英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

bucket [bucket 词源字典]: bucket: [13] We first encounter bucket in the Anglo-Norman forms buket and buquet. It is not entirely clear where this came from, but it may be a derivative of Old English būc. The primary underlying sense of this was ‘something bulging or swelling’, and hence it meant not only ‘jug’ but also ‘belly’ (related are German bauch and Swedish buk ‘paunch’). It survived dialectally into modern English as bowk, meaning ‘milkpail’ and ‘large tub used in coal mines’. The bucket of ‘kick the bucket’ was originally a beam from from which slaughtered animals were hung; it is probably a separate word, from Old French buquet ‘balance’.
[bucket etymology, bucket origin, 英语词源]
buckle: buckle: [14] English acquired buckle via Old French boucla from Latin buccula ‘cheek strap of a helmet’. This was a diminutive form of Latin bucca ‘cheek’ (source of French bouche ‘mouth’), which gave English the anatomical term buccal ‘of the cheeks’ [19], and some have speculated is related to English pock. The notion of ‘fastening’ implicit in the Latin word carried through into English.

As well as ‘cheek strap’, Latin buccula meant ‘boss in the middle of a shield’. Old French boucle adopted this sense too, and created the derivative boucler, originally an adjective, meaning (of a shield) ‘having a central boss’. English borrowed this as buckler ‘small round shield’ [13]. The verb buckle was created from the English noun in the late 14th century, but the sense ‘distort’, which developed in the 16th century, comes from French boucler, which had come to mean ‘curl, bulge’.

Also from the French verb is bouclé ‘yarn with irregular loops’ [19].
=> bouclé, buckler
buckram: buckram: [14] Etymologically, buckram ‘stiffened cloth’ is cloth from Bokhara, a city in central Asia (now the Uzbek city of Bukhara), from where in the Middle Ages cloth was exported to Europe. And not just any cloth: originally buckram denoted a high-quality cotton or linen fabric, and it was only in the 15th century that the word came to be applied to a coarser textile. It came into English from Old French boquerant.
buckwheat: buckwheat: [16] Buckwheat has no connection with male deer. The buck- element is related to the English word beech, and the name comes from the resemblance of buckwheat (the seeds of a plant of the dock family) to the three-sided seeds of the beech tree. The word was actually borrowed from Middle Dutch boecweite, meaning literally ‘beechwheat’.
=> beech
bud: bud: [14] Bud is something of a mystery word. It appears in the late 14th century, with no apparent English ancestors. Various suggestions have been put forward as to its origin, including Old French boter ‘push forward, thrust’ (a distant relative of English button). Similarities have also been noted to Old English budd ‘beetle’ and Sanskrit bhūri ‘abundant’. But the question remains open. The American colloquial form of address bud is short for buddy [19], probably itself an alteration of brother.
budge: budge: see bull
budgerigar: budgerigar: [19] When the first English settlers arrived at Port Jackson (now Sydney Harbour) in the late 18th century, they heard the local Aborigines referring to a small green parrot-like bird as budgerigar. In the local language, this meant literally ‘good’ (budgeri) ‘cockatoo’ (gar). The English language had acquired a new word, but to begin with it was not too sure how to spell it; the first recorded attempt, in Leichhardt’s Overland Expedition 1847, was betshiregah. The abbreviated budgie is 1930s.
budget: budget: [15] Originally, a budget was a ‘pouch’. English got the word from Old French bougette, which was a diminutive form of bouge ‘leather bag’ (from which we get bulge). This came from Latin bulga, which may have been of Gaulish origin (medieval Irish bolg ‘bag’ has been compared). The word’s financial connotations arose in the 18th century, the original notion being that the government minister concerned with treasury affairs opened his budget, or wallet, to reveal what fiscal measures he had in mind.

