英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

advantage [advantage 词源字典]: advantage: [14] Advantage comes from Old French avantage, which was based on avant ‘before’; the notion behind its formation was of being ahead of others, and hence in a superior position. As with advance, the intrusive -dbecame established in the 16th century, on the analogy of words genuinely containing the Latin prefix ad-. The reduced form vantage actually predates advantage in English, having entered the language via Anglo-Norman in the 13th century.
[advantage etymology, advantage origin, 英语词源]
affair: affair: [13] Like ado, and of course to-do, affair originally meant literally ‘to do’. It was coined in Old French from the phrase à faire ‘to do’, and entered English via Anglo-Norman afere. The spelling affair was established by Caxton, who based it on the French model. The specific sense of a ‘love affair’ dates from the early 18th century.
=> fact
ancient: ancient: [14] Like antique, ancient was originally, in Latin, an adjectivized version of the adverb and preposition ‘before’: to ante ‘before’ was added the adjective suffix -ānus, to produce the adjective *anteānus ‘going before’. In Old French this became ancien, and it passed into English via Anglo-Norman auncien. The final -t began to appear in the 15th century, by the same phonetic process as produced it in pageant and tyrant. The now archaic use of ancient as ‘standard, flag’ and as ‘standard-bearer’ (as most famously in Shakespeare’s ‘ancient Pistol’) arose from an alteration of ensign.
=> antique
arbour: arbour: [14] Despite its formal resemblance to, and semantic connections with, Latin arbor ‘tree’, arbour is not etymologically related to it. In fact, its nearest English relative is herb. When it first came into English it was erber, which meant ‘lawn’ or ‘herb/flower garden’. This was borrowed, via Anglo-Norman, from Old French erbier, a derivative of erbe ‘herb’.

This in turn goes back to Latin herba ‘grass, herb’ (in the 16th century a spelling with initial h was common in England). Gradually, it seems that the sense ‘grassy plot’ evolved to ‘separate, secluded nook in a garden’; at first, the characteristic feature of such shady retreats was their patch of grass, but their seclusion was achieved by surrounding trees or bushes, and eventually the criterion for an arbour shifted to ‘being shaded by trees’.

Training on a trellis soon followed, and the modern arbour as ‘bower’ was born. The shift from grass and herbaceous plants to trees no doubt prompted the alteration in spelling from erber to arbour, after Latin arbor; this happened in the 15th and 16th centuries.
=> herb
archer: archer: [13] Like arch, archer comes from Latin arcus ‘curve, bow’. Its hypothetical Vulgar Latin derivative *arcārius ‘bowman’ passed via Old French archier and Anglo-Norman archer into English. The ultimate source of arcus was the Indo-European base *arkw-, from which English arrow eventually developed.
=> arc, arch, arrow
arras: arras: [15] An arras is a tapestry hanging, immortalized by Shakespeare in Hamlet when he conceals Polonius behind one, there to be killed by Hamlet. The word comes from the Anglo-Norman phrase draps d’arras, literally ‘cloth of Arras’: Arras is a city in the Pas-de- Calais, northern France, famous in the Middle Ages as a centre for the manufacture of woollens and tapestry.
arson: arson: [17] Like ardour and ardent, arson comes from the Latin verb ardēre ‘burn’. Its past participle was arsus, from which was formed the noun arsiō ‘act of burning’. This passed via Old French into Anglo-Norman as arson, and in fact was in use in the Anglo-Norman legal language of England from the 13th century onwards (it occurs in the Statute of Westminster 1275). The jurist Sir Matthew Hale was the first to use the word in a vernacular text, in 1680. Other words in English ultimately related to it include arid and probably ash, area, and azalea.
=> ardour, area, ash, azalea
asset: asset: [16] Originally, to have assets was simply to have ‘enough’ – as in French assez. The Anglo-Norman legal phrase aver asetz signified ‘have enough money to meet one’s debts’, and eventually asetz, later assets, passed from the general meaning ‘enough’ to the particular ‘financial resources’ (the final -s caused it to be regarded as a plural noun, but the analogical singular asset does not appear until the 19th century).

