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ache [ache 词源字典]: ache: [OE] Of the noun ache and the verb ache, the verb came first. In Old English it was acan. From it was formed the noun, æce or ece. For many centuries, the distinction between the two was preserved in their pronunciation: in the verb, the ch was pronounced as it is now, with a /k/ sound, but the noun was pronounced similarly to the letter H, with a /ch/ sound.

It was not until the early 19th century that the noun came regularly to be pronounced the same way as the verb. It is not clear what the ultimate origins of ache are, but related forms do exist in other Germanic languages (Low German āken, for instance, and Middle Dutch akel), and it has been conjectured that there may be some connection with the Old High German exclamation (of pain) ah.
[ache etymology, ache origin, 英语词源]
acorn: acorn: [OE] Acorn has no etymological connection with oak; its nearest linguistic relative in English is probably acre. The Old English word was æcern, which may well have derived from æcer ‘open land’ (the related Middle High German ackeran referred to beech mast as well as acorns, and Gothic akran developed more widely still, to mean simply ‘fruit’).

There are cognate words in other, non- Germanic, Indo-European languages, such as Russian yagoda ‘berry’ and Welsh aeron ‘fruits’. Left to develop on its own, æcern would have become modern English achern, but the accidental similarity of oak and corn have combined to reroute its pronunciation.
=> acre
acre: acre: [OE] Acre is a word of ancient ancestry, going back probably to the Indo-European base *ag-, source of words such as agent and act. This base had a range of meanings covering ‘do’ and ‘drive’, and it is possible that the notion of driving contributed to the concept of driving animals on to land for pasture. However that may be, it gave rise to a group of words in Indo- European languages, including Latin ager (whence English agriculture), Greek agros, Sanskrit ájras, and a hypothetical Germanic *akraz.

By this time, people’s agricultural activities had moved on from herding animals in open country to tilling the soil in enclosed areas, and all of this group of words meant specifically ‘field’. From the Germanic form developed Old English æcer, which as early as 1000 AD had come to be used for referring to a particular measured area of agricultural land (as much as a pair of oxen could plough in one day).
=> act, agent, agriculture, eyrie, onager, peregrine, pilgrim
adder: adder: [OE] In Old English, the term for a snake (any snake, not just an adder) was nǣddre; there are or were related forms in many other European languages, such as Latin natrix, Welsh neidr, and German natter (but there does not seem to be any connection with the natterjack toad). Around the 14th century, however, the word began to lose its initial consonant. The noun phrase including the indefinite article, a nadder, became misanalysed as an adder, and by the 17th century nadder had disappeared from the mainstream language (though it survived much longer in northern dialects).
aesthetic: aesthetic: [18] In strict etymological terms, aesthetic relates to perception via the senses. It comes ultimately from the Greek verb aísthesthai ‘perceive’ (which is related to Latin audīre ‘hear’), and this meaning is preserved in anaesthetic, literally ‘without feeling’. The derived adjective aisthētikós reached Western Europe via modern Latin aesthēticus, and was first used (in its Germanized form ästhetisch) in the writings of the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).

Here, it retained its original sense, ‘perceptual’, but its use by A T Baumgarten as the title (Æsthetica) of a work on the theory of beauty in art (1750) soon led to its adoption in its now generally accepted meaning.
=> audible, audition
after: after: [OE] In the first millennium AD many Germanic languages had forms cognate with Old English æfter (Gothic aftra, for example, and Old Norse aptr), but, with the exception of Dutch achter, none survive. It is not clear what their ultimate origin is, but the suffix they share may well be a comparative one, and it is possible that they derive from a Germanic base *af- (represented in Old English æftan ‘from behind’).

