英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

tambourine [tambourine 词源字典]: tambourine: [16] Tambourine is one of a small family of English words that go back ultimately to Persian tabīr ‘drum’. This found its way via Provençal tabor and Old French tabour into English as tabor ‘small drum’ [13]. The Persian word was adopted into Arabic, where it was swallowed up by the similar-sounding tambūr ‘lute’ – so that tambūr now meant ‘drum’. This was borrowed into Old French as tambour, and passed on to English as tambour [15]. Tambourine comes from a French diminutive form.
=> tabor[tambourine etymology, tambourine origin, 英语词源]
tame: tame: [OE] Tame evolved from a prehistoric Germanic *tamaz, which also produced German zahm and Dutch tam. This in turn was descended from the Indo-European base *dom-, which also lay behind Latin domāre ‘tame, subdue’ (source of English daunt [13] and indomitable [17]) and Greek damán ‘tame, subdue’ (source of English adamant and diamond).
=> adamant, daunt, diamond, indomitable
tamper: tamper: [16] Tamper began life as a variant of temper. It originally meant ‘mix clay together with water to make it suitable for use’. However, the notion of ‘mixing’ seems to lead on naturally to ‘interference’ (meddle originally meant ‘mix’), and by the end of the 16th century we find that ‘tampering with clay’ had moved on to ‘tampering with anything’ – ‘interfering’ with it.
=> temper
tan: tan: [OE] Tan was borrowed into late Old English from the medieval Latin verb tannāre. This was derived from tannum ‘oak bark’ (oak bark is used in tanning leather), which itself was probably a loan-word from Gaulish tanno- ‘oak’. The French noun tan ‘tan’ came ultimately from the same Latin source. From it was derived tanin, acquired by English as tannin [19]; and its immediate Old French predecessor formed the basis of an adjective tané ‘tancoloured, dark’, whose Anglo-Norman version tauné gave English tawny [14].
=> tannin, tawny
tandem: tandem: [18] Latin tandem meant ‘eventually, at length’. Its use for ‘acting conjointly’ arose from an 18th-century play on words, in which ‘at length’ was jocularly interpreted as ‘lengthwise, in a straight line’, and the word was applied to a ‘carriage drawn by two horses one behind the other in a straight line’. In the 1880s it was transferred to a ‘bicycle with two seats, one behind the other’. Its more general modern use, for ‘acting together’, dates from the early 20th century.
tangerine: tangerine: [18] The tangerine was originally exported to Britain, in the 1840s, from the Moroccan port of Tangier, and so it was called the Tangerine orange (Tangerine started life as an adjective meaning ‘of Tangier’: ‘an old Tangerine captain with a wooden leg’, Joseph Addison, Tatler 1710). This was soon shortened to tangerine. It was first used as a colour term at the end of the 19th century.
tangible: tangible: [16] Tangible means literally ‘touchable’. It comes via French tangible from late Latin tangibilis, a derivative of Latin tangere ‘touch’. Other English words from this source include tangent [16], etymologically a line ‘touching’ a circle. Its past participle tactus has contributed contact, intact, and tact, while the base from which it was formed, *tag-, has also produced contagion, contaminate, entire, and integrity.
=> contact, contagion, contaminate, intact, integrity, tact, task, taste, tax
tank: tank: [17] Tank ‘water-storage container’ originated in India, where it denoted a ‘pond’. It was borrowed from a local word, such as Gujarati tānkh or Marathi tānken ‘pond, cistern’. These in turn probably went back to Sanskrit tadāga ‘pond, lake’, which was of Dravidian origin. The word was applied as a secret code name to the new armoured vehicle at the end of 1915, supposedly because it was thought to resemble a benzene tank.
tannin: tannin: see tan
tantalize: tantalize: [16] The verb tantalize was inspired by the sad story of Tantalus, a mythical king of Phrygia in the ancient world. He had displeased the gods in some way (versions differ as to how, the commonest being that he had stolen their food), and as a punishment he was condemned to stand for ever in water up to his chin, while overhead hung boughs laden with fruit: whenever he stooped to drink, the water disappeared, and when he tried to reach the fruit, the wind blew it away. The term tantalus, coined in the 19th century for a lockable decanter stand whose contents can be seen but not got at, preserves the same idea.
tantamount: tantamount: [17] Tantamount means etymologically ‘amounting to as much’. It comes from an earlier verb tantamount ‘amount to as much as, be equal to’, which was a lexicalization of the Anglo-Norman expression tant amunter ‘amount to as much’. This was made up of tant ‘as much’, which came via Old French from Latin tantus, and amunter, ancestor of English amount.
