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bull [bull 词源字典]: bull: There are three distinct words bull in English. The oldest is the animal name, which first appears in late Old English as bula. Related forms occur in other Germanic languages, including German bulle and Dutch bul. The diminutive bullock is also recorded in late Old English. The second bull is ‘edict’ [13], as in ‘papal bull’. This comes from medieval Latin bulla ‘sealed document’, a development of an earlier sense ‘seal’, which can be traced back to classical Latin bulla ‘bubble’ (source also of English bowl, as in the game of bowls; of boil ‘heat liquid’; of budge [16], via Old French bouger and Vulgar Latin *bullicāre ‘bubble up, boil’; and probably of bill ‘statement of charges’).

And finally there is ‘ludicrous or selfcontradictory statement’ [17], usually now in the phrase Irish bull, whose origins are mysterious; there may be a connection with the Middle English noun bul ‘falsehood’ and the 15th-to 17th-century verb bull ‘mock, cheat’, which has been linked with Old French boler or bouller ‘deceive’. The source of the modern colloquial senses ‘nonsense’ and ‘excessive discipline’ is not clear.

Both are early 20th-century, and closely associated with the synonymous and contemporary bullshit, suggesting a conscious link with bull the animal. In meaning, however, the first at least is closer to bull ‘ludicrous statement’. Bull’s-eye ‘centre of a target’ and ‘large sweet’ are both early 19th-century. Bulldoze is from 1870s America, and was apparently originally applied to the punishment of recalcitrant black slaves; it has been conjectured that the underlying connotation was of ‘giving someone a dose fit for a bull’.

The term bulldozer was applied to the vehicle in the 1930s.
=> phallic; bill, bowl, budge[bull etymology, bull origin, 英语词源]
bullet: bullet: [16] Etymologically, a bullet is a ‘little ball’. It comes from French boulette, a diminutive form of boule ‘ball’, from which English also gets bowl, as in the game of bowls. It originally meant ‘cannon-ball’ as well as ‘rifle or pistol projectile’, but this sense had effectively died out by the mid-18th century.
=> bowl
bulletin: bulletin: [17] If a bullet is etymologically a ‘little ball’, a bulletin is a ‘little little edict’. It comes via French bulletin from Italian bulletino, which was a diminutive form of bulletta ‘document, voting slip’ (briefly introduced into English in the 17th century as bullet: ‘Elected by the Great Master and his Knights, who give their voices by bullets’, George Sandys, Travels 1615); French billet ‘letter’, and indeed English billet, as in ‘billeting’ soldiers on a house, are parallel formations on a variant of the root of bulletta.

And to return to bulletta, this was itself a diminutive form of bulla, from medieval Latin bulla ‘sealed document’, which is the source of English bull, as in ‘papal bull’.
=> billet, bull
bullion: bullion: [14] The immediate source of bullion was Anglo-Norman bullion, which meant ‘place where coins are made, mint’, so presumably the underlying connotation is of melting, or ‘boiling’, metal down and then turning it into coins. On this reasoning it would come ultimately from Vulgar Latin *bulliōnem, a nominal derivative of Latin bullīre ‘boil’, from bulla ‘bubble’ (source of English boil). The present-day meaning ‘gold and silver in bulk’ had developed by the mid-15th century.
=> boil
bully: bully: [16] Bullies have undergone a sad decline in status. In the 16th century the word meant ‘sweetheart’: ‘Though she be somewhat old, it is my own sweet bully’, John Bale, Three laws 1538. But gradually the rot set in, its meaning passing through ‘fine fellow’ to ‘blusterer’ to the present-day harasser of inferiors. In the 18th and 19th centuries it also meant ‘pimp’.