It has been suggested that this goes back to Indo-European *ap- (source of Latin ab ‘away, from’ and English of(f)), in which case after would mean literally ‘more off’ – that is, ‘further away’. Nautical aft is probably a shortening of abaft, formed, with the prefixes a- ‘on’ and be- ‘by’, from Old English æftan.
=> of, off
aftermath: aftermath: [16] Originally, and literally, an aftermath was a second crop of grass or similar grazing vegetation, grown after an earlier crop in the same season had been harvested. Already by the mid 17th century it had taken on the figurative connotations of ‘resulting condition’ which are today its only living sense. The -math element comes from Old English mǣth ‘mowing’, a noun descended from the Germanic base *mǣ, source of English mow.
=> mow
aghast: aghast: [13] Aghast was originally the past participle of a verb, agasten ‘frighten’, which in turn was based on the Old English verb gǣstan ‘torment’. The spelling with gh did not finally become established until the 18th century, and in fact aghast was the last in a series of etymologically related words in the general semantic area of ‘fear’ and ‘horror’ to undergo this transformation. It seems to have acquired its gh by association with ghastly, which in turn got it from ghost (probably under the ultimate influence of Flemish gheest).
alms: alms: [OE] The word alms has become much reduced in its passage through time from its ultimate Greek source, eleēmosúnē ‘pity, alms’. This was borrowed into post-classical (Christian) Latin as eleēmosyna, which subsequently became simplified in Vulgar Latin to *alimosina (source of the word for ‘alms’ in many Romance languages, such as French aumône and Italian limosina).

At this stage Germanic borrowed it, and in due course dispersed it (German almosen, Dutch aalmoes). It entered Old English as ælmesse, which became reduced in Middle English to almes and finally by the 17th century to alms (which because of its -s had come to be regarded as a plural noun). The original Greek eleēmosúnē is itself a derivative, of the adjective eleémōn ‘compassionate’, which in turn came from the noun éleos ‘pity’.

From medieval Latin eleēmosyna was derived the adjective eleēmosynarius (borrowed into English in the 17th century as the almost unpronounceable eleemosynary ‘giving alms’). Used as a noun, this passed into Old French as a(u)lmonier, and eventually, in the 13th century, became English aumoner ‘giver of alms’. The modern sense of almoner as a hospital social worker did not develop until the end of the 19th century.
=> almoner, eleemosynary
ant: ant: [OE] The word ant appears to carry the etymological sense ‘creature that cuts off or bites off’. Its Old English form, æmette, was derived from a hypothetical Germanic compound *aimaitjōn, formed from the prefix *ai- ‘off, away’ and the root *mait- ‘cut’ (modern German has the verb meissen ‘chisel, carve’): thus, ‘the biter’.

The Old English word later developed along two distinct strands: in one, it became emmet, which survived into the 20th century as a dialectal form; while in the other it progressed through amete and ampte to modern English ant. If the notion of ‘biting’ in the naming of the ant is restricted to the Germanic languages (German has ameise), the observation that it and its nest smell of urine has been brought into play far more widely.

The Indo-European root *meigh-, from which ultimately we get micturate ‘urinate’ [18], was also the source of several words for ‘ant’, including Greek múrmēx (origin of English myrmecology ‘study of ants’, and also perhaps of myrmidon [14] ‘faithful follower’, from the Myrmidons, a legendary Greek people who loyally followed their king Achilles in the Trojan war, and who were said originally to have been created from ants), Latin formīca (hence English formic acid [18], produced by ants, and formaldehyde [19]), and Danish myre.

It also produced Middle English mire ‘ant’, the underlying meaning of which was subsequently reinforced by the addition of piss to give pismire, which again survived dialectally into the 20th century.
any: any: [OE] Any is descended from a prehistoric Germanic compound meaning literally ‘one-y’ (a formation duplicated in unique, whose Latin source ūnicus was compounded of ūnus ‘one’ and the adjective suffix -icus). Germanic *ainigaz was formed from *ain- (source of English one) and the stem *-ig-, from which the English adjective suffix -y is ultimately derived. In Old English this had become ǣnig, which diversified in Middle English to any and eny; modern English any preserves the spelling of the former and the pronunciation of the latter.
=> one
apple: apple: [OE] Words related to apple are found all over Europe; not just in Germanic languages (German apfel, Dutch appel, Swedish äpple), but also in Balto-Slavonic (Lithuanian óbuolas, Polish jabtko), and Celtic (Irish ubhall, Welsh afal) languages. The Old English version was æppel, which developed to modern English apple.

