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hobby [hobby 词源字典]: hobby: Hobby in the sense ‘pastime’ is short for hobbyhorse. This originated in the 16th century as a term for the figure of a horse used in morris dances: the element hobby, used since the 14th century for a ‘small horse’, was derived from Hob, a pet form of the man’s name Robert or Robin which survives also in hobgoblin [16]. From the morris-dance hobbyhorse was descended the toy hobbyhorse, a stick with a horse’s head on top; and the notion of ‘riding a hobbyhorse’, which could not actually take you anywhere, passed metaphorically into ‘doing something only for amusement’ – hence the meaning ‘pastime’, first recorded for hobbyhorse in the 17th century and for the shortened hobby in the early 19th century. Hobby ‘bird of prey’ [15] comes from Old French hobet, a diminutive form of hobe ‘small bird of prey’, whose origins are not known.
=> hobbyhorse, hobgoblin[hobby etymology, hobby origin, 英语词源]
hobnob: hobnob: [18] In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Sir Toby Belch says ‘Hob, nob, is his word: give’t or take’t’; from which it has been deduced that the hob of hobnob represents have and that the nob represents the now obsolete nave ‘not have’ (formed in the Old English period by adding the negative particle ne to have). In Middle English these would have been habbe and nabbe.

When hobnob first appears as a verb, in the mid 18th century, it means ‘drink together’ – perhaps from the notion of buying alternate rounds of drinks, or drinking toasts to each other in turn. The modern sense ‘associate familiarly, socialize’ is not recorded before the early 19th century.
=> have
hock: hock: English has three words hock. The oldest, ‘joint of a quadruped corresponding to the human ankle’ [16], is short for an earlier hockshin, which comes from Old English hōhsinu. This meant literally ‘heel-sinew’, and the hōh came from the same prehistoric Germanic source as produced modern English heel. In its original sense it can also be spelled hough, but for ‘joint of bacon’, first recorded in the 18th century, hock is the only spelling. Hock ‘Rhinewine’ [17] is short for an earlier hockamore, an anglicization of Hochheimer (Hochheim, on the river Main, is a centre of German wine production). Hock ‘pawn, debt’ [19] comes from Dutch hok ‘prison’, hence ‘debt’; it was introduced to English by Dutch immigrants in the USA.