Anglo-Norman asetz itself goes back via Old French asez to Vulgar Latin *assatis, formed from the Latin phrase ad satis ‘to enough’ (satis is the source of English satisfy and satiate, and is related to sad).
=> sad, satiate, satisfy
attach: attach: [14] When English first acquired it, attach meant ‘seize’ or ‘arrest’. It is Germanic in origin, but reached us via Old French atachier. This was an alteration of earlier Old French estachier ‘fasten (with a stake)’, which was based on a hypothetical Germanic *stakōn. The metaphorical meaning ‘arrest’ appears to have arisen in Anglo-Norman, the route by which the word reached English from Old French; the original, literal sense ‘fasten, join’ did not arrive in English until as late as the 18th century, as a reborrowing from modern French attacher.

A similar borrowing of Germanic *stakōn into Italian produced the ancestor of English attack.
=> attack, stake
aunt: aunt: [13] Aunt appears to come ultimately from *amma, a hypothetical non-Indo-European word for ‘mother’ (parallel to Indo-European *mammā, and like it reproducing syllables perceived to be uttered by babies), which at some point was borrowed into Latin. It first appears in the derived form amita ‘paternal aunt’, which passed into English via Old French ante (of which modern French tante is an alternation) and Anglo-Norman aunte.
avoid: avoid: [14] Avoid at first meant literally ‘make void, empty’. It was formed in Old French from the adjective vuide ‘empty’ (source of English void [13], and derived from a hypothetical Vulgar Latin *vocitus, which is related ultimately to vacant). With the addition of the prefix es- ‘out’, a verb evuider was formed, which passed into English via Anglo-Norman avoider. The original sense ‘empty’ barely survived into the 17th century, but meanwhile it had progressed through ‘withdrawing, so as to leave someone alone or leave a place empty’ to ‘deliberately staying away from someone or something’.
=> vacant, void
banner: banner: [13] Banner is of Germanic origin, but it reached English via Latin. Early forms which show its Germanic antecedents are Gothic bandwo ‘sign’ and the related Old Norse benda ‘give a sign’, but at some stage it was acquired by Latin, as bandum ‘standard’. This passed via Vulgar Latin *bandāria into various Romance languages, in some of which the influence of derivatives of Germanic *bann- (source of English ban) led to the elimination of the d. Hence Old French baniere and Anglo-Norman banere, source of English banner.
=> ban
baron: baron: [12] The earliest historical sense of baron, ‘tenant under the feudal system who held his land and title directly from the king’, can be traced back to its probable source, medieval Latin barō, which originally meant simply ‘man’, and hence ‘vassal’ or ‘retainer’. The word was of course brought into English by the Normans, as Anglo-Norman barun, and from earliest times was used as a title for someone belonging to the lowest order of peerage. Some have suggested an ultimate Germanic origin, and compared Old High German baro ‘freeman’.
basket: basket: [13] Basket is something of a mystery word. It turns up in the 13th century in Old French and Anglo-Norman as basket and in Anglo-Latin as baskettum, but how it got there is far from clear. Some have suggested that Latin bascauda ‘washing tub’, said by the Roman writer Martial to be of British origin (and thought by some etymologists to be possibly of Celtic origin), may be connected with it in some way, but no conclusive proof of this has ever been found.
beauty: beauty: [13] Beauty came via Anglo-Norman beute and Old French bealte from Vulgar Latin *bellitas, a derivative of Latin bellus ‘beautiful’ (this developed from an earlier, unrecorded *dwenolos, a diminutive form of Old Latin *duenos, *duonos, which is related to Latin bonus ‘good’ – source of English bonus [18], bounty [13], and bounteous [14]).

Other English words from the same ultimate source are beau [17] and its feminine form belle [17]; beatific [17], which comes from Latin beātus ‘blessed, happy’, the past participle of the verb beāre, a relative of bellus; embellish; and bibelot ‘small ornament’ [19], originally a French word based ultimately on *belbel, a reduplication of Old French bel ‘beautiful’.

