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beyond [beyond 词源字典]: beyond: [OE] Beyond is a lexicalization of the Old English phrase be geondan ‘from the farther side’. The second element comes from a prehistoric Germanic *jandana, formed on a base *jan- which also gave English the now largely dialectal yon [OE] and yonder [13]. To German it contributed the demonstrative adjective and pronoun jener ‘that’, and there are related demonstrative forms without the initial jin other Indo-European languages, including non-Germanic ones (Old Slavonic onu ‘that’, for instance, and Sanskrit āna- ‘this one’).
=> yon, yonder[beyond etymology, beyond origin, 英语词源]
bias: bias: [16] English acquired bias from Old French biais, but its previous history is uncertain. It probably came via Old Provençal, but where from? Speculations include Latin bifacem ‘looking two ways’, from bi- ‘two’ and faciēs ‘face’, and Greek epikársios ‘oblique’. When the word first entered English it meant simply ‘oblique line’, but by the end of the 16th century it was being applied more specifically to the game of bowls, in the sense of the ‘bowl’s curved path’, and also the ‘unequal weighting given to the bowl in order to achieve such a path’.

The modern figurative senses ‘inclination’ and ‘prejudice’ derive from this.
bib: bib: [16] The word bib is first mentioned in John Baret’s Quadruple dictionarie 1580, where it is described as being ‘for a child’s breast’. It appears to come from the now archaic verb bib (as in wine-bibber), perhaps from the notion that the bib protects the baby’s clothes as it drinks. The verb itself is possibly from Latin bibere ‘drink’, source of beer, beverage, bibulous, and imbibe.
=> beer, bibulous, imbibe
bibelot: bibelot: see beauty
bible: bible: [13] Greek ta biblía meant literally ‘the books’. This was borrowed into ecclesiastical Latin as biblia, where the plural form came to be misanalysed as a feminine singular; hence Old French, and through it English, received bible as a singular noun. Greek biblía itself was the plural of biblíon ‘book’ (whence English bibliography [17]), which was originally a diminutive form of bíblos or búblos. This was used for ‘book’, and for the book’s forerunners, such as scrolls and papyri. It may come from Bublos, an ancient Phoenician port from which papyrus was exported to Greece.
=> bibliography
bicycle: bicycle: [19] The word bicycle, literally ‘twowheeled’ (from Greek kúklos ‘circle, wheel’), was originally coined in French, and first appeared in English in 1868, in the 7 September edition of the Daily News: ‘bysicles and trysicles which we saw in the Champs Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne this summer’. This reflects the fact that it was in the 1860s that the bicycle first assumed the form we know it in today, with pedals and cranks driving the front wheel. (Slightly earlier was the now obsolete velocipede, literally ‘swift foot’, first applied to pedal bicycles and tricycles around 1850.

Until the introduction of pneumatic tyres in the 1880s, the new cycles were known as bone-shakers – a term first encountered in 1874.)
=> cycle, wheel
bid: bid: [OE] Bid has a complicated history, for it comes from what were originally two completely distinct Old English verbs. The main one was biddan (past tense bæd) ‘ask, demand’, from which we get such modern English usages as ‘I bade him come in’. It goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *bithjan (source of German bitten ‘ask’), which was formed from the base *beth- (from which modern English gets bead).