The first reference to the expression occurs in a pamphlet called The budget opened 1733 directed against Sir Robert Walpole: ‘And how is this to be done? Why by an Alteration only of the present Method of collecting the publick Revenues … So then, out it comes at last. The Budget is opened; and our State Empirick hath dispensed his packets by his Zany Couriers through all parts of the Kingdom … I do not pretend to understand this Art of political Legerdemain’.

The earliest recorded use of the word non-satirically in this sense seems to be from 1764.
=> bulge
buff: buff: [16] Buff originally meant ‘buffalo’; it was presumably an alteration of the French word buffe ‘buffalo’. That sense had died out by the early 18th century, but since then the word has undergone a bizarre series of semantic changes. First, it came to mean ‘leather’, originally from buffalo hides, but later from ox hides. This was commonly used in the 16th and 17th centuries for making military uniforms, so be in buff came to mean ‘be in the army’.

Then in the 17th century the associations of ‘hide’ and ‘skin’ led to the expression in the buff ‘naked’. The colour of buff leather, a sort of dull yellowish-brown, led to the word’s adoption in the 18th century as a colour term. In the 19th century, soft buff or suede leather was used for the small pads or wheels used by silversmiths, watchmakers, etc for polishing: hence the verb buff ‘polish’.

And finally, in the 1820s New York City volunteer firemen were known as ‘buffs’, from the colour of their uniforms; thus anyone who was a volunteer or enthusiastic for something became known as a buff (as in ‘film buff’). The buff of blind-man’s buff is a different word. It meant ‘blow, punch’, and was borrowed in the 15th century from Old French buffe, source also of English buffet ‘blow’ [13].

