
=> piebald, skewbald
balk: balk: [OE] There are two separate strands of meaning in balk, or baulk, as it is also spelled. When it first entered English in the 9th century, from Old Norse bálkr, it meant a ‘ridge of land, especially one between ploughed furrows’, from which the modern sense ‘stumbling block, obstruction’ developed. It is not until about 1300 that the meaning ‘beam of timber’ appears in English, although it was an established sense of the Old Norse word’s Germanic ancestor *balkon (source also of English balcony).

The common element of meaning in these two strands is something like ‘bar’, which may have been present in the word’s ultimate Indo- European base *bhalg- (possible source of Greek phálagx ‘log, phalanx’).
=> balcony, phalanx
ball: ball: There are two distinct words ball in English. The ‘round object’ [13] comes via Old Norse böllr from a prehistoric Germanic *balluz (source also of bollock [OE], originally a diminutive form). A related form was Germanic *ballōn, which was borrowed into Italian to give palla ‘ball’, from which French probably acquired balle.

Derivatives of this branch of the family to have reached English are balloon [16], from French ballon or Italian ballone, and ballot [16], from the Italian diminutive form ballotta (originally from the use of small balls as counters in secret voting). The Germanic stem form *bal-, *bul- was also the ultimate source of English bowl ‘receptacle’.

The ‘dancing’ ball [17] comes from French bal, a derivative of the now obsolete verb bal(l)er ‘dance’, which was descended via late Latin ballāre from Greek ballízein ‘dance’. Related words in English include ballad(e) [14], which came via Old French from Provençal balada ‘song or poem to dance to’, and ballet.
=> ballon, ballot, bollock; ballad, ballet
ballast: ballast: [16] Originally, ballast appears to have meant literally ‘bare load’ – that is, a load carried by a ship simply for the sake of its weight, and without any commercial value. English probably acquired it, via Low German, from a Scandinavian language; Old Swedish and Old Danish had not only ballast but also barlast, which appears to betray the word’s component parts: bar, related to English bare, and last ‘burden’ (Old English had hlæst ‘burden’, related to lade, which survived into the 20th century as a measure of weight for various commodities).
=> bare, lade
ballet: ballet: [17] Etymologically, a ballet is a ‘little dance’. English acquired the word, via French ballet, from Italian balletto, a diminutive of ballo ‘dance’, related to English ball (the diminutive of Italian balla ‘spherical ball’ is ballotta, whence English ballot). The noun ballo came from the verb ballare (a descendant via late Latin ballāre of Greek ballízein ‘dance’), of which another derivative was ballerino ‘dancing master’.

The feminine form, ballerina, entered English in the late 18th century. Balletomane ‘ballet enthusiast’ is a creation of the 1930s. Another word ballet, also a diminutive, exists, or at least existed, in English. It meant ‘little [spherical] ball’, and was used in the 18th century as a technical term in heraldry.
=> ball
ballistic: ballistic: see parable
balloon: balloon: see ball
ballot: ballot: see ball
ballyhoo: ballyhoo: [20] Ballyhoo remains an etymological mystery, but there is no shortage of suggested candidates as its source: an Irish village called Ballyhooly; an old nautical slang word ballyhoo meaning ‘unseaworthy vessel’, which seems to have been an anglicization of Spanish balahú ‘schooner’; and the bizarre late- 19th-century ballyhoo bird, a fake bird made of wood and cardboard and intended to fool a birdhunter. None of them, alas, seems remotely relevant to ballyhoo’s original American sense, ‘barker’s patter outside a circus tent, to encourage people to enter’.
balm: balm: [13] In origin, balm and balsam are the same word. Both come via Latin balsamum from Greek bálsamon, an ‘aromatic oily resin exuded from certain trees’. Its ultimate source may have been Hebrew bāśām ‘spice’. Latin balsamum passed into Old French, and thence into English, as basme or baume (hence the modern English pronunciation), and in the 15th to 16th centuries the Latin l was restored to the written form of the word. The new borrowing balsam, direct from Latin, was made in the 15th century.
=> balsam
baluster: baluster: [17] Etymologically, baluster and banister are the same word. Both come ultimately from Greek balāustion ‘pomegranate flower’, which reached English via Latin balaustium, Italian balaustro, and French balustre. The reason for the application of the term to the uprights supporting a staircase handrail is that the lower part of a pomegranate flower has a double curve, inwards at the top and then bulging outwards at the bottom, similar to the design of some early balusters.

