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bin [bin 词源字典]: bin: [OE] Old English had the word bine or binne (it meant ‘manger’), but it is not clear where it got it from. Perhaps the most likely source is a word, *benna, in the Celtic language of the pre- Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain (Welsh has ben ‘cart’). But it may also have come from medieval Latin benna, which gave French benne ‘large basket’. In English, the modern sense ‘storage container’ does not fully emerge until the 14th century.
[bin etymology, bin origin, 英语词源]
bind: bind: [OE] Band, bend, bind, bond, and bundle can all be traced back ultimately to an Indo- European base *bhendh-, which was also the source of Sanskrit bandh ‘bind’ and Greek peisma ‘cable’. In the case of bind, the immediate precursor of Old English bindan was the Germanic stem with an i vowel, *bind-. In the 14th century the verb came to be used as a noun, for the ‘stem of a climbing plant’, from which we get bine (as in woodbine ‘honeysuckle’).
=> band, bend, bond, bundle
binnacle: binnacle: [15] Binnacle ‘ship’s compass housing’ has a curious history: etymologically it means ‘place where something lives’, and it is related to habitation and inhabit. Forms with -nn- do not begin to appear before the 18th century. Until then the word had been bittacle, which came from Spanish bitácula. A close relative of the Spanish word, French habitacle, gives a clue to its ultimate provenance in Latin habitāculum, a derivative of habitāre ‘inhabit’.
biology: biology: [19] The modern European languages have made prolific use of Greek bíos ‘life’ as a prefix, particularly in the 20th century. The first compound into which it entered in English seems to have been biotic, in the now obsolete sense ‘of secular life’ (around 1600), but the trend was really set by biography, first recorded as being used by John Dryden in his Life of Plutarch 1683. Biology itself came along at the beginning of the 19th century, via French, having been coined in German by Gottfried Reinhold in 1802.

Twentieth-century contributions have included bioengineering, biometric, bionic, biorhythm, and biotechnology. Greek bíos itself goes back to an Indo-European base *gwej-, from which English also ultimately gets quick, vital, vivid, and zoo.
=> quick, vital, vivid, zoo
birch: birch: [OE] Old English bi(e)rce came from a prehistoric Germanic *berkjōn, source also of German birke. The word goes back ultimately to an Indo-European *bhergo, but as is often the case with ancient tree-names, it does not denote the same type of tree in every language in which it has descendants: Latin fraxinus, for example, means ‘ash tree’. It has been speculated that the word is related to bright (whose Indo-European source was *bhereg-), with reference to the tree’s light-coloured bark.

It could also be that the word bark [13] itself is related. The verb birch ‘flog’ (originally with a birch rod or bunch of birch twigs) is early 19th-century.
=> bark, bright
bird: bird: [OE] Bird is something of a mystery word. It was not the ordinary Old English word for ‘feathered flying animal’; that was fowl. In Old English, bird meant specifically ‘young bird, nestling’. It did not begin to replace fowl as the general term until the 14th century, and the process took many hundreds of years to complete. Its source is quite unknown; it has no obvious relatives in the Germanic languages, or in any other Indo-European language.

The connotations of its original meaning have led to speculation that it is connected with breed and brood (the usual Old English form was brid, but the r and i subsequently became transposed in a process known as metathesis), but no convincing evidence for this has ever been advanced. As early as 1300, bird was used for ‘girl’, but this was probably owing to confusion with another similar Middle English word, burde, which also meant ‘young woman’.

The usage crops up from time to time in later centuries, clearly as an independent metaphorical application, but there does not really seem to be an unbroken chain of occurrences leading up to the sudden explosion in the use of bird for ‘young woman’ in the 20th century. Of other figurative applications of the word, ‘audience disapproval’ (as in ‘get the bird’) comes from the hissing of geese, and in ‘prison sentence’ bird is short for bird lime, rhyming slang for time.
birth: birth: [12] Old English had a word gebyrd ‘birth’ which survived until the end of the 13th century as birde, but it was quite distinct from (though related to) modern English birth, which was borrowed from Old Norse byrth. This came from the same Germanic stem (*ber-, *bur-) as produced bear, bairn, and indeed Old English gebyrd. The suffix -th denotes a process, or the result of a process: hence birth is ‘(the result of) the process of bearing a child’. Along with bath and death it is one of the most ancient words formed with -th.
=> bairn, bear, berth
biscuit: biscuit: [14] Biscuit means literally ‘twicecooked’ – from the method of cooking, in which the biscuits are returned to the oven after the initial period of baking in order to become dry or crisp. The original source of the word was probably a medieval Latin *biscoctus, from bis ‘twice’ and coctus ‘cooked’, the past participle of coquere (which is related to English cook). It reached English via Old French biscut.
=> cook
bisect: bisect: see section
bishop: bishop: [OE] Bishop originally had no ecclesiastical connections; its Greek source, episkopos, at first meant simply ‘overseer’, from epi- ‘around’ and skopein ‘look’ (antecedent of English scope, and related to spy). From the general sense, it came to be applied as the term for various government officials, and was waiting to be called into service for a ‘church officer’ as Christianity came into being and grew. The Greek word was borrowed into ecclesiastical Latin as episcopus (source of French évêque), and in more popular parlance lost its e-, giving *biscopus, which was acquired by English in the 9th century.
=> scope, spy
bison: bison: [14] Bison appears to be of Germanic origin, from a stem *wisand- or *wisund-. This became Old English wesand, which did not survive; and it was acquired again in the 19th century as wisent, borrowed from German wisent, applied to the ‘aurochs’, an extinct species of European wild ox. The b- form came into English via Latin bison, a borrowing from the Germanic. Originally of course referring to the European bison, the term was first applied to the North American species at the end of the 17th century.
bit: bit: There are three distinct nouns bit in English, but the two most ancient ones are probably both related ultimately to the verb bite. Bit as in ‘drill bit’ [OE] originally meant simply ‘bite’ or ‘biting’. The Old English word, bite, came from Germanic *bitiz, a derivative of the verb *bītan ‘bite’. The ‘drill bit’ sense did not develop until the 16th century.

