英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

barley [barley 词源字典]: barley: [OE] The Old English word for ‘barley’ was bære or bere. It came from an Indo- European base *bhar- which also gave Latin farīna ‘flour’ (from which English gets farinaceous [17]) and Old Norse farr ‘barley’. Barley (Old English bærlic) was in fact originally an adjective formed from this (like princely based on prince), and it was not until the early twelfth century that it came to be used as a noun. A barn [OE] was originally a building for storing barley. The Old English word ber(e)n was a compound formed from bere and ern or ærn ‘house’ (which may be related to English rest).
=> barn, farinaceous, farrago[barley etymology, barley origin, 英语词源]
barnacle: barnacle: [12] The term barnacle was originally applied to a type of goose, Branta leucopsis, which according to medieval legend grew on trees or on logs of wood. Various fanciful versions of its reproductive cycle existed, among them that it emerged from a fruit or that it grew attached to a tree by its beak, but the most tenacious was that it developed inside small shellfish attached to wood, rocks, etc by the seashore.

Hence by the end of the 16th century the term had come to be applied to these shellfish, and today that is its main sense. The word was originally bernak (it gained its -le ending in the 15th century) and came from medieval Latin bernaca, but its ultimate source is unknown.
baron: baron: [12] The earliest historical sense of baron, ‘tenant under the feudal system who held his land and title directly from the king’, can be traced back to its probable source, medieval Latin barō, which originally meant simply ‘man’, and hence ‘vassal’ or ‘retainer’. The word was of course brought into English by the Normans, as Anglo-Norman barun, and from earliest times was used as a title for someone belonging to the lowest order of peerage. Some have suggested an ultimate Germanic origin, and compared Old High German baro ‘freeman’.
barque: barque: see embark
barrage: barrage: see bar
barricade: barricade: [17] 12 May 1588 was known as la journée des barricades ‘the day of the barricades’, because in the course of disturbances in Paris during the Huguenot wars, large barrels (French barriques) filled with earth, cobblestones, etc were hauled into the street on that day to form barricades – and the term has stuck ever since. Barrique itself was borrowed from Spanish barrica ‘cask’, which was formed from the same stem as that from which English gets barrel [14]. It has been speculated that this was Vulgar Latin *barra ‘bar’, on the basis that barrels are made of ‘bars’ or ‘staves’.
=> bar, barrel
barrier: barrier: see bar
barrister: barrister: [16] A barrister is a lawyer who has been ‘called to the bar’ – that is, admitted to plead as an advocate in the superior courts of England and Wales. This notion derives from the ancient practice of having in the inns of court a partition separating senior members from students, which barrier the students metaphorically passed when they qualified. The ending -ister was probably added on the analogy of such words as minister and chorister.
=> bar
barrow: barrow: [OE] Barrow for carrying things and barrow the burial mound are two distinct words in English. The barrow of wheelbarrow is related to bear ‘carry’. The Old English word, bearwe, came from the same Germanic base, *ber- or *bar-, as produced bear, and also bier. Barrow the burial mound, as erected by ancient peoples over a grave site, is related to German berg ‘mountain, hill’. The Old English word, beorg, came from prehistoric Germanic *bergaz.
=> bear, bier
base: base: There are two distinct words base in English. Base meaning ‘lower part, foundation’ [14] came either via Old French base or was a direct anglicization of Latin basis (acquired by English in its unaltered form at around the same time). The Latin word in its turn came from Greek básis, which meant originally ‘step’ and came ultimately from the Indo-European base *gwm-, from which English gets come; the semantic progression involved was ‘going, stepping’ to ‘that on which one walks or stands’ to ‘pedestal’.

The derivative basement [18] is Italian in origin (Italian basamento means ‘base of a column’), but probably reached English via early modern Dutch basement ‘foundation’. Base meaning ‘low’ [14] comes via Old French bas from medieval Latin bassus ‘short, low’. The ultimate antecedents of this are uncertain, although some have suggested a connection with básson, the comparative form of Greek bathús ‘deep’.