English beautiful is 15th century.
=> beau, belle, beatific, bibelot, bonus, bounty, embellish
beef: beef: [13] Like mutton, pork, and veal, beef was introduced by the Normans to provide a dainty alternative to the bare animal names ox, cow, etc when referring to their meat. Anglo-Norman and Old French boef or buef (which of course became modern French boeuf) came from Latin bov-, the stem of bōs ‘ox’, from which English gets bovine [19] and Bovril [19]. Bōs itself is actually related etymologically to cow. The compound beefeater ‘yeoman warder of the Tower of London’ was coined in the 17th century; it was originally a contemptuous term for a ‘well-fed servant’.
=> bovine, cow
betray: betray: [13] Betray is an English formation based on the Old French verb traïr ‘betray’, which came from Latin tradere ‘hand over, deliver up’ (originally a compound formed from trans- ‘across’ and dāre ‘give’). The noun formed from tradere was trāditiō, from which English gets, directly, tradition, and indirectly, via Old French and Anglo-Norman, the appropriate treason.
=> tradition, treason
boast: boast: [13] The immediate source of boast appears to be Anglo-Norman bost, but where it came from before that is far from clear; German dialect bauste(r)n ‘swell’ has been compared, suggesting that it could be of Germanic origin. To begin with it meant ‘loud or threatening talk’ as well as ‘bragging’.
boil: boil: Boil ‘large spot’ [OE] and boil ‘vaporize with heat’ [13] are distinct words. The former comes from Old English byl or byle, which became bile in Middle English; the change to boil started in the 15th century, perhaps from association with the verb. The Old English word goes back ultimately to a West Germanic *būlja, whose central meaning element was ‘swelling’; from it also comes German beule ‘lump, boil’.

The verb’s source, via Anglo-Norman boiller, is Latin bullīre, a derivative of bulla ‘bubble’, a word which also gave us bull (as in ‘Papal bull’), bullion, bowl (as in the game of ‘bowls’), budge, bullet, bulletin and bully (as in ‘bully beef’), as well, perhaps, as bill.
=> bill, bowl, budge, bull, bullet, bulletin, bullion, bully, ebullient
bottle: bottle: [14] Etymologically, a bottle is a small butt, or barrel. The word comes ultimately from medieval Latin butticula, a diminutive form of late Latin buttis ‘cask’ (whence English butt ‘barrel’). It reached English via Old French botele. The 20th-century British colloquial meaning ‘nerve, courage’ comes from rhyming slang bottle and glass ‘class’. In medieval Latin, a servant who handed wine round at meals and looked after the wine cellar was a buticulārius: hence, via Old French bouteillier and Anglo-Norman buteler, English butler [13].
=> butler
bound: bound: English has no fewer than four separate words bound. The only one which goes back to Old English is the adjective, meaning ‘obliged’ or ‘destined’, which comes from the past participle of bind (in Old English this was bunden, which survives partially in ‘bounden duty’). Next oldest is the adjective meaning ‘going or intending to go’ [13]. Originally meaning ‘ready’, this was borrowed from Old Norse búinn, the past participle of búa ‘prepare’, which derived from the same ultimate source (the Germanic base *bū- ‘dwell, cultivate’) as be, boor, booth, bower, build, burly, bye-law, and byre.

The final -d of bound, which appeared in the 16th century, is probably due to association with bound ‘obliged’. Virtually contemporary is the noun bound ‘border, limit’ [13]. It originally meant ‘landmark’, and came via Anglo-Norman bounde from early Old French bodne (source also of Old French borne, from which English got bourn, as in Hamlet’s ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’).

Its ultimate source was medieval Latin bodina, perhaps from a prehistoric Gaulish *bodina. Boundary [17] seems to have been formed from the dialectal bounder, an agent noun derived from the verb bound ‘form the edge or limit of’. Finally, bound ‘leap’ [16] comes from Old French bondir. It originally meant ‘rebound’ in English (rebound [14] began as an Old French derivative of bondir), but this physical sense was a metaphorical transference from an earlier sense related to sound.