Apparently from earliest times the word was applied not just to the fruit we now know as the apple, but to any fruit in general. For example, John de Trevisa, in his translation of De proprietatibus rerum 1398 wrote ‘All manner apples that is, “fruit” that are enclosed in a hard skin, rind, or shell, are called Nuces nuts’. The term earth-apple has been applied to several vegetables, including the cucumber and the potato (compare French pomme de terre), and pineapple (which originally meant ‘pine cone’, with particular reference to the edible pine nuts) was applied to the tropical fruit in the 17th century, because of its supposed resemblance to a pine cone.
ark: ark: [OE] The notion underlying ark seems to be that of ‘enclosing or defending a space’. Its ultimate Latin source, arca ‘large box or chest’, was related to arx ‘citadel’ and to arcēre ‘close up’ (from which English gets arcane). Arca was borrowed into prehistoric Germanic, and came into English as ærc. In addition to meaning ‘chest’ (a sense which had largely died out by the 18th century), it signified the ‘coffer in which the ancient Hebrews kept the tablets of the Ten Commandments’ – the Ark of the Covenant – and by extension, the large commodious vessel in which Noah escaped the Flood.
=> arcane, exercise
arrow: arrow: [OE] Appropriately enough, the word arrow comes from the same ultimate Indo- European source that produced the Latin word for ‘bow’ – *arkw-. The Latin descendant of this was arcus (whence English arc and arch), but in Germanic it became *arkhw-. From this basic ‘bow’ word were formed derivatives in various Germanic languages meaning literally ‘that which belongs to the bow’ – that is, ‘arrow’ (Gothic, for instance, had arhwazna).

The Old English version of this was earh, but it is recorded only once, and the commonest words for ‘arrow’ in Old English were strǣl (still apparently in use in Sussex in the 19th century, and related to German strahl ‘ray’) and fiān (which remained in Scottish English until around 1500). Modern English arrow seems to be a 9th-century reborrowing from Old Norse *arw-.
=> arc, arch
arse: arse: [OE] Arse is a word of considerable antiquity, and its relatives are found practically from end to end of the geographical range of the Indo-European language family, from Old Irish err ‘tail’ in the west to Armenian or ‘rump’. Its Indo-European source was *órsos, which produced the Germanic form *arsaz: hence German arsch, Dutch aars, and, via Old English ærs, English arse.

The euphemistic American spelling ass appears to be as recent as the 1930s, although there is one isolated (British) record of it from 1860. The term wheatear, for a thrushlike European bird, is an alteration over time of a Middle English epithet ‘white arse’, after its white rump feathers.
ash: ash: [OE] There are two distinct words ash in English: ash the tree and ash ‘burnt material’. The tree (Old English æsc) comes from a prehistoric Germanic *askiz, which in turn derived from the Indo-European base *os-; this was the source of several tree-names in other Indo-European languages, not all of them by any means corresponding to the ash: Latin ornus, for instance, meant ‘elm’, and Albanian ah is ‘beech’. Ash as in ‘cigarette ash’ is a descendant of Old English æsce.