It is probably a modification of Dutch boele ‘lover’ which, as a term of endearment, may have originated as baby-talk. This bully has no connection with the bully of bully beef [18], which comes from French bouilli, the past participle of bouillir ‘boil’. The bully of bully off [19], a now discontinued way of starting play in hockey, appears to come from a term for ‘scrummage’ in Eton football, but whether that is related to the cruel bully is not clear.
bulwark: bulwark: [15] Bulwark comes from Middle High German bolwerc ‘fortification’, a compound formed from bole ‘plank’ (the same word as English bole ‘tree trunk’) and werc, equivalent to English work. It thus originally meant ‘rampart constructed out of planks or tree trunks’. The word was shared by other Germanic languages, including Swedish bolverk, and French borrowed it as boullewerc, which has since become boulevard.
=> bole, boulevard, work
bum: bum: There are two distinct words bum in English. By far the older, ‘buttocks’, is first recorded in John de Trevisa’s translation of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon 1387: ‘It seemeth that his bum is out that hath that evil [piles]’. It is not clear where it comes from. The other, ‘tramp, loafer’, and its associated verb ‘spend time aimlessly’ [19], chiefly American, probably come from an earlier bummer, derived from the German verb bummeln ‘loaf around, saunter’ (familiar to English speakers from the title of Jerome K Jerome’s novel Three Men on the Bummel 1900, about a jaunt around Germany).
bumf: bumf: [20] The earliest, literal, but now long discontinued sense of bumf is ‘toilet paper’ (first recorded in 1889), which does much to elucidate its origin: it is short for bum fodder. The element of contempt is carried over into its modern meaning, ‘unwanted or uninteresting printed material’, which dates from around 1930.
bump: bump: [16] The earliest recorded sense of bump is ‘swelling, lump’, but the evidence suggests that the primary meaning is ‘knock’, and that this led on to ‘swelling’ as the result of being hit. It is not clear where the word came from, although it may be of Scandinavian origin; no doubt ultimately it imitates the sound of somebody being hit. The verbal sense ‘swell’, now obsolete, is probably responsible for bumper, which originally meant ‘full glass or cup’, and in the 19th century was extended to anything large or abundant (as in ‘bumper crop’).
bumpkin: bumpkin: [16] Originally, bumpkin seems to have been a humorously disparaging epithet for a Dutch person: in the first known record of the word, in Peter Levins’s Dictionary of English and Latin words 1570, it is glossed batavus (Batavia was the name of an island at the mouth of the Rhine in ancient times, and was henceforth associated with the Netherlands). It was probably a Dutch word, boomken ‘little tree’ (from boom ‘tree’, related to German baum ‘tree’ and English beam), used with reference to Netherlanders’ supposedly dumpy stature. The phrase ‘country bumpkin’ is first recorded from the later 18th century.
=> beam
bun: bun: [14] The word bun first crops up in 1371, in an Anglo-Latin document relating to different types of bread. Its origins, however, are completely shrouded in mystery. Equally obscure, but presumably unrelated, is another word bun, which in the 16th century meant ‘squirrel’. By the 19th century we find it being used for ‘rabbit’, and it survives in its familiar form bunny.
bunch: bunch: [14] Bunch originally meant ‘swelling’ (the first text recorded as containing the word, the Middle English poem Body and Soul 1325, speaks of ragged folk ‘with broad bunches on their back’), but we have no real clues as to its source. Perhaps, like bump, it was ultimately imitative of the sound of hitting something, the sense ‘swelling’ being the result of the blows. The first hints of the modern sense ‘cluster, collection’ come in the mid-15th century in the phrase bunch of straw, although how this derived from ‘swelling’ is not clear.
bundle: bundle: [14] Etymologically, bundle is ‘that which binds or is bound’. Like band, bend, bind, and bond, it can be traced back ultimately to an Indo-European base *bhendh- ‘tie’. The Germanic base *bund-, derived from this, produced Old English byndelle ‘binding’. There is no direct evidence to link this with the much later bundle, although the similarities are striking. Alternatively, the source may be the related Middle Dutch bundel ‘collection of things tied together’.
=> band, bend, bind, bond
bungalow: bungalow: [17] Etymologically, bungalow means simply ‘Bengali’. Banglā is the Hind word for ‘of Bengal’ (as in Bangladesh), and English borrowed it (probably in the Gujarati version bangalo) in the sense ‘house in the Bengal style’. Originally this signified any simple, lightly-built, usually temporary structure, which by definition had only one storey, but it is the one-storeyedness that has come to be the identifying characteristic.
bunion: bunion: [18] Bunion is probably a modification of the East Anglian dialect word bunny ‘lump, swelling’, representing a 15th-century form bony, glossed in a contemporary English-Latin dictionary as ‘great knob’. This was apparently borrowed from Old French hugne ‘bump on the head’.
bunkum: bunkum: [19] Buncombe is a county of North Carolina, USA. Around 1820, during a debate in the US Congress, its representative Felix Walker rose to make a speech. He spoke on – and on – and on. Fellow congressmen pleaded with him to sit down, but he refused to be deflected, declaring that he had to make a speech ‘for Buncombe’. Most of what he said was fatuous and irrelevant, and henceforth bunkum (or buncombe, as it was at first spelled) became a term for political windbagging intended to ingratiate the speaker with the voters rather than address the real issues.

It early passed into the more general sense ‘nonsense, claptrap’. Its abbreviated form, bunk, is 20th-century; it was popularized by Henry Ford’s remark ‘History is more or less bunk’, made in 1916. Of the other English words bunk, ‘bed’ [19] is probably short for bunker, which first appeared in 16th-century Scottish English, meaning ‘chest, box’; while bunk as in do a bunk and bunk off [19] is of unknown origin.
bunt: bunt: see punt
bunting: bunting: Bunting ‘bird’ [13] and bunting ‘flags’ [18] are presumably two distinct words, although in neither case do we really know where they come from. There was a now obsolete English adjective bunting, first recorded in the 16th century, which meant ‘plump, rounded, short and thick’ (could a subliminal memory of it have been in Frank Richards’s mind when he named Billy Bunter?).

Perhaps the small plump bird, the bunting, was called after this. The adjective probably came from an obsolete verb bunt, which meant (of a sail) ‘swell, billow’, but since we do not know where that came from, it does not get us very much further. As for bunting ‘flags’, the word originally referred to a loosely woven fabric from which they were made, and it has been conjectured that it came from the English dialect verb bunt ‘sift’, such cloth having perhaps once been used for sifting flour.
buoy: buoy: [13] Buoy is of disputed origin, as to both its immediate source and its ultimate derivation. One school of thought holds that English borrowed it directly from Old French boie ‘chain’, while another views Middle Dutch boeye as an intermediate stage. Again some etymologists maintain that its beginnings were amongst the Germanic languages, and have connected it with English beacon, while others would trace it via Latin boia ‘strap’ to Greek boeiai ‘ox-leather straps’, a derivative of bous ‘ox’ (which is related to English cow).

The meaning of Old French boie favours the latter explanation, the semantic link being that buoys are held in place by chains. Buoyant [16] comes from Spanish boyante, the present participle of boyar ‘float’, which was derived from boya ‘buoy’, a borrowing from Old French boie.
burden: burden: There are two distinct words burden in English. By far the older, ‘load’, comes from Old English byrthen. Like bear, birth, bairn, bier, barrow, and berth it goes back ultimately to an Indo-European base *bher-, which signified both ‘carry’ and ‘give birth’. Its immediate Germanic ancestor was *burthi-, which also gave German bürde ‘load’. The other burden, ‘refrain’, and hence ‘main theme’, is an alteration of an earlier bourdon [14], which was borrowed from Old French bourdon ‘bass pipe’.
=> bairn, barrow, bear, berth, bier, birth