The bit placed in a horse’s mouth is probably the same word. Bit meaning ‘small piece’ [OE] also comes from a Germanic derivative of *bītan, in this case *biton; this gave Old English bita ‘piece bitten off’. The more general sense, ‘small piece’, developed in the 16th century. The third bit, ‘unit of computer information’ [20], is a blend formed from ‘binary digit’.
=> bite
bitch: bitch: [OE] The antecedents of Old English bicce ‘female dog’ are obscure. It may come from a prehistoric Germanic *bekjōn-, but the only related form among other Germanic languages appears to be Old Norse bikkja. The superficially similar French biche means ‘female deer’, and is probably not related. The use of the word as a derogatory term for ‘woman’ seems to have originated in the 14th century.
bite: bite: [OE] The Old English verb bītan came from prehistoric Germanic *bītan, which also produced German beissen and Dutch bijten. The short-vowel version of the base, *bit-, was the source of bit, beetle, and probably bitter, and is also represented in various non-Germanic forms, such as Latin fidere ‘split’ (from which English gets fission). Bait came via Old Norse from a causal usage, ‘cause to bite’, and passed via Old French into abet (the possible source of bet).
=> beetle, bit, bitter, fission
bitter: bitter: [OE] Old English biter appears to have come from *bit-, the short-vowel version of *bīt-, source of bite. Its original meaning would thus have been ‘biting’, and although there do not seem to be any traces of this left in the historical record, the sense development to ‘acrid-tasting’ is fairly straightforward (compare the similar case of sharp).

It seems likely that the bitter of ‘bitter end’ comes from a different source altogether, although in its current meaning it appears to have been influenced by the adjective bitter. A bitter was originally a ‘turn of a cable round the bitts’, and a bitt was a ‘post on the deck of a ship for fastening cables to’. It is not clear where bitt came from, although it was probably originally a seafarer’s term from the north German coast, and it may be related to English boat.

Thus in the first instance ‘to the bitter end’ probably meant ‘to the very end, as far as it is possible to go’.
=> bite
bittern: bittern: [14] The Latin word for ‘bittern’ (a marsh bird) was būtiō, but by the time it reached Old French it had become butor. The discrepancy has been accounted for by proposing a Vulgar Latin intermediate *būtitaurus, literally ‘bittern-bull’ (Latin taurus is ‘bull’), coined on the basis of the bittern’s loud booming call, supposedly reminiscent of a bull’s. The original English forms, as borrowed from Old French, were botor and bitoure; the final -n first appeared in the 16th century, perhaps on the analogy of heron.
bitumen: bitumen: see cud
bivouac: bivouac: [18] Bivouac appears to be of Swiss- German origin. The early 19th-century writer Stalder noted that the term beiwacht (bei ‘additional’ + wacht ‘guard’ – a relative of English watch and wake) was used in Aargau and Zürich for a sort of band of vigilantes who assisted the regular town guard. Beiwacht was borrowed into French as bivac, and came to English in a later form bivouac.

Its original application in English was to an army remaining on the alert during the night, to guard against surprise attack; in so doing, of course, the soldiers did not go to sleep in their tents, and from this the term bivouac spread to ‘improvised, temporary camp’, without the luxury of regular tents.
=> wake, watch
bizarre: bizarre: [17] Bizarre can probably be traced back to Italian bizzarro, of unknown origin, which meant ‘angry’. It passed into Spanish as bizarro, meaning ‘brave’, and then found its way into French, where its meaning gradually mutated from ‘brave’ to ‘odd’ – which is where English got it from. It used to be thought that the French word might have come from Basque bizarra ‘beard’ (the reasoning being that a man with a beard must be a brave, dashing fellow), which would have made bizarre almost unique as a word of Basque origin in English (the only genuine one in everyday use now is the acronymic name ETA, standing for Euzkadi ta Azkatasuna ‘Basque Homeland and Liberty’), but this is now not thought likely.
black: black: [OE] The usual Old English word for ‘black’ was sweart (source of modern English swart and swarthy, and related to German schwarz ‘black’), but black already existed (Old English blæc), and since the Middle English period it has replaced swart. Related but now extinct forms existed in other Germanic languages (including Old Norse blakkr ‘dark’ and Old Saxon blac ‘ink’), but the word’s ultimate source is not clear. Some have compared it with Latin flagrāre and Greek phlégein, both meaning ‘burn’, which go back to an Indo-European base *phleg-, a variant of *bhleg-.