It has cognate forms in other Germanic languages (German asche, Dutch asch, Swedish aska), pointing to a prehistoric Germanic *azgon, which may be related to the Latin verbs ārēre ‘be dry’ (source of English arid) and ārdēre ‘burn’ (source of English ardent, ardour, and arson).
=> ardent, arid, arson
at: at: [OE] The preposition at was originally found throughout the Germanic languages: Old English had æt, Old High German az, Gothic and Old Norse at. It survives in the Scandinavian languages (Swedish att, for instance) as well as English, but has been lost from German and Dutch. Cognates in other Indo-European languages, including Latin ad ‘to, at’, suggest an ultimate common source.
awl: awl: [OE] The Old English form, æl, came from a hypothetical Germanic base *āl-, which had a probable relative in Sanskrit ārā. The compound bradawl was formed in the 19th century using the term brad ‘thin flat nail’, which came originally from Old Norse broddr ‘spike’. Awls, tools for making holes to take nails, are part of the shoemaker’s traditional set of implements: hence the apparently quite recent, early 20thcentury rhyming slang cobbler’s awls (cobblers for short) for ‘balls’.
axe: axe: [OE] Relatives of the word axe are widespread throughout the Indo-European languages, from German axt and Dutch aaks to Latin ascia and Greek axínē. These point back to a hypothetical Indo-European *agwesī or *akusī, which denoted some sort of cutting or hewing tool. The Old English form was æx, and there is actually no historical justification for the modern British spelling axe, which first appeared in the late 14th century; as late as 1885 the Oxford English Dictionary made ax its main form, and it remains so in the USA.
bad: bad: [13] For such a common word, bad has a remarkably clouded history. It does not begin to appear in English until the end of the 13th century, and has no apparent relatives in other languages (the uncanny resemblance to Persian bad is purely coincidental). The few clues we have suggest a regrettably homophobic origin. Old English had a pair of words, bǣddel and bǣdling, which appear to have been derogatory terms for homosexuals, with overtones of sodomy.

The fact that the first examples we have of bad, from the late 13th and early 14th centuries, are in the sense ‘contemptible, worthless’ as applied to people indicates that the connotations of moral depravity may have become generalized from an earlier, specifically anti-homosexual sense.
bake: bake: [OE] The Old English verb bacan goes back to a prehistoric Germanic base *bak-, which also produced German backen, Dutch bakken, and Swedish baka; its ultimate source was the Indo-European base *bhog-, another descendant of which was Greek phógein ‘roast’. Derivatives of the English verb include batch [15], which comes from Old English *bæcce, literally ‘something baked’, and the name Baxter, which originally meant ‘female baker’.
=> batch
bald: bald: [14] In Middle English times, bald was ballede, which suggests that it may have been a compound formed in Old English with the suffix -ede ‘characterized by, having’. It has been conjectured that the first element in the compound was Old English *ball-, meaning ‘white patch’ or ‘blaze’ on an animal’s head; this may be supported by isolated examples of the use of the adjective to mean (of a horse) ‘whitefaced’ from the 16th to the 18th centuries, and by the obsolete dialectal ball meaning both ‘white patch on the head’ and ‘white-faced horse’.

This would have produced the Old English adjective *bællede or *beallede, which, from ‘having a white blaze’, progressed naturally in meaning to ‘hairless’. The compounds piebald [16] and skewbald [17] are both based on bald: piebald means ‘having black and white patches like a magpie’, while skewbald may be based on Middle English skew ‘(cloudy) skies’ or on Old French escu ‘shield’.
=> piebald, skewbald
ballast: ballast: [16] Originally, ballast appears to have meant literally ‘bare load’ – that is, a load carried by a ship simply for the sake of its weight, and without any commercial value. English probably acquired it, via Low German, from a Scandinavian language; Old Swedish and Old Danish had not only ballast but also barlast, which appears to betray the word’s component parts: bar, related to English bare, and last ‘burden’ (Old English had hlæst ‘burden’, related to lade, which survived into the 20th century as a measure of weight for various commodities).
=> bare, lade
bare: bare: [OE] Bare is an ancient word, traceable back to an Indo-European *bhosos. Descendants of this in non-Germanic languages include Lithuanian basas ‘barefoot’, but for the most part it is the Germanic languages that have adopted the word. Germanic *bazaz produced German and Swedish bar, Dutch baar, and, via Old English bær, modern English bare.
barley: barley: [OE] The Old English word for ‘barley’ was bære or bere. It came from an Indo- European base *bhar- which also gave Latin farīna ‘flour’ (from which English gets farinaceous [17]) and Old Norse farr ‘barley’. Barley (Old English bærlic) was in fact originally an adjective formed from this (like princely based on prince), and it was not until the early twelfth century that it came to be used as a noun. A barn [OE] was originally a building for storing barley. The Old English word ber(e)n was a compound formed from bere and ern or ærn ‘house’ (which may be related to English rest).
=> barn, farinaceous, farrago
bass: bass: Bass the fish [15] and bass the musical term [15] are of course completely unrelated words, with different pronunciations. Bass meaning ‘of the lowest register’ is simply a modified spelling of the adjective base, under the influence of Italian basso. Related words are bassoon [18], from French basson, and basset-horn [19], a partial translation of Italian corno di bassetto, literally ‘bass horn’.