Old French bondir ‘resound’ came from Vulgar Latin *bombitīre ‘hum’, which itself was a derivative of Latin bombus ‘booming sound’ (source of English bomb).
=> band, bend, bind, bond, bundle; be, boor, booth, bower, build, burly, byre, neighbour; boundary, bourn; bomb, rebound
boy: boy: [13] The etymology of boy has long been problematical, but the now most generally accepted view is that it is probably a reduced form of an unrecorded Anglo-Norman *abuie or *embuie ‘fettered’, from the Old French verb embuier ‘fetter’. This came from Vulgar Latin *imboiāre, a compound verb based on Latin boiae ‘leather collar, fetter’, which was adapted from Greek boeiai doraí ‘ox-hides’ (hence ‘oxleather thongs’), from bous ‘ox’ (related to English bovine and cow).

The apparently implausible semantic connection is elucidated by the early meaning of boy in English, which was ‘male servant’; according to this view, a boy was etymologically someone kept in leather fetters, and hence a ‘slave’ or ‘servant’. The current main sense, ‘young male’, developed in the 14th century.
=> cow
brief: brief: [14] Brief comes via Old French bref from Latin brevis ‘short’, which is probably related to Greek brakhús ‘short’, from which English gets the combining form brachy-, as in brachycephalic. Latin produced the nominal derivative breve ‘letter’, later ‘summary’, which came into English in the 14th century in the sense ‘letter of authority’ (German has brief simply meaning ‘letter’).

The notion of an ‘abbreviation’ or ‘summary’ followed in the next century, and the modern legal sense ‘summary of the facts of a case’ developed in the 17th century. This formed the basis of the verbal sense ‘inform and instruct’, which is 19th-century. Briefs ‘underpants’ are 20th-century. The musical use of the noun breve began in the 15th century when, logically enough, it meant ‘short note’.

Modern usage, in which it denotes the longest note, comes from Italian breve. Other derivatives of brief include brevity [16], introduced into English via Anglo-Norman brevete; abbreviate [15], from late Latin abbreviāre (which is also the source, via Old French abregier, of abridge [14]); and breviary ‘book of church services’ [16], from Latin breviārium.
=> abbreviate, abridge, brevity
broker: broker: [14] Broker has no connection with the past tense of break. It comes from Anglo- Norman brocour ‘small trader’, but its ultimate origin is not clear. A variant Anglo-Norman form abrocour has fuelled speculation as to a link with Spanish alboroque ‘sealing of a bargain’ and Portuguese alborcar ‘barter’, which are presumably of Arabic origin (the alrepresenting the Arabic definite article); but other etymologists have sought to link the word with broach, as if the underlying sense were ‘someone who sells wine from [that is, by broaching] the cask’, and hence any ‘retailer’.
bruise: bruise: [OE] Modern English bruise is a blend of words from two sources. The main contributor is Old English brysan, which as well as ‘bruise’ meant ‘crush to pieces’, and is related to Latin frustum ‘piece broken or cut off’. But then in the early Middle English period we begin to see the influence of the unrelated Old French verb bruisier ‘break’ and its Anglo-Norman form bruser (which in modern French has become briser).

Their main effect has been on the spelling of the word, although the use of bruise for ‘break’ from the 14th to the 17th century seems to have been due to French influence too, rather than a survival of the Old English meaning: ‘Had his foot once slipped … he would have been bruised in pieces’, The most dangerous and memorable adventure of Richard Ferris 1590. Bruiser ‘large rough man’ originated in an 18th-century term for a prizefighter.
=> débris
brush: brush: [14] It is not clear whether brush for sweeping and brush as in brushwood are the same word, although both appeared in the language at about the same time, from a French source. Brush ‘broken branches’ comes from brousse, the Anglo-Norman version of Old French broce, which goes back to an unrecorded Vulgar Latin *bruscia. Brush for sweeping, on the other hand, comes from Old French broisse or brosse.

