英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

tissue [tissue 词源字典]: tissue: [14] Tissue is etymologically ‘woven’ cloth. The word was borrowed from Old French tissu ‘fine woven cloth’, which was a noun use of the past participle of tistre ‘weave’. This in turn was descended from Latin texere ‘weave’ (source of English text, texture, etc). The application of the word to ‘physiological substance’ dates from the early 19th century. The original notion of weaving is preserved metaphorically in expressions such as ‘tissue of lies’.
=> technical, text, texture, toilet[tissue etymology, tissue origin, 英语词源]
tit: tit: English has three separate words tit. The oldest, ‘breast’ [OE], belongs to a West Germanic family of terms for ‘breast’ or ‘nipple’ that also includes German zitze and Dutch tit: it presumably originated in imitation of a baby’s sucking sounds. From Germanic it was borrowed into the Romance languages, giving Italian tetta, Spanish teta, Romanian tata, and French tette.

The Old French ancestor of this, tete, gave English teat [13], which gradually replaced tit as the ‘polite’ term. (Titillate [17] may be ultimately related). Tit the bird [18] is short for titmouse [14]. This in turn was formed from an earlier and now defunct tit, used in compounds denoting ‘small things’ and probably borrowed from a Scandinavian language, and Middle English mose ‘titmouse’, which came from a prehistoric Germanic *maisōn (source also of German meise and Dutch mees ‘tit’).

And the tit [16] of tit for tat (which produced British rhyming slang titfer ‘hat’ [20]) originally denoted a ‘light blow, tap’, and was presumably of onomatopoeic origin. (The tit- of titbit [17], incidentally, is probably a different word. It was originally tid- – as it still is in American English – and it may go back ultimately to Old English tiddre ‘frail’.)
=> teat, titillate; titmouse
titchy: titchy: [20] Titchy commemorates the ‘Tichborne claimant’, the title given to Arthur Orton, who, in an English cause célèbre of the 1860s, returned from Australia claiming to be Roger Tichborne, the heir to an English baronetcy who had supposedly been lost at sea. The diminutive music-hall comedian Harry Relph (1868–28) bore some resemblance to Orton, and so he acquired the nickname ‘Little Tich’.

This in due course spread to other small people (the tiny Kent and England leg-spinner A P Freeman (1888–1965) was called ‘Tich’), but it does not appear to have been until the 1950s that tich, or titch, established itself as a colloquial generic term for a ‘small person’. With it came the derived adjective titchy.
tithe: tithe: [OE] Originally, tithe meant simply a ‘tenth’ – a sense that has revived somewhat in recent years. The specific application to a ‘ten per-cent levy on annual production, paid to the Church’ dates from the 12th century. It comes from Old English tēotha ‘tenth’ (the modern English form tenth arose in the 12th century, through the influence of ten).
=> ten
titillate: titillate: see tit
titivate: titivate: see tidy
title: title: [13] Title comes via Old French title from Latin titulus ‘inscription on a tomb or altar, label, title’. Other contributions made by the Latin word to English include entitle [14], tilde [19], tittle [14], and titular [18].
=> entitle, tilde, tittle, titular
titmouse: titmouse: see tit
to: to: [OE] To comes from a prehistoric West Germanic *tō, which also produced German zu and Dutch toe. This went back ultimately to an Indo-European *do, which also produced Russian do ‘to’. Too is historically the same word as to.
=> too
toad: toad: [OE] Toad is a mystery word, with no known relatives in any other Indo-European language. Of its derivatives, toady [19] is short for the earlier toad eater ‘sycophant’ [17]. This originated in the dubious selling methods of itinerant quack doctors. They employed an assistant who pretended to eat a toad (toads were thought to be poisonous), so that the quack could appear to effect a miraculous cure with his medicine.