The bass is a spiny-finned fish, and it may be that its name is related to Old English byrst ‘bristle’. The Old English term for the fish was bærs, which survived dialectally until the 19th century in the form barse, and it is thought that it goes back to a Germanic base *bars- (source of German barsch); this may be cognate with *bors-, from which Old English byrst came.

In the 15th century, barse underwent some sort of phonetic mutation to produce bass.
=> base, bassoon
bath: bath: [OE] Bath is a word widely dispersed among the Germanic languages (German has bad, as does Swedish). Like the others, Old English bæth goes back to a hypothetical Germanic *batham, which perhaps derives from the base *ba- (on the suffix -th see BIRTH). If this is so, it would be an indication (backed up by other derivatives of the same base, such as bake, and cognate words such as Latin fovēre ‘heat’, source of English foment) that the original notion contained in the word was of ‘heat’ rather than ‘washing’.

This is preserved in the steam bath and the Turkish bath. The original verbal derivative was bathe, which goes back to Germanic *bathōn (another derivative of which, Old Norse batha, had a reflexive form bathask, which probably lies behind English bask); use of bath as a verb dates from the 15th century.
=> bask, bathe
beach: beach: [16] Beach is a mystery word. When it first turns up, in the dialect of the southeast corner of England, it means ‘shingle’; and since long stretches of the seashore in Sussex and Kent are pebbly, it is a natural extension that the word for ‘shingle’ should come to be used for ‘shore’. Its ultimate source is obscure, but some etymologists have suggested a connection with Old English bæce or bece ‘stream’ (a relative of English beck [14]), on the grounds that the new meaning could have developed from the notion of the ‘pebbly bed of a stream’.
=> beck
bellows: bellows: [OE] Bellows and belly were originally the same word, Old English belig, which meant ‘bag’. This was used in the compound blǣstbelig, literally ‘blowing bag’, a device for blowing a fire, which was replaced in the late Old English period by the plural form of the noun, belga or belgum, from which we get bellows. Meanwhile the meaning of belly developed from ‘bag’ to, in the 13th century, ‘body’ and, in the 14th century, ‘abdomen’.

Ultimately the word goes back to Germanic *balgiz ‘bag’, from the base *balg- or *belg- (itself a descendant of Indo-European *bhel- ‘swell’), which also lies behind billow [16], bolster, and possibly bellow and bell.
=> bell, bellow, belly, billow, bold, bolster
bequeath: bequeath: [OE] Etymologically, what you bequeath is what you ‘say’ you will leave someone in your will. The word comes from Old English becwethan, a derivative of cwethan ‘say’, whose past tense cwæth gives us quoth (it is no relation to quote, by the way). The original sense ‘say, utter’ died out in the 13th century, leaving the legal sense of ‘transferring by will’ (first recorded in 1066).

