英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

bureau [bureau 词源字典]: bureau: [17] Etymologically, bureau seems to mean ‘red’. Its ultimate source is probably Greek purrhós ‘red’, a derivative of pur ‘fire’ (as in English pyre and pyrotechnic), which is related to English fire. This was borrowed into Latin as burrus, which developed into Old French bure ‘dark brown’. This seems to have formed the basis of a derivative burel, later bureau, meaning ‘dark brown cloth’.

This cloth was used for covering the writing surface of desks, and so eventually bureau came to mean ‘writing desk’ itself. Offices being the natural habitat of writing desks, bureau was later applied to them too. The derivative bureaucracy is 19th-century, of French origin.
=> pyre, pyrotechnic[bureau etymology, bureau origin, 英语词源]
burgess: burgess: see borough
burglar: burglar: [15] The first trace we have of burglar is as burgulator in 13th-century Anglo-Latin texts, and it appears in Anglo-Norman legal documents of the 15th century as burgler. These point to an unrecorded medieval Latin base *burg- ‘plunder’, which appears in Old French burgur ‘robber’. The verb burgle is a 19thcentury back-formation from burglar.
burk: burk: [20] Although burk is now the commoner spelling, presumably under the influence of the proper name Burk, the original form of the word was berk. It is short for Berkeley (or perhaps Berkshire) hunt, rhyming slang for cunt. (The Berkeley hunt chases foxes in Gloucestershire.) The pronunciation of the word represents, of course, the dialectal or nonstandard version of Berkeley/Berkshire, rather than the /ba:k/ which became standard in southern British English from the 15th century.
burke: burke: [19] In present-day English burke means ‘avoid’, as in ‘burke an issue’, but it can be traced back semantically via ‘suppress, hush up’ to ‘suffocate so as to provide a body for surgical dissection’. In this sense it was a macabre adoption of the name of William Burke (1792– 1829), an Irishman who with his colleague William Hare set up a profitable but nefarious business in early 19th-century Edinburgh providing cadavers for surgeons to dissect.

To begin with they obtained their supplies by robbing graves, but eventually, in order to get higher-quality material, they took to murdering people, generally by suffocation or strangling. Burke was executed.
burlesque: burlesque: [17] French is the immediate source of English burlesque, but French got it from Italian burlesco, a derivative of burla ‘joke, fun’. This may come from Vulgar Latin *burrula, a derivative of late Latin burra ‘trifle’, perhaps the same word as late Latin burra ‘wool, shaggy cloth’.
burly: burly: [13] Burly has come down in the world over the centuries. Originally it meant ‘excellent, noble, stately’, and it appears to come from an unrecorded Old English adjective *būrlic, literally ‘bowerly’ – that is, ‘fit to frequent a lady’s apartment’. Gradually, connotations of ‘stoutness’ and ‘sturdiness’ began to take over, and by the 15th century the modern ‘heavily built’ had become well established.
=> boor, booth, bower
burn: burn: [OE] English has two separate words burn. The commoner, relating to ‘fire’, is actually a conflation of two Old English verbs: birnan, which was intransitive, and bærnan, which was transitive. Both come ultimately from the Germanic base *bren-, *bran-, which also produced brand and possibly broil, and was the source of German brennen and Swedish brinna ‘burn’ (another variant of the base, *brun-, lies behind the brim- of brimstone).

