英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

horse [horse 词源字典]: horse: [OE] The Germanic languages have gone their own way as far as the horse is concerned. The prehistoric Indo-European term for the animal was *ekwos, which produced Latin equus (source of English equestrian and equine), Greek híppos (whence English hippodrome and hippopotamus), Sanskrit açvás, and Old English eoh. Remarkably, though, this has virtually died out as the day-to-day word for ‘horse’ in the modern European branches of the Indo- European languages.

In the case of English, it has been replaced by a descendant of prehistoric Germanic *khorsam or *khorsaz: horse (German ross, now mainly a literary term equivalent to English steed, is related). Its source is not known, although some have linked it with Latin currere ‘run’.
[horse etymology, horse origin, 英语词源]
hose: hose: [OE] The original meaning of hose was ‘leg-covering, stocking’. It comes from a prehistoric Germanic *khuson, which also produced German hose and Dutch hoos. It appears that the metaphorical transference from a ‘long tubular stocking’ to a ‘long tube for conveying liquid’ was first made in Dutch; it was introduced into English in the 15th century.
hospital: hospital: [13] Like hospices, hostels, and hotels, hospitals were originally simply places at which guests were received. The word comes via Old French hospital from medieval Latin hospitāle, a noun use of the adjective hospitālis ‘of a guest’. This in turn was derived from hospit-. the stem of Latin hospes ‘guest, host’.

In English, hospital began its semantic shift in the 15th century, being used for a ‘home for the elderly or infirm, or for down-and-outs’; and the modern sense ‘place where the sick are treated’ first appeared in the 16th century. The original notion of ‘receiving guests’ survives, of course, in hospitality [14] and hospitable [16]. Hospice [19] comes via French from Latin hospitium ‘hospitality’, another derivative of hospes.
=> hospice, hospitable, host, hostel, hotel
host: host: Indo-European *ghostis denoted ‘stranger’. From it were descended Germanic *gastiz (source of English guest), Greek xénos ‘guest, stranger’ (source of English xenon and xenophobia), and Latin hostis ‘stranger, enemy’. This original meaning is retained in the derived adjective hostile [16], but the noun itself in postclassical times came to mean ‘army’, and that is where (via Old French) English got host ‘army’ [13] from.

Its main modern sense, ‘large number’, is a 17th-century development. But Latin had another noun, hospes ‘host’, which was probably derived from hostis. Its stem form, hospit-, passed into Old French as hoste (whose modern French descendant hôte means both ‘host’ and ‘guest’). English borrowed this in the 13th century, giving it a second noun host, quite distinct in meaning, but ultimately of the same origin. (Other English words that owe their existence to Latin hospes include hospice, hospital, hostel, hotel, and ostler.) But that is not the end of the host story.

English has yet another noun host, meaning ‘bread of the Eucharist’ [14]. This comes via Old French hoiste from Latin hostia ‘sacrifice, victim’.
=> guest, hospital, hostile, hotel, ostler, xenon, xenophobia
hostage: hostage: [13] Despite its similarity, hostage is not related to any of the English words host. It comes via Old French hostage from *obsidāticum, a Vulgar Latin derivative of late Latin obsidātus ‘condition of being held as a security for the fulfilment of an undertaking’. This is turn was based on Latin obses ‘hostage’, a compound noun formed from the prefix ob- ‘before’ and the base of sedēre ‘sit’ (English obsess [16] is made up of virtually the same elements). The use of hostage for the ‘person held’ was established before English took it over.
=> obsess
hostel: hostel: see hotel
hot: hot: [OE] Hot is the English member of a family of adjectives widespread in Germanic, but with very few outside relatives. Its first cousins are German heiss, Dutch heet, Swedish het, and Danish hed, which point back to a prehistoric Germanic ancestor *khaitaz (the English noun and verb heat come from the same source). Lithuanian kaisti and Latvian kaist ‘become hot’ are allied forms.
=> heat
hotchpotch: hotchpotch: [15] Hotchpotch is an alteration (for the sake of the rhyme) of an earlier hotchpot. This was borrowed from an Old French compound made up of hocher ‘shake’ (perhaps from Frankish hottisōn) and pot ‘pot’. So originally the word meant literally ‘shake the pot’ – presumably to blend an assortment of ingredients, although it is not certain that the allusion was in the first instance culinary. (Old French hocher, incidentally, may well have been the source of the Scottish verb hotch ‘shake, fidget’ [14].)
hot dog: hot dog: [19] This term for a cooked sausage or frankfurter in a bun has its origins in the mid- 19th-century use of dog as an American slang term for a sausage (perhaps an allusion to the sausage’s often dubious contents). By the 1890s hot dog was Yale University slang for a cooked sausage bought at a fast-food stall, and by 1900 it was in widespread use for the whole deal, bun and all. Since then it has never looked back. (The widely repeated story that the term was invented by the US cartoonist ‘Tad’ Dorgan in the early 1900s is quite untrue.)
hotel: hotel: [17] Ultimately, hotel and hospital are the same word, but they have diverged widely over the centuries. Both go back to medieval Latin hospitāle ‘place where guests are received, hospice’, but this developed in two different ways in Old French. One branch led with little change to English hospital, but a reduced form hostel also emerged (borrowed by English as hostel [13]).