The noun derivative of Old English cwethan in compounds was -cwiss. Hence we can assume there was an Old English noun *becwiss, although none is recorded. The first we hear of it is at the beginning of the 14th century, when it had unaccountably had a t added to it, producing what we now know as bequest.
=> bequest, quoth
berry: berry: [OE] Berry is a strictly Germanic word, not found in other branches of Indo-European (German has beere, Dutch bes, and Danish bær). Its earliest application seems to have been specifically to grapes; the only record of it in Old Saxon and Gothic is in the compound ‘wineberry’, and around 1000 Aelfric translated Deuteronomy 23:24 into Old English as ‘If you go into your friend’s vineyard, eat the berries’.

But by the Middle Ages the term had broadened out to encompass the sorts of fruit we would recognize today as berries. The word goes back ultimately to a prehistoric Germanic *basj-, which it has been speculated may be related to Old English basu ‘red’.
bid: bid: [OE] Bid has a complicated history, for it comes from what were originally two completely distinct Old English verbs. The main one was biddan (past tense bæd) ‘ask, demand’, from which we get such modern English usages as ‘I bade him come in’. It goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *bithjan (source of German bitten ‘ask’), which was formed from the base *beth- (from which modern English gets bead).

But a contribution to the present nexus of meanings was also made by Old English bēodan (past tense bēad) ‘offer, proclaim’ (whence ‘bid at an auction’ and so on). This can be traced ultimately to an Indo- European base *bh(e)udh-, which gave Germanic *buth-, source also of German bieten ‘offer’ and perhaps of English beadle [13], originally ‘one who proclaims’.
=> bead, beadle
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-.
bladder: bladder: [OE] Old English blǣdre came from a hypothetical West and North Germanic *blǣdrōn, a derivative of the stem *blǣ-, from which we get blow. The name perhaps comes from the bladder’s capacity for inflation. It was originally, and for a long time exclusively, applied to the urinary bladder.
=> blow
blade: blade: [OE] The primary sense of blade appears to be ‘leaf’ (as in ‘blades of grass’, and German blatt ‘leaf’). This points back to the ultimate source of the word, the Germanic stem *bhlō-, from which English also gets bloom, blossom, and the now archaic blow ‘come into flower’. However, the earliest sense recorded for Old English blæd was the metaphorical ‘flattened, leaflike part’, as of an oar, spade, etc. The specific application to the sharp, cutting part of a sword or knife developed in the 14th century.
=> bloom, blossom, blow
bleak: bleak: [16] Bleak originally meant ‘pale’, and comes ultimately from an Indo-European base *bhleg-, possible source of black and a variant of *phleg-, which produced Greek phlégein ‘burn’ and Latin flagrāre ‘burn’ (whence English conflagration and flagrant; flame, fulminate, and refulgent are also closely related).

From *bhlegcame the prehistoric Germanic adjective *blaikos ‘white’, from which Old English got blāc ‘pale’ (the sense relationship, as with the possibly related blaze, is between ‘burning’, ‘shining brightly’, ‘white’, and ‘pale’). This survived until the 15th century in southern English dialects as bloke, and until the 16th century in the North as blake.

Its disappearance was no doubt hastened by its resemblance to black, both formally and semantically, since both ‘pale’ and ‘dark’ carry implications of colourlessness. Blake did however persist in Northern dialects until modern times in the sense ‘yellow’. Meanwhile, around the middle of the 16th century bleak had begun to put in an appearance, borrowed from a close relative of bloke/blake, Old Norse bleikr ‘shining, white’.

The modern sense ‘bare’ is recorded from very early on. A derivative of the Germanic base *blaikwas the verb *blaikjōn, source of Old English blǣcan ‘whiten’, the ancestor of modern English bleach (which may be related to blight). And a nasalized version of the stem may have produced blink [14].
=> bleach, blight, blink, conflagration, flagrant, flame, fulminate
blight: blight: [17] Blight appeared out of the blue in the early 17th century in agricultural and horticultural texts, and its origins are far from clear. It has, however, been speculated that it may be connected with the Old English words blǣce and blǣcthu, both terms for some sort of itchy skin condition such as scabies. These in turn are probably related to Old English blǣcan ‘bleach’, the link being the flaky whiteness of the infected skin.