The adjective bass is historically the same word as base, but since the 16th century has been distinguished from it by spelling.
=> basis; bass
bashful: bashful: see abash
basilisk: basilisk: [14] Greek basilískos meant literally ‘little king’ – it was a diminutive of basiléus ‘king’, source also of English basil [15] (probably from the herb’s use by the Greeks in certain royal potions) and of English basilica [16] (a church built originally on the plan of a royal palace). The Greeks used it for a ‘goldcrested wren’, but also for a type of serpent, and it is this latter use which developed into the fabulous monster of classical and medieval times, whose breath and glance could kill. The name was said by Pliny to be based on the fact that the basilisk had a crown-shaped mark on its head.
=> basil, basilica
basin: basin: [13] Basin comes via Old French bacin from medieval Latin *bacchinus, a derivative of Vulgar Latin *bacca ‘water vessel’, which may originally have been borrowed from Gaulish. The Old French diminutive bacinet produced English basinet ‘helmet’ [14] and, with a modification of the spelling, bassinette ‘cradle’ [19], which was originally applied in French to any vaguely basin-shaped object.
=> basinet, bassinette
bask: bask: [14] When English first acquired this word, probably from Old Norse bathask, it was in the sense ‘wallow in blood’: ‘seeing his brother basking in his blood’, John Lydgate, Chronicles of Troy 1430. It was not until the 17th century that the modern sense ‘lie in pleasant warmth’ became established: ‘a fool, who laid him down, and basked him in the sun’, Shakespeare, As You Like It 1600. The word retains connotations of its earliest literal sense ‘bathe’ – Old Norse bathask was the reflexive form of batha ‘bathe’.
=> bathe
basket: basket: [13] Basket is something of a mystery word. It turns up in the 13th century in Old French and Anglo-Norman as basket and in Anglo-Latin as baskettum, but how it got there is far from clear. Some have suggested that Latin bascauda ‘washing tub’, said by the Roman writer Martial to be of British origin (and thought by some etymologists to be possibly of Celtic origin), may be connected with it in some way, but no conclusive proof of this has ever been found.
bass: bass: Bass the fish [15] and bass the musical term [15] are of course completely unrelated words, with different pronunciations. Bass meaning ‘of the lowest register’ is simply a modified spelling of the adjective base, under the influence of Italian basso. Related words are bassoon [18], from French basson, and basset-horn [19], a partial translation of Italian corno di bassetto, literally ‘bass horn’.

The bass is a spiny-finned fish, and it may be that its name is related to Old English byrst ‘bristle’. The Old English term for the fish was bærs, which survived dialectally until the 19th century in the form barse, and it is thought that it goes back to a Germanic base *bars- (source of German barsch); this may be cognate with *bors-, from which Old English byrst came.

In the 15th century, barse underwent some sort of phonetic mutation to produce bass.
=> base, bassoon
bassinette: bassinette: see basin
bastard: bastard: [13] The idea underlying the word bastard appears to be that of a child born of an impromptu sexual encounter on an improvised bed, for it seems to echo Old French fils de bast, literally ‘packsaddle son’, that is, one conceived on a packsaddle pillow. If this is the case, the word goes back to medieval Latin bastum ‘packsaddle’, whose ultimate source was Greek bastázein ‘carry’; this passed via Old French bast, later bat, into late Middle English as bat, which now survives only in batman [18].

The derived form is first found in medieval Latin as bastardus, and this reached English via Old French bastard. Its modern usage as a general term of abuse dates from the early 19th century.
=> batman
baste: baste: There are two separate verbs baste in English, one meaning ‘sew loosely’ [14], the other ‘moisten roasting meat with fat’ [15]. The first comes from Old French bastir, which was acquired from a hypothetical Germanic *bastjan ‘join together with bast’. This was a derivative of *bastaz, from which English gets bast ‘plant fibre’ [OE]. The origin of the second is far more obscure. It may come from an earlier base, with the past form based being interpreted as the present tense or infinitive.
bat: bat: Bat as in ‘cricket bat’ [OE] and bat the animal [16] come from entirely different sources. Bat the wooden implement first appears in late Old English as batt ‘cudgel’, but it is not clear where it ultimately came from. Some have postulated a Celtic source, citing Gaulish andabata ‘gladiator’, which may be related to English battle and Russian bat ‘cudgel’, but whatever the word’s origins, it seems likely that at some point it was influenced by Old French batte, from battre ‘beat’.

The flying bat is an alteration of Middle English backe, which was borrowed from a Scandinavian language. The word is represented in Old Swedish natbakka ‘night bat’, and appears to be an alteration of an earlier -blaka, as in Old Norse lethrblaka, literally ‘leatherflapper’. If this is so, bat would mean etymologically ‘flapper’, which would be of a piece with other names for the animal, particularly German fledermaus ‘fluttermouse’ and English flittermouse, which remained a dialectal word for ‘bat’ into the 20th century.

It is unusual for the name of such a common animal not to go right back to Old English; in this case the Old English word was hrēremūs, which survived dialectally into the 20th century as rearmouse.
=> battle