But a contribution to the present nexus of meanings was also made by Old English bēodan (past tense bēad) ‘offer, proclaim’ (whence ‘bid at an auction’ and so on). This can be traced ultimately to an Indo- European base *bh(e)udh-, which gave Germanic *buth-, source also of German bieten ‘offer’ and perhaps of English beadle [13], originally ‘one who proclaims’.
=> bead, beadle
bide: bide: [OE] Bide appears to be related ultimately to Old English bēodan, partial source of modern English bid, but exactly how is not clear. It comes from a lengthened version of the same stem, producing a hypothetical Germanic *bīthan, and to all outward appearances is connected with such non-Germanic forms as Latin fīdere and Greek peithésthai; but as these mean ‘believe, trust’, it is not easy to reconstruct a semantic connection with bide ‘remain’. Bide itself is now little used, except in ‘bide one’s time’, but the derived abide [OE] remains current, especially in the sense ‘endure’, as does the noun formed from it, abode [13].
=> abide, abode, bid
bier: bier: [OE] Etymologically, a bier is ‘something used for carrying’. It comes from West Germanic *bērō, a derivative of the same base (*ber-) as produced the verb bear. Its Old English form was bēr, and it was not spelled with an i until the 16th century. The original general sense ‘framework for carrying something’ (which it shares with the etymologically related barrow) died out around 1600, but already by about 1000 the modern specific meaning ‘stand for a coffin’ had developed.
=> barrow, bear
bifurcate: bifurcate: see fork
big: big: [13] Big is one of the notorious mystery words of English etymology – extremely common in the modern language, but of highly dubious origin. In its earliest use in English it meant ‘powerful, strong’, and it is not really until the 16th century that we get unequivocal examples of it in the modern sense ‘large’. It occurs originally in northern texts, only slowly spreading south, which suggests that it may be of Scandinavian origin; some have compared Norwegian dialect bugge ‘important man’.
bight: bight: see bow
bigot: bigot: [16] According to the 12th-century Anglo- Norman chronicler Wace, bigot was a contemptuous term applied by the French to the Normans, but it is far from clear where this came from, whether it is the same word as present-day bigot, and, if it is, how it came to mean ‘narrowminded person’. All that can be said for certain is that the word first turned up in its modern form in the 15th century as French bigot, from which English borrowed it.
bigwig: bigwig: see wig
bikini: bikini: [20] For Frenchmen, the sight of the first minimal two-piece swimming costumes for women produced by fashion designers in 1947 was as explosive as the test detonation of an atom bomb by the USA at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, in the western Pacific Ocean, in July 1946. Hence their naming it the ‘Bikini’, the first record of which is in the August 1947 issue of Le Monde Illustré. English acquired the word in 1948. The monokini, essentially a braless bikini, first appeared in 1964, the inspiration for its name being the accidental resemblance of the element bi- in bikini to the prefix bi- ‘two’.
bilge: bilge: see bulge
bill: bill: There are three distinct words bill in English (not counting the proper name), and of them all, the most recent is the commonest. Bill ‘note of charges’ [14] comes from Anglo-Latin billa, which is probably a variant of Latin bulla ‘_document, seal’ (as in ‘papal bull’). English billet [15], as in ‘billeting soldiers on a house’, was originally a diminutive form of billa (French billet ‘letter’ comes from the same source). Bill ‘hook-bladed weapon’ [OE], now found mainly in billhook, comes from a prehistoric West Germanic *bilja, which may be based ultimately on Indo-European *bhid-, source of English bite. Bill ‘beak’ [OE] may be related to bill ‘weapon’, but this is not clear.

The verbal sense ‘caress’, as in ‘bill and coo’, is 16th-century; it arose from the courting behaviour of doves stroking each other’s beaks.
=> billet
billiards: billiards: [16] Billiard comes from French billard, which is the name not only of the game, but also of the cue it is played with. And the cue is the clue to the word’s history, for it comes from French bille ‘tree trunk’, hence ‘long cylindrical bit of wood’. The import of the -ard suffix is not altogether clear, but another suffix used with bille was the diminutive -ette, from which English got billet ‘piece of wood’ [15] (not to be confused with billet ‘assignment to lodgings’; see BILL). Bille itself came from medieval Latin billa or billus, which may have been of Celtic origin.
=> billet
biltong: biltong: [19] Biltong, strips of sun-dried meat – anything from beef to ostrich – used as iron rations in southern Africa, has the unpromising literal meaning ‘buttock-tongue’ (Afrikaans bil is ‘buttock’, tong is ‘tongue’). The reason for the name is supposedly that the meat for biltong was customarily cut from the hind quarters of the animal, and that the coiner found in it, perhaps rather optimistically, a resemblance to the taste of smoked ox tongue.
bimbo: bimbo: [20] Bimbo most recently made its mark on the English language in the 1980s, when it was in heavy use among journalists to denigrate buxom young women of limited IQ who sold the secrets of their affairs with the rich and famous to the press. It was by no means a newcomer, though. It first crossed the Atlantic to America, from Italy, in the late 1910s. In Italian it means ‘baby’, and US slang took it up in the colloquial sense of baby, for referring to a usually hapless fellow.

By the 1920s it was being applied equally to young women, especially promiscuous or empty-headed ones (the latter feature probably reinforced by the appearance of dumbo ‘fool’ in the early 1930s).