In Middle English, blǣcthu would have become *bleht, which could plausibly have been the source of blight. A related piece in the jigsaw is blichening ‘blight or rust in corn’, found once in Middle English, which may have come ultimately from Old Norse blikna ‘become pale’.
=> bleach
blow: blow: There are three distinct blows in English. The commonest, the verb ‘send out air’ [OE], can be traced back to an Indo-European base *bhlā-. It came into English (as Old English blāwan) via Germanic *blǣ-, source also of bladder. The Indo-European base also produced Latin flāre ‘blow’, from which English gets flatulent and inflate.

The other verb blow, ‘come into flower’ [OE], now archaic, comes ultimately from Indo-European *bhlō-. It entered English (as Old English blōwan) via Germanic *blo-, from which English also gets bloom and probably blade. A variant form of the Indo-European base with -s- produced Latin flōs (source of English flower) and English blossom.

The noun blow ‘hard hit’ [15] is altogether more mysterious. It first appears, in the form blaw, in northern and Scottish texts, and it has been connected with a hypothetical Germanic *bleuwan ‘strike’.
=> bladder, flatulent, inflate; blade, bloom, blossom, flower
blue: blue: [13] Colour terms are notoriously slippery things, and blue is a prime example. Its ultimate ancestor, Indo-European *bhlēwos, seems originally to have meant ‘yellow’ (it is the source of Latin flāvus ‘yellow’, from which English gets flavine ‘yellow dye’ [19]). But it later evolved via ‘white’ (Greek phalós ‘white’ is related) and ‘pale’ to ‘livid, the colour of bruised skin’ (Old Norse has blá ‘livid’).

English had the related blāw, but it did not survive, and the modern English word was borrowed from Old French bleu. This was descended from a Common Romance *blāvus, which in turn was acquired from prehistoric Germanic *blǣwaz (source also of German blau ‘blue’).
=> flavine
brain: brain: [OE] Old English brægen came from a Germanic *bragnam. Its rather restricted distribution in modern Germanic languages (apart from English brain there is only Dutch and Frisian brein) suggests that in prehistoric times it may have been limited to the area of North Germany where the Low German dialects were spoken, but it may well have some connection with Greek brekhmós ‘forehead’.
braise: braise: [18] Braise has a wide range of rather surprising living relatives. Its immediate source is French braiser, a derivative of braise ‘live coals’ (from which English gets brazier [17] and the breeze of breezeblock). In Old French this was brese, a borrowing from Germanic *brasa, which came from the same base as produced German braten ‘roast’ (as in bratwurst) and Old English brǣdan ‘roast’. The ultimate source of this base was Indo-European *bhrē- ‘burn, heat’, which produced such other diverse offspring as English breath, breed, brood, and probably brawn.
=> brawn, brazier, breath, breed, brood
breadth: breadth: [16] Breadth was formed in the 16th century by adding the suffix -th (as in length) to the already existing noun brede ‘breadth’. This was an ancient formation, directly derived in prehistoric Germanic times from *braid-, the stem of broad. It came into Old English as brǣdu.
=> broad
breath: breath: [OE] Breath comes ultimately from the Indo-European base *bhrē- ‘burn, heat’ (source also of braise, breed, brood, and probably brawn), and in its original Indo-European form *bhrētos appears to have meant something like the ‘steam, vapour, etc given off by something burning or cooking’. When it reached Old English, via Germanic *brǣthaz, it still meant ‘smell’ or ‘exhalation’, and it was not in fact until as late as the 14th century that this notion of ‘exhalation’ came to be applied to human or animal respiration (the main Old English word for ‘breath’ had been ǣthm, which German still has in the form atem).