A balustrade [17], from Italian balaustrata via French, is a row of balusters. Already by the mid 17th century a transformation of the l to an n had taken place, producing the parallel banister.
=> balustrade, banister
bamboo: bamboo: [16] Bamboo appears to come from a Malay word mambu. This was brought back to Europe by the Portuguese explorers, and enjoyed a brief currency in English from the 17th to the 18th century. However, for reasons no one can explain, the initial m of this word became changed to b, and it acquired an s at the end, producing a form found in Latin texts of the time as bambusa. This appears to have passed into English via Dutch bamboes, so the earliest English version of the word was bambos. As so often happens in such cases, the final s was misinterpreted as a plural ending, so it dropped off to give the new ‘singular’ bamboo.
bamboozle: bamboozle: [18] Bamboozle is a mystery word. It first appears in 1703, in the writings of the dramatist Colly Cibber, and seven years later it was one of a list of the latest buzzwords cited by Jonathan Swift in the Tatler (others included bully, mob, and sham). It is probably a ‘cant’ term (a sort of low-life argot), and may perhaps be of Scottish origin; there was a 17th-century Scottish verb bombaze ‘perplex’, which may be the same word as bombace, literally ‘padding, stuffing’, but metaphorically ‘inflated language’ (the variant form bombast has survived into modern English).
=> bombast
ban: ban: [OE] Ban is one of a widespread group of words in the European languages. Its ultimate source is the Indo-European base *bha-, which also gave English fame (from a derivative of Latin fārī ‘speak’) and phase (from Greek phāsis). The Germanic offshoot of the Indo- European base, and source of the English word, was *bannan, which originally probably meant simply ‘speak, proclaim’.

This gradually developed through ‘proclaim with threats’ to ‘put a curse on’, but the sense ‘prohibit’ does not seem to have arisen until as late as the 19th century. The Germanic base *bann- was borrowed into Old French as the noun ban ‘proclamation’. From there it crossed into English and probably mingled with the cognate English noun, Middle English iban (the descendant of Old English gebann).

It survives today in the plural form banns ‘proclamation of marriage’. The adjective derived from Old French ban was banal, acquired by English in the 18th century. It originally meant ‘of compulsory military service’ (from the word’s basic sense of ‘summoning by proclamation’); this was gradually generalized through ‘open to everyone’ to ‘commonplace’.
=> banal, bandit, banish, contraband, fame, phase
banana: banana: [16] Banana comes from a West African language – possibly Wolof, a language of the Niger-Congo family, spoken in Senegal and the Gambia. The original European discoverers of the word – and the fruit – were the Spanish and Portuguese, who passed them on to England. The term bananas ‘mad’ is 20th-century, but its origins are obscure; some have compared banana oil, a 20th-century slang term for ‘mad talk, nonsense’.
band: band: There are two distinct words band in English, but neither of them goes back as far as Old English. The one meaning ‘group of people’ [15] comes from Old French bande, but is probably Germanic in ultimate origin; the specific sense ‘group of musicians’ developed in the 17th century. Band ‘strip’ [13] comes from Germanic *bindan, source of English bind, but reached English in two quite separate phases.

It first came via Old Norse band, in the sense ‘something that ties or constrains’; this replaced Old English bend, also from Germanic *bindan (which now survives only as a heraldic term, as in bend sinister), but is now itself more or less obsolete, having been superseded by bond, a variant form. But then in the 15th century it arrived again, by a different route: Old French had bande ‘strip, stripe’, which can be traced back, perhaps via a Vulgar Latin *binda, to the same ultimate source, Germanic *bindan.
=> bend, bind, bond, bundle, ribbon
bandit: bandit: [16] Etymologically, a bandit is someone who has been ‘banished’ or outlawed. The word was borrowed from Italian bandito, which was a nominal use of the past participle of the verb bandire ‘ban’. The source of this was Vulgar Latin *bannīre, which was formed from the borrowed Germanic base *bann- ‘proclaim’ (from which English gets ban). Meanwhile, in Old French, bannīre had produced banir, whose lengthened stem form baniss- gave English banish [14].
=> ban, banish
bandy: bandy: [16] To ‘bandy words with someone’ may go back to an original idea of ‘banding together to oppose others’. The word comes from French bander ‘oppose’, which is possibly a derivative of bande ‘group, company’ (source of English band). The rather complex semantic development goes from ‘taking sides’, through ‘opposing a third party’, ‘exchanging blows’, ‘exchanging hits’ (in the 16th and 17th centuries it was a term in tennis), to ‘exchanging hostile words’.

The adjective bandy [17], as in ‘bandy legs’, probably comes from the noun bandy ‘curved stick used in an early form of hockey’ (the game was also known as bandy). It may ultimately be related to the verb bandy, the connection being the notion of knocking a ball to and fro.
=> band