It is tempting to conclude that this is a variant of Old French broce, particularly in view of the plausible semantic link that brushwood (cut twigs, etc) bundled together and tied to a handle makes a serviceable brush (that is how broom came to mean ‘brush’). The verb brush ‘move fast or heedlessly’ comes from Old French brosser ‘dash through undergrowth’, a derivative of broce; its frequent modern connotation of ‘touching in passing’ comes from the other brush.
bucket: bucket: [13] We first encounter bucket in the Anglo-Norman forms buket and buquet. It is not entirely clear where this came from, but it may be a derivative of Old English būc. The primary underlying sense of this was ‘something bulging or swelling’, and hence it meant not only ‘jug’ but also ‘belly’ (related are German bauch and Swedish buk ‘paunch’). It survived dialectally into modern English as bowk, meaning ‘milkpail’ and ‘large tub used in coal mines’. The bucket of ‘kick the bucket’ was originally a beam from from which slaughtered animals were hung; it is probably a separate word, from Old French buquet ‘balance’.
bullion: bullion: [14] The immediate source of bullion was Anglo-Norman bullion, which meant ‘place where coins are made, mint’, so presumably the underlying connotation is of melting, or ‘boiling’, metal down and then turning it into coins. On this reasoning it would come ultimately from Vulgar Latin *bulliōnem, a nominal derivative of Latin bullīre ‘boil’, from bulla ‘bubble’ (source of English boil). The present-day meaning ‘gold and silver in bulk’ had developed by the mid-15th century.
=> boil
burglar: burglar: [15] The first trace we have of burglar is as burgulator in 13th-century Anglo-Latin texts, and it appears in Anglo-Norman legal documents of the 15th century as burgler. These point to an unrecorded medieval Latin base *burg- ‘plunder’, which appears in Old French burgur ‘robber’. The verb burgle is a 19thcentury back-formation from burglar.
bustard: bustard: [15] Bustard (the name of a large game bird now extinct in Britain) is something of a mystery word. Old French had two terms for the bird, bistarde and oustarde, both of which come from Latin avis tarda, literally ‘slow bird’ (Latin tardus gave English tardy [15]). This, according to the Roman writer Pliny, was what the bird was called in Spain.

It has been objected that the bustard can run quite fast, and that the name avis tarda must be some sort of folk-etymological alteration of a non-Latin word; but in fact the bird’s normal gait is a fairly slow and stately walk, so the term is not so far-fetched. The English word is presumably a blend of the two Old French ones, perhaps via an Anglo-Norman *bustarde.
=> tardy
butcher: butcher: [13] Butcher comes via Anglo-Norman boucher from Old French bouchier, a derivative of boc ‘male goat’ (this was probably borrowed from a Celtic word which came ultimately from the same Indo-European base as produced English buck). The original sense of the word was thus ‘dealer in goat’s flesh’.
=> buck
butt: butt: There are no fewer than four distinct words butt in English. The oldest, ‘hit with the head’ [12], comes via Anglo-Norman buter from Old French boter. This can be traced back through Vulgar Latin *bottāre ‘thrust’ (source of English button) to a prehistoric Germanic *buttan. Old French boter produced a derivative boteret ‘thrusting’, whose use in the phrase ars boterez ‘thrusting arch’ was the basis of English buttress [13]. Butt ‘barrel’ [14] comes via Anglo-Norman but and Old French bot or bout from late Latin buttis ‘cask’ (a diminutive form of which was the basis of English bottle).