Its modern French descendant is hôtel, from which English gets hotel (originally used in the sense ‘large residence’, as in the French hôtel de ville ‘town hall’, but since the 18th century increasingly restricted to its present-day sense). Other contributions made to English by Old French hostel are the derivatives hostelry [14] and ostler [13], originally (as hosteler) ‘someone who receives guests’ but since the 14th century used for someone who looks after horses at an inn.
=> hospital, host, hostel, hostelry, ostler
hound: hound: [OE] Until superseded around the 16th century by dog, hound was the main English word for ‘dog’ (and indeed its relatives in the other Germanic languages remain so – German, Swedish, and Danish hund, for instance, and Dutch hond). It goes back ultimately to Indo- European *kuntos, a derivative of the base which also produced Greek kúōn ‘dog’ (source of English cynic and, according to some etymologists, quinsy), Latin canis ‘dog’ (whence French chien and Italian cane, not to mention English canine, canary, chenille, and kennel), Welsh ci ‘dog’ (as in corgi [20], literally ‘dwarf dog’), and Russian sobaka ‘dog’.

Since the 16th century, English hound has been used largely for ‘hunting dog’.
=> canary, canine, chenille, cynic, kennel, quinsy
hour: hour: [13] Greek hórā (a distant relative of English year) was originally a rather vague term, denoting ‘period of time, season’. In due course it came to be applied more specifically to ‘one twelfth of a day (from sunrise to sunset)’, but as this varied in length according to the time of the year, hórā was still far from being a precise unit of time. Not until the Middle Ages (when hórā had passed via Latin hora and Old French hore into English as hour) did the term become fixed to a period of sixty minutes. (The same sort of vague relationship between ‘time’ in general or ‘period of time’ and ‘fixed period’ is shown in Swedish timme, which is related to English time but means ‘hour’; in German stunde, which originally meant ‘period of time’, but now means ‘hour’; and indeed in English tide, which in Old English times meant ‘hour’ but now, insofar as it survives as a temporal term, denotes ‘season’ – as in Whitsuntide.) English horoscope [16] comes ultimately from Greek hōroskópos, a compound which meant literally ‘observer of time’ – that is, of the ‘time of birth’.
=> horoscope, year
house: house: [OE] The ultimate origins of house are uncertain. The furthest it can be positively traced into the past is to a prehistoric Germanic *khūsam, which also produced German haus, Dutch huus (probably a close relative of English husk), and Swedish hus (descendant of Old Norse hús, which provided the hus- of English husband). Beyond that, all is speculation: some have argued, for instance, that *khūsam came from an Indo-European *keudh- ‘cover, hide’, source also of English hide, hoard, and hut.
=> husband, husk, husting
how: how: [OE] How belongs to the large family of question-words which in Indo-European began with qw- (as in English quantity, query, etc). The phonetic descendant of this in prehistoric Germanic was khw-, which in modern English is represented by wh-. How itself comes from a West Germanic adverb *khwō formed from the base that also produced English what and who; like who it has lost its /w/ sound, but since who did not lose it until considerably later the spelling wh remains as a reminder of it.

The how! with which North American Indians supposedly greet each other is not the same word, incidentally. It is an imitation of a Sioux word, such as Dakota háo or Omaha hau.
=> what, who
howitzer: howitzer: [17] Czech houfnice denotes a ‘large catapult’ for hurling stones at the enemy. It was borrowed into German as houfenitz, and this made its way into English as howitz at the end of the 17th century. This had died out within a hundred years, but at around the same time English acquired howitzer, probably via Dutch houwitser, which has stood the test of time.
hoyden: hoyden: see heathen
hub: hub: [17] Hub is one of those words that emerge unheralded from the undergrowth of language, its forbears uncertain. It seems originally to have meant ‘lump’, and is probably ultimately the same word as hob [16]. This was at first spelled hub and may have denoted a lump of clay used as a bakestone, or a brick or clay projection at the back of a fire on which things were placed to keep warm. And hobnail [16] is etymologically a nail with a large ‘lumpy’ head.
=> hob
hubbub: hubbub: [16] Hubbub is an Irish contribution to English. It comes from Irish Gaelic hooboobbes, which appears to be related to the Old Irish battle-cry abú. This was a derivative of buide ‘victory’ (a relative of which across the Irish Sea formed the basis of the name Boudicca or Boadicea, the Ancient Britons’ version of Victoria). English acquired the word (and the now disused longer form hubbuboo) in the mid 16th century, and originally used it for the ‘warcry of a savage tribe’; the modern sense ‘noisy turmoil’ developed in the 17th century.
huckster: huckster: [12] The Low German dialects of northern Germany appear to have had in prehistoric times a root *huk- which denoted ‘sell’. It has been suggested that this was the source of English hawker ‘peddler’, and with the alternative agent suffix -ster (which originally signified ‘female doer’, but in Low German was used for males) it produced huckster – perhaps borrowed from Middle Dutch hokester.
=> hawk
huddle: huddle: [16] Huddle originally meant ‘hide’ (‘to chop off the head of the sentence, and slyly huddle the rest’, James Bell’s translation of Walter Haddon against Orosius 1581), suggesting that it could well be a derivative of the same base as produced English hide (its form indicates that it would have come via a Low German dialect). But virtually from the first huddling was more than just ‘hiding’ – it was ‘hiding in a heap or among a crowd’; and from this has developed the word’s modern meaning ‘crowd or draw together’.