The toad-eating assistant came to be a byword for ‘servility’ or ‘dependency’, and hence for ‘servile flattery’. Toadstools [14] were named for their stool-like shape, and also because of an association between poisonous fungi and the supposedly poisonous toad.
toast: toast: [14] Toast comes via Old French toster ‘roast, grill’ from Vulgar Latin *tostāre, a derivative of the past participle of Latin torrēre ‘parch’ (source of English torrid). Its use as a noun, meaning ‘toasted bread’, dates from the 15th century. It was common to put sippets or croutons of spiced toast into drinks to improve their flavour, and it was the custom of gallants in the 17th century, when (as they frequently did) they drank the health of ladies, to say that the name of the lady in question enhanced the flavour of their drink better than any toast.

That is supposedly the origin of the use of the term toast for ‘drinking someone’s health’.
=> thirst, torrent, torrid
tobacco: tobacco: [16] Tobacco was introduced to Europe from the Americas, and that is where its name came from too. It originated in a Carib word, and reached English via Spanish and Portuguese tabaco. What precisely the Carib word meant, however, is a matter of dispute. Some say that it referred to tobacco leaves rolled up into a cylindrical shape for smoking, while others maintain that it denoted a pipe for smoking the tobacco in.

The word has spread to virtually all European languages (French tabac, German, Dutch, Russian, and Czech tabak, Welsh tybaco, etc), and only a few remnants of alternative terms remain: Romanian tutun and Polish tytun, for instance, borrowings from Turkish tütün, which originally meant ‘smoke’, and Breton butun, which came from pety, the word for ‘tobacco’ in the Guarani language of South America (source also of English petunia [19], a close relative of the tobacco plant).
toccata: toccata: see touch
tocsin: tocsin: see touch
today: today: [OE] Today is simply a compound assembled from the preposition to (in the now obsolete sense ‘at, on’) and day. Parallel formations are Dutch vandaag (literally ‘from or of day’) and Swedish and Danish i dag (‘in day’). In fact virtually all the terms for ‘today’ in the European languages contain an element meaning ‘day’, but not all of them are as obvious as today, vandaag, and i dag.

German heute, for instance, comes from a prehistoric Germanic *hiu tagu, which meant literally ‘on this day’. Russian segodnja likewise denotes etymologically ‘this day’. And the second syllable of Latin hodiē ‘today’ (ancestor of French aujourd’hui, Italian oggi, and Spanish hoy) represents an inflected form of diēs ‘day’. Tomorrow and tonight [OE] were formed on the same basis.
toddy: toddy: [17] Toddy originally meant ‘palm sap’. It was an alteration of an earlier tarry, which was borrowed from Hindi tārī. This was a derivative of tār ‘palm tree’, a descendant of Sanskrit tāla or tāra, which in turn was probably borrowed from a Dravidian language of southern India (Kannada has tar, Telugu tādu). This palm sap was used as a drink, often in a potently fermented form, and in the 18th century toddy came to denote a hot spirit-based drink.
toe: toe: [OE] Many European languages use the same word for ‘finger’ and ‘toe’ (Spanish dedo, for example, and Russian and Polish palec), and English toe may have originated in such a dualpurpose term. Its prehistoric Germanic ancestor was *taikhwōn, and it has been speculated that this may be related to Latin digitus ‘finger, toe’ (source of English digit). Other descendants of the Germanic form include German zehe, Dutch tee, Swedish tåa, and Danish taa.
=> digit
toff: toff: [19] Toff probably originated as an alteration of tuft [14], which was used from the 18th century as an Oxford University slang term for a ‘titled undergraduate’ (students who came from noble families wore a gold tassel or ‘tuft’ on their caps). Tuft itself was adapted from Old French tofe or toffe ‘tuft’, a word of Germanic origin.
=> tuft
toffee: toffee: [19] Toffee is one of the mystery words of English. It is an alteration of an earlier taffy [19] (still current in American English), but where that came from is not known. The early 19thcentury spelling toughy suggests that it may have been derived from tough, in allusion to the sweet’s texture, but it is probably only a later folk-etymologizing rationalization. Another possibility is that it came from tafia ‘rumlike drink made from molasses’ [18], an alteration of ratafia [17], which was of West Indian Creole origin.
toga: toga: see protect