A derivative of the Anglo-Norman form was buterie ‘storeroom for casks of alcohol’, from which English gets buttery ‘food shop in a college’ [14]. Butt ‘target’ [14] probably comes from Old French but ‘goal, shooting target’, but the early English sense ‘mound on which a target is set up’ suggests association also with French butte ‘mound, knoll’ (which was independently borrowed into English in the 19th century as a term for the isolated steep-sided hills found in the Western states of the USA). Butt ‘thick end’ [15], as in ‘rifle butt’ and ‘cigarette butt’, appears to be related to other Germanic words in the same general semantic area, such as Low German butt ‘blunt’ and Middle Dutch bot ‘stumpy’, and may well come ultimately from the same base as produced buttock [13]. (The colloquial American sense of butt, ‘buttocks’, originated in the 15th century.) The verb abut [15] comes partly from Anglo- Latin abuttāre, a derivative of hutta ‘ridge or strip of land’, which may be related to English butt ‘thick end’, and partly from Old French aboter, a derivative of boter, from which English gets butt ‘hit with the head’.
=> button, buttress; bottle, butler, butte, début; buttock, abut
cable: cable: [13] The ultimate source of cable is late Latin capulum ‘lasso’, a derivative of the verb capere ‘take, seize’, either directly or perhaps via Arabic habl. In Provençal, capulum became cable, which produced the Old French form chable: so English must either have borrowed the word straight from Provençal, or from *cable, an unrecorded Anglo-Norman variant of the Old French word.
=> capture, heave
calendar: calendar: [13] English acquired calendar via Anglo-Norman calender and Old French calendier from Latin calendārium, which was a ‘moneylender’s account book’. It got its name from the calends (Latin calendae), the first day of the Roman month, when debts fell due. Latin calendae in turn came from a base *kal- ‘call, proclaim’, the underlying notion being that in ancient Rome the order of days was publicly announced at the beginning of the month.

The calendula [19], a plant of the daisy family, gets its name from Latin calendae, perhaps owing to its once having been used for curing menstrual disorders. Calender ‘press cloth or paper between rollers’ [15], however, has no connection with calendar; it probably comes from Greek kúlindros ‘roller’, source of English cylinder.
cantankerous: cantankerous: [18] Cantankerous is a rather mysterious word. It first appears in the 1770s, and the earliest known reference to it is in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer 1772: ‘There’s not a more bitter cantanckerous road in all christendom’. Its origin is disputed: perhaps the likeliest source is Middle English contekour ‘brawler’, from contek ‘strife’, a borrowing from an unrecorded Anglo-Norman *contek, but an Irish origin has also been suggested, perhaps from Irish cannrán ‘strife, grumbling’ (another early user of the word was the Irish playwright Thomas Sheridan).
capon: capon: [OE] Capon, a ‘castrated male chicken’, is probably literally a ‘cut cockerel’. The word comes via Anglo-Norman capun from Latin capō, which is probably ultimately derived from a word for ‘cut’ – Greek kóptein, for example – the underlying reference of course being to the cutting off of the unfortunate bird’s testicles.
car: car: [14] Car seems first to have been used as an independent term for a road vehicle powered by an internal-combustion engine in 1896, in the publication Farman’s Auto-Cars (the compounds autocar and motorcar are a year earlier). But the word is of course of far longer standing as a general term for a wheeled conveyance. It comes ultimately from an unrecorded Celtic *karros, via Latin carrus ‘two-wheeled wagon’, Vulgar Latin *carra, and Anglo-Norman carre or car; it is probably linked with current and course, giving an underlying meaning ‘move swiftly’.