The -hock of hollyhock, incidentally, comes from Old English hoc ‘mallow’ (and the holly- is an alteration of holy, and has no connection with holly).
=> heel
hockey: hockey: [19] The first known unequivocal reference to the game of hockey comes in William Holloway’s General Dictionary of Provincialisms 1838, where he calls it hawkey, and describes it as ‘a game played by several boys on each side with sticks, called hawkeybats, and a ball’ (the term came from West Sussex). It is not known for certain where the word originated, but it is generally assumed to be related in some way to hook, with reference to the hockey stick’s curved end. The Galway Statutes of 1527 refer to the ‘hurling of the little ball with hockie sticks or staves’, which may mean ‘curved sticks’.
=> hook
hocus pocus: hocus pocus: [17] Hocus pocus came from a phoney Latin phrase – in full hax pax max Deus adimax – used by travelling conjurers to impress their audiences. It was originally used for such a ‘conjurer’, or for a ‘trickster’ in general (‘a Persian hocus pocus performed rare tricks with hands and feet’, Sir Thomas Herbert, Travels into Africa and the Greater Asia 1634), but this had largely died out by the end of the 17th century, leaving ‘trickery, deception’ in full possession. Hoax [18] probably originated as a shortened version of hocus.
=> hoax
hoe: hoe: see hay
hog: hog: [OE] Hog generally means ‘pig’, of course, and has done so since the late Old English period, but it is also a technical term used by farmers and stockmen for a ‘young sheep before its first sheering’, a usage which seems to go back at least to the 14th century, so it could well be that originally the term hog denoted not a type of animal, but its age. Its ultimate source may have been Celtic.
hogmanay: hogmanay: [17] Hogmanay is the Scottish term for ‘New Year’s Eve’, and so might reasonably be supposed to be of Gaelic origin, but in fact it is not. It appears to come from hoguinané, the Norman dialect version of Old French aguillanneuf, a greeting given when exchanging New Year’s gifts (and possibly a contraction of accueillis l’an neuf ‘welcome the new year’).
hoi polloi: hoi polloi: see polyp
hoist: hoist: [16] The history of hoist cannot be traced back very far. It is an alteration of a now defunct hoise (probably due to the mistaking of the past form hoised for a present form), which itself was an alteration of an earlier heise. This probably came from, or at least was related to, Dutch hijsen or Low German hissen ‘raise’. Heist ‘robbery, hold-up’ [20], which originated in the USA, is a variant of hoist, and perhaps represents a survival of heise.
=> heist
hold: hold: Hold ‘grasp, clasp’ [OE] and hold ‘cargo store’ [16] are not the same word. The verb goes back to a prehistoric Germanic source which meant ‘watch, guard’. This ancestral sense is preserved in the derivative behold [OE], but the simple verb hold, together with its relatives German halten (source of English halt), Dutch houden, Swedish hålla, and Danish holde, has moved on via ‘keep’ to ‘have in the hands’. The cargo hold, on the other hand, is simply an alteration (influenced by the verb hold) of an earlier hole or holl – which was either the English word hole or a borrowing of its Dutch relative hol.
=> behold, halt; hole
hole: hole: [OE] Etymologically, a hole is a ‘hollow’ place. It originated as a noun use of the Old English adjective hol ‘hollow’ which, together with German hohl, Dutch hol, and Danish hul, all meaning ‘hollow’, goes back to a prehistoric German *khulaz. The source of this is disputed, but it may be related to Indo-European *kel- ‘cover, hide’ (source of English apocalypse, cell, cellar, conceal, hall, hell, helmet, hull ‘pod’, and occult). The semantic connection is presumably that a place that is ‘deep’ or ‘hollowed out’ is also ‘hidden’.
=> apocalypse, cell, conceal, hall, hell, helmet, occult
holiday: holiday: [OE] A holiday was originally a ‘holy day’, a day set aside as a religious festival. The first signs of the word being used for a ‘day on which no work is done’ (originally because of its religious significance) appear in the 14th century.
=> holy
holism: holism: see holocaust
hollow: hollow: [12] Modern English hole comes from an Old English adjective meaning ‘hollow’, and by a coincidental swap hollow originated in an Old English word for ‘hole’ (the two are probably ultimately related). Old English holh meant ‘hollow place’, ‘hole’, or ‘cave’, and presumably came from the same source as produced Old English hol ‘hollow’. In the early Middle English period it began to be used as an adjective, its inflected form holge having become holwe, later holew or hollow.
=> cauliflower
hollyhock: hollyhock: see holy
holocaust: holocaust: [13] Etymologically, a holocaust is a ‘complete burning’, and the word was originally used in English for a ‘burnt offering’, a ‘sacrifice completely consumed by fire’ (Mark 12, 33, ‘more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices’ in the Authorized Version, was translated by William Tindale in 1526 as ‘a greater thing than all holocausts and sacrifices’).

It comes via Old French and Latin from Greek holókauston, a compound formed from hólos ‘whole’ (as in English holograph [17] and holism [20], a coinage of the South African statesman Jan Smuts) and kaustós, a relative of Greek kaúein ‘burn’ (from which English gets caustic [14] and cauterize [14]). John Milton was the first English writer to use the word in the wider sense ‘complete destruction by fire’, in the late 17th century, and in the succeeding centuries several precedents were set for its modern application to ‘nuclear destruction’ and ‘mass murder’ – Bishop Ken, for instance, wrote in 1711 ‘Should general Flame this World consume … An Holocaust for Fontal Sin’, and Leitch Ritchie in Wanderings by the Loire 1833 refers to Louis VII making ‘a holocaust of thirteen hundred persons in a church’.
=> caustic, cauterize, holism
holster: holster: [17] Holster was probably borrowed from Dutch holster, and may well be related to Old English heolster ‘cover’, which did not survive into the Middle English period. It seems likely that its ultimate source was Indo- European *kel- ‘cover, hide’, a prolific progenitor of English words including apocalypse, cell, cellar, conceal, hall, hell, helmet, hole, hollow, hull ‘pod’, and occult.
=> apocalypse, cell, conceal, hall, hell, helmet, occult
holy: holy: [OE] Holy originated as a derivative of the prehistoric Germanic adjective which produced modern English whole, and so its etymological meaning is perhaps ‘unimpaired, inviolate’. This ancestral form was *khailagaz, which diversified into German and Dutch heilig, Swedish helig, and Danish hellig as well as English holy. Hallow is essentially the same word, and compounds with holy as a now hidden component include hollyhock [13] as well as holiday.
=> hallow, holiday
home: home: [OE] Old English hām meant ‘place where one lives, house, village’. The last of these survives only in place-names (such as Birmingham, Fulham), and it is the ‘house, abode’ sense that has come through into modern English home. Its ancestor was prehistoric Germanic *khaim-, which also produced German heim, Dutch heem, Swedish hem, and Danish hjem. It is not clear where this came from, although some have connected it with Latin civis ‘citizen’.