=> amount, paramount
taper: taper: [OE] Taper is ultimately the same word as paper. Both go bach to Latin papyrus ‘papyrus’. This was used among other things for a ‘candlewick made from papyrus’, and hence for a ‘candle’. It seems to have been borrowed in this sense into Old English as *papur, and by a process known as dissimilation (in which one of a pair of similar speech sounds is changed, so as to break up the pair) it became tapur. The verb taper ‘become narrower’, which emerged in the 16th century, is an allusion to the shape of the candle.
=> paper, papyrus
tapestry: tapestry: [15] The ultimate source of tapestry is Greek tápēs ‘tapestry, woven carpet’. Its diminutive from tapētion was borrowed via late Latin tapētium into Old French as tapis ‘carpet’. From this was derived the verb tapisser ‘cover with a carpet’, and this in turn formed the basis of a noun tapisserie ‘carpets, woven material’. English took it over and altered it to tapestry.
tar: tar: [OE] Tar is etymologically a substance produced from ‘trees’. The word goes back via a prehistoric Germanic *terw- (source also of German and Dutch teer, Swedish tjära, and Danish tjære) to Indo-European *drew- ‘tree’ (source of English tree) – the original application of the word evidently having been to the tarry resins produced by conifers. (The tar [17] of Jack tar ‘sailor’ is short for tarpaulin [17], a compound noun probably formed from tar and pall ‘covering’.)
=> tree, trough
tarantella: tarantella: [18] In the 15th century in southern Italy an epidemic of a curious nervous disorder broke out, one of whose symptoms was an uncontrollable compulsion to whirl and cavort around, as if dancing. The people attributed it to the bite of a spider, the tarantula [16], named after the local town and seaport of Taranto. In due course the dancing came to be rationalized as a method of counteracting the effects of the spider’s bite, and it was named tarantella, a diminutive form of Taranto. The word finally came to stand for a particular type of dance.
tardy: tardy: see bustard
tarmac: tarmac: [20] The term tarmac commemorates the name of John Loudon McAdam (1756–1836), a Scottish civil engineer who developed a method of levelling roads and covering them with gravel. Setting the gravel in tar produced in the 1880s the term tarmacadam, and in 1903 the abbreviated form tarmac was registered as a trademark. By 1919 the word was being used in British English as a synonym for ‘runway’.
task: task: see tax
taste: taste: [13] The origins of taste are not entirely clear, but what does seem certain is that it is connected in some way with Latin tangere ‘touch’; indeed it was originally used for ‘touch’ in English (‘With that finger he will it taste if it is rightly wrought’, St Michael 1290), and its French relative tâter denotes ‘feel’. It was once generally supposed that it came from Latin taxāre ‘feel, assess’ (source of English tax), which was derived from tangere.

The theory is that taxāre produced a Vulgar Latin derivative *taxitāre, which turned into tastāre – whence Old French taster, and eventually English taste. Another theory has it, however, that *tastāre was a blend of tangere with Latin gustāre ‘taste’ (source of English gusto).
=> tangent, tangible
tattoo: tattoo: English has two words tattoo. The older, ‘military display’ [17], was borrowed from a Dutch word, taptoe, that means literally ‘tap to’, that is, ‘shut the tap’ – a signal to shut off the taps of the beer barrels at closing time in the taverns. By the time it reached English it was being used for a ‘drum beat signalling the time for soldiers to return to their quarters at night’, and in the 18th century it was applied to a ‘military display based on this’. The tattoo on the skin [18] was borrowed from a Polynesian language, such as Tahitian (tatau) or Marquesan (ta-tu).
=> tap