The term blind-man’s buff is first recorded around 1600, some what later than its now obsolete synonym hoodman blind.
=> buffalo, buffet
buffalo: buffalo: [16] English probably acquired buffalo from Portuguese bufalo, originally naming the ‘water buffalo’, Bubalis bubalis, a large oxlike animal of Asia and Africa, and subsequently extended to the ‘Cape buffalo’ of South Africa, Syncerus caffer. The Portuguese word came from late Latin bufalus, an alteration of Latin bubalus, which was borrowed from Greek boúbalos. The Greek word, which seems to have named a type of African gazelle, may have been formed from bous ‘ox’. The application of the word to the North American bison, which is still regarded as ‘incorrect’, dates from the late 18th century.
=> buff
buffer: buffer: Neither buffer ‘fellow’ [18] nor buffer ‘shock absorber’ [19] can be traced back with any certainty to a source, but the likeliest conjecture is that they both come (independently) from an obsolete English verb buff, which was probably originally (like puff) imitative of the sound of blowing or breathing out. The earliest recorded sense of this, in the late 13th century, was ‘stammer’, and so the human buffer may originally have been a ‘stammerer’. By the 16th century we find the verb being used in the sense ‘make the sound of something soft being hit’, which is a likely source of buffer ‘shock absorber’.
bug: bug: [14] Originally, bug meant ‘something frightening’ – and in fact one of the earliest known uses of the word was for what we would now call a ‘scare-crow’. It is one of a set of words (others are bogle and perhaps bugaboo) for alarming or annoying phenomena, usually supernatural, whose interrelationship and ultimate source have never been adequately explained (see BOGEY). Bug ‘insect’ [16] is probably the same word, although it has also been connected with Old English budd ‘beetle’. The meanings ‘defect’ (from the 19th century) and ‘germ’ and ‘hidden microphone’ (both 20th-century) all developed from ‘insect’.
bugbear: bugbear: [16] Early references to bugbear suggest that it was a sort of bug – ‘frightening creature’ – conjured up to frighten naughty children. It is usually assumed that the second element of the word simply represents the animal ‘bear’, and that the frightening creature was represented as being in the shape of a bear. The modern sense ‘source of annoyance’ developed in the late 19th century.
bugger: bugger: [16] The Bulgarians, belonging from the early Christian era to the Eastern Orthodox Church, were regarded by Western Europeans as heretics. Thus it was that the Latin word Bulgarus came to be applied generically to any heretic, and eventually specifically to the Albigenses, a Catharistic sect in southern France in the 11th to 13th centuries. It passed via Old French bougre and Middle Dutch bugger into English, acquiring along the way bigoted associations of heresy with anal intercourse. The weakened use of the word as a general term of abuse dates from the early 18th century.
bugle: bugle: [14] Bugle originally meant ‘buffalo’ or ‘bull’. It comes via Old French bugle from Latin būculus, a diminutive form of bos ‘ox’ (a relative of English cow). It was used from the early 14th century in the compound bugle-horn, denoting a bull’s horn used either as a drinking vessel or as a hunting horn, and it was not long before bugle took on a separate life of its own in the ‘musical horn’ sense.
=> cow
build: build: [OE] In common with a wide range of other English words, including bower, booth, and the – bour of neighbour, build comes ultimately from the Germanic base *bū- ‘dwell’. A derivative of this, Germanic *buthlam, passed into Old English as bold, which meant ‘house’; the verb formed from this, byldan, thus originally meant ‘construct a house’, and only gradually broadened out in meaning to encompass any sort of structure.
=> boor, booth, bower, build, byre, neighbour
bulb: bulb: [16] Bulb can be traced back to Greek bólbos, which was a name for various plants with a rounded swelling underground stem. In its passage via Latin bulbus to English it was often applied specifically to the ‘onion’, and that was its original meaning in English. Its application to the light bulb, dating from the 1850s, is an extension of an earlier 19th-century sense ‘bulbshaped swelling in a glass tube’, used from the 1830s for thermometer bulbs.
bulge: bulge: [13] Etymologically, bulge and budget are the same word, and indeed when English first acquired bulge it was as a noun, with, like budget, the sense ‘pouch’. It came from Old French bouge ‘leather bag’, a descendant of Latin bulga, which may have been of Gaulish origin (medieval Irish bolg ‘bag’ has been compared). The word’s present-day connotations of ‘swelling’ and ‘protruding’ presumably go back to an early association of ‘pouches’ with ‘swelling up when filled’ (compare the case of bellows and belly, which originally meant ‘bag’, and came from a source which meant ‘swell’), but curiously, apart from an isolated instance around 1400 when bulge is used for a ‘hump on someone’s back’, there is no evidence for this meaning in English before the 17th century.

Additionally, from the 17th to the 19th centuries bulge was used for the ‘bottom of a ship’s hull’; it has now been superseded in this sense by bilge [15], which may well be a variant form.
=> bilge, budget
bulimia: bulimia: [19] The condition now called ‘bulimia’ – in which bouts of overeating are followed by bouts of purging – was recognized and so named in the 1970s. The word used to name it, however, is much more ancient than that. It goes back to Greek boulimia, which meant ‘ravenous hunger’ (it was formed from limos ‘hunger’, with the prefix bou-; this may well have been adapted from bous ‘ox’, in which case the word would have meant literally ‘the hunger of an ox’).

It originally came into English, via medieval Latin, in the late 14th century, and for many hundred years its standard form was bulimy. It was applied to a sort of hunger so extreme that it could be categorized as an illness.
bulk: bulk: [14] Formally, bulk comes from Old Norse búlki, which meant ‘cargo’ or ‘heap’: the original connotation of the English word in this sense was thus of goods loaded loose, in heaps, rather than neatly packed up. That is the source of the phrase in bulk. However, a certain similarity in form and meaning to the English word bouk ‘belly’ (from Old English būc, and ultimately a descendant of West and North Germanic *būkaz) led to the two being confused, so that bulk was used for ‘belly’, or more generally ‘body’.

Modern connotations of ‘great size’ seem to be a blend of these two. The bulk of bulkhead [15] is a different word; it may come from Old Norse bálkr ‘partition’.