The verb breathe is 13thcentury.
=> braise, brawn, breed, brood
burn: burn: [OE] English has two separate words burn. The commoner, relating to ‘fire’, is actually a conflation of two Old English verbs: birnan, which was intransitive, and bærnan, which was transitive. Both come ultimately from the Germanic base *bren-, *bran-, which also produced brand and possibly broil, and was the source of German brennen and Swedish brinna ‘burn’ (another variant of the base, *brun-, lies behind the brim- of brimstone).

It has been conjectured that Latin fervēre ‘boil’ (source of English fervent and ferment) may be connected. Burn ‘stream’ comes from Old English burn(e), burna, which was a descendant of a Germanic base *brun-, source also of German brunne ‘stream’. This too has been linked with Latin fervēre (from the notion of fast-running water ‘boiling’ over rocks).
=> brand, brimstone, broil, ferment, fervent
cap: cap: [OE] Old English cæppa came from late Latin cappa ‘hood’, source also of English cape ‘cloak’. The late Latin word may well have come from Latin caput ‘head’, its underlying meaning thus being ‘head covering’.
=> cappuccino, chapel, chaperone, képi
cart: cart: [13] Old English had a word cræt ‘carriage’, which may, by the process known as metathesis (reversal of speech sounds), have produced the word which first appeared at the beginning of the 13th century as karte or carte. But a part must certainly also have been played by Old Norse kartr ‘cart’, and some have also detected the influence of Anglo-Norman carete, a diminutive form of car (source of English car).
=> car
chalice: chalice: [13] Latin calix ‘cup’ and its relative, Greek kálux ‘pod’, perhaps hold the record for the words most often borrowed into English. Calix first made its appearance as part of the original West Germanic stratum of English, into which it had been borrowed from Latin; this was as Old English cælc. Then came cælic, which Old English independently acquired from Latin after the conversion of the English to Christianity.

Next was calice, whose source was an Old French dialectal form descended from Latin calix. And finally, at the end of the 13th century, the main Old French form chalice was adopted. The final twist in the story is that in the 17th century Latin calyx (a descendant of the related Greek kálux) was borrowed into English as a botanical term, ‘outer covering of a flower’.
cheek: cheek: [OE] Old English cēace and cēoce go back respectively to prehistoric West Germanic *kǣkōn and *keukōn, but beyond that the word has no known relatives in other Indo-European languages. It has, however, produced one or two interesting offshoots. It forms the basis of the verb choke, and may be the source of chock-full (literally, ‘full up to the cheeks’); and Middle Dutch kākelen, source of English cackle [13], may be partly based on the related Middle Dutch kāke ‘jaw’. The metaphorical sense ‘impudence’ (whence cheeky) arose in the 19th century, originally as ‘insolent talk’.
=> cackle, chock-full, choke
Christian: Christian: [16] Christian is derived, of course, from the name of Christ. It is a surprisingly recent word, having been introduced in the 16th century from Latin Chrīstiānus, replacing the existing English adjective christen, which came from Old English crīsten. The latter was the basis of the Old English verb crīstnian, from which we get modern English christen.

The name Christ itself was borrowed into Old English from Latin Chrīstus, which in turn came from Greek Khrīstós. This meant literally ‘anointed’, and came from the verb khríein ‘anoint’. It was a direct translation of Hebrew māshīah (source of English messiah), which also meant literally ‘anointed’. Christmas comes from late Old English crīstes mæsse, literally ‘Christ’s mass’.
=> cretin
clammy: clammy: [14] Etymologically, clammy means ‘sticky as if smeared with clay’. It comes from the now obsolete verb clam ‘smear, stick’. This goes back to Old English clǣman, a word of ancient ancestry: its prehistoric Germanic source was *klaimjan, a verb derived from *klaimaz ‘clay’; this was formed from the base *klai-, which is also the ultimate source of English clay and can be traced back to the Indo-European base *gloi-, *glei-, *gli-, from which English gets glue and gluten.
=> clay, glue