It has been conjectured that Latin fervēre ‘boil’ (source of English fervent and ferment) may be connected. Burn ‘stream’ comes from Old English burn(e), burna, which was a descendant of a Germanic base *brun-, source also of German brunne ‘stream’. This too has been linked with Latin fervēre (from the notion of fast-running water ‘boiling’ over rocks).
=> brand, brimstone, broil, ferment, fervent
burnish: burnish: see brown
burrow: burrow: see borough
bursar: bursar: see purse
burst: burst: [OE] In Old English, burst meant simply ‘break suddenly and sharply’; the modern connotation of ‘breaking open owing to internal pressure’ developed in the 16th century. The word comes from a prehistoric West and North Germanic *brestan, which can be traced back to an Indo-European base *bhrest- (this has been linked with medieval Irish brosc ‘noise’).
bury: bury: [OE] Modern English bury is a descendant of Old English byrgan, which came from the Germanic base *burg- (source also of English borough). The underlying meaning of the base was ‘protection, shelter’, and in the case of bury this referred to ‘covering a dead body with earth’ (in Old English, bury applied only to interment; the general sense ‘put underground’ did not develop until the 14th century). The derived burial goes back to Old English byrgels, which in Middle English times was mistaken for a plural.
=> borough
bus: bus: [19] Bus is, of course, short for omnibus. The first person on record as using it was the British writer Harriet Martineau, who spelled it buss: ‘if the station offers me a place in the buss’, Weal and woe in Garveloch 1832. Omnibus itself was borrowed from French, where it was first applied in 1828 to a voiture omnibus, literally ‘carriage for everyone’ (omnibus is the dative plural of Latin omnis ‘all’).
busby: busby: [18] Busby originally meant ‘large bushy wig’, and so may be related to buzz wig, a term with similar meaning current during the 19th century (and perhaps the inspiration for Sergeant Buzfuz, the lawyer in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers). The application to the full-dress fur hat worn by hussars in the British army dates from the early 19th century, but its extension to the Guards’ bearskin (still regarded as a solecism in some quarters) seems to have been a 20thcentury development.
bush: bush: [13] Bush comes ultimately from a prehistoric Germanic *busk-, which also produced German busch ‘bush’. There is no actual record of the word in Old English, but it probably existed as *bysc. The Germanic base was also borrowed into the Romance languages, where in French it eventually produced bois ‘wood’. A diminutive form of this gave English bouquet [18], while a variant bosc may have been at least partly responsible for the now archaic English bosky ‘wooded’ [16]. A derived Vulgar Latin verb *imboscāre gave English ambush.
=> ambush, bouquet, oboe
bust: bust: There are two different words bust in English. The one meaning ‘break’ [18] is simply an alteration of burst. Bust ‘sculpture of head and chest’ [17] comes via French buste from Italian busto ‘upper body’, of uncertain origin (Latin had the temptingly similar bustum ‘monument on a tomb’, but this does not seem to fit in with the word’s primary sense ‘upper body’).

In English, application of the word to the human chest probably developed in the 18th century (one of the earliest examples is from Byron’s Don Juan 1819: ‘There was an Irish lady, to whose bust I ne’er saw justice done’), although as late as the early 19th century it could still be used with reference to men’s chests, and had not become particularized to female breasts: ‘His naked bust would have furnished a model for a statuary’, Washington Irving, A tour on the prairies 1835.
bustard: bustard: [15] Bustard (the name of a large game bird now extinct in Britain) is something of a mystery word. Old French had two terms for the bird, bistarde and oustarde, both of which come from Latin avis tarda, literally ‘slow bird’ (Latin tardus gave English tardy [15]). This, according to the Roman writer Pliny, was what the bird was called in Spain.

It has been objected that the bustard can run quite fast, and that the name avis tarda must be some sort of folk-etymological alteration of a non-Latin word; but in fact the bird’s normal gait is a fairly slow and stately walk, so the term is not so far-fetched. The English word is presumably a blend of the two Old French ones, perhaps via an Anglo-Norman *bustarde.
=> tardy
busy: busy: [OE] Busy goes back to an Old English bisig, which also meant ‘occupied’. Apart from Dutch bezig, it has no apparent relatives in any Indo-European language, and it is not known where it came from. The sense ‘inquisitive’, from which we get busybody [16], developed in the late 14th century. Business was originally simply a derivative formed from busy by adding the suffix -ness.

In Old English it meant ‘anxiety, uneasiness’, reflecting a sense not recorded for the adjective itself until the 14th century. The modern commercial sense seems to have originated in the 15th century. (The modern formation busyness, reflecting the fact that business can no longer be used simply for the ‘state of being busy’, is 19th-century.)
=> pidgin
but: but: [OE] But originally meant ‘outside’. It was a compound word formed in prehistoric West Germanic from *be (source of English by) and *ūtana (related to English out). This gave Old English būtan, which quickly developed in meaning from ‘outside’ to ‘without, except’, as in ‘all but me’ (the sense ‘outside’ survived longer in Scotland than elsewhere). The modern conjunctive use of but did not develop until the late 13th century.
=> by, out