English words derived at some point or other from the same source include career, carriage, carry, charge, and chariot.
=> career, caricature, carriage, carry, charge, chariot, course, current
carcass: carcass: [14] English first acquired this word from Anglo-Norman carcois, and early forms were carcays and carcoys. Spellings similar to modern English carcass begin to emerge in the 16th century, and may be due to reborrowing from French carcasse, to association with the noun case ‘container’, which meant ‘body’ in the 16th century, or to a combination of both. The usual current spelling throughout the English-speaking world is carcass, but British English also uses carcase. The word’s ultimate origin is unknown.
carpenter: carpenter: [14] Etymologically, a carpenter is a ‘maker of carriages’. The word comes, via Anglo-Norman carpenter, from late Latin carpentārius, originally an adjective derived from carpentum ‘two-wheeled vehicle’. This, like the similar and perhaps related Latin carrus, source of English car, was of Celtic origin. The generalization in meaning to ‘worker in wood’ took place before the word was borrowed into English.
carrion: carrion: [13] Ultimately, carrion is a derivative of Latin carō ‘flesh’ (source also of English carnal). This appears to have had a Vulgar Latin offshoot *carōnia, which entered English via Anglo-Norman caroine. At first it was used in English for ‘dead body’, but before the end of the 13th century the current sense ‘flesh unfit for human consumption’ had begun to establish itself.
=> carnal, crone
carry: carry: [14] For such a basic and common word, carry has a surprisingly brief history. It does not go back to some prehistoric Indo-European root, but was formed less than 1000 years ago in Anglo-Norman or Old Northern French, on the basis of carre or car (immediate source of English car). The verb carier thus meant literally ‘transport in a wheeled vehicle’. This sense was carried over into English, and though it has since largely given way to the more general ‘convey’, it is preserved in the derivative carriage, in such expressions as ‘carriage paid’.
=> car, carriage
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
castle: castle: [11] Castle was one of the first words borrowed by the English from their Norman conquerors: it is mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle only nine years after the battle of Hastings. It comes via Anglo-Norman castel from Latin castellum, a diminutive form of castrum ‘fort’ (which was acquired by Old English as ceaster, and now appears in English place-names as -caster or -chester). The Old French version of castel, chastel, produced modern French château, and also its derivative châtelaine, borrowed into English in the 19th century.
=> château
cat: cat: [OE] The word cat seems to have appeared on the European scene, in the form of Latin catta or cattus, around 1000 AD (the previous Latin word was fēlēs, source of English feline). No one is completely sure where it came from (although given the domestic cat’s origins in Egypt, it is likely to have been an Egyptian word), but it soon spread north and west through Europe. The Latin word reached English via Germanic *kattuz, later backed up by Anglo-Norman cat, a variant of Old French chat.
catch: catch: [13] Originally catch meant ‘chase, hunt’ (and in fact it is etymologically related to the English word chase). However, it remarkably quickly moved on to be applied to the next logical step in the procedure, ‘capture’, and by the early 16th century ‘chase’ was becoming obsolete (although it remains the only sense of related words in other languages, such as French chasser and Italian cacciare).

Looked at from another point of view, however, catch might be said to be harking back to its ultimate roots in Latin capere ‘take’, source of English capture. Its past participle, captus, provided the basis for a new verb captāre ‘try to seize, chase’. In Vulgar Latin this became altered to *captiāre, source of Old French chacier (whence English chase) and the corresponding Anglo-Norman cachier (whence English catch).
=> capture, chase
cater: cater: [16] Cater is related to French acheter ‘buy’, and originally meant ‘buy provisions’. It comes ultimately from Vulgar Latin *accaptāre, a compound verb formed from the Latin prefix ad- ‘to’ and the verb captāre ‘try to seize’ (source of English catch and chase). This provided the basis for the Anglo-Norman agent noun acatour ‘buyer, purveyor’, which gave English the now obsolete acater.

Losing its a-, this became cater, which until the early 17th century was the word for what we would now call a ‘caterer’. At around the same time cater began to be used as a verb; the first known example of this is in Shakespeare’s As You Like It II, iii: ‘He that doth the ravens feed, yea providently caters for the sparrow’.
=> capture, catch, chase
cattle: cattle: [13] Ultimately, cattle is the same word as chattel [13], and when it first entered English it had the same meaning, ‘property’. From earliest times, however, it was applied specifically to livestock thought of as property. In the Middle Ages it was a wide-ranging term in animal husbandry, being used for horses, sheep, pigs, and even poultry and bees, as well as cows, and such usages survived dialectally until comparatively recently, but from the mid 16th century onwards there is increasing evidence of the word’s being restricted solely to cows.

Its ultimate source is medieval Latin capitāle ‘property’, which came to English via Old French chatel as chattel and via Anglo-Norman catel as cattle. Capitāle itself goes back to classical Latin capitālis (from caput ‘head’), from which English gets capital.
=> capital, chattel
cauldron: cauldron: [13] Etymologically, cauldrons are for heating not food but people. The word comes ultimately from Latin calidārium ‘hot bath’, which was a derivative of the adjective calidus ‘warm’ (related to English calorie, and, by a much more circuitous route, lee ‘sheltered area’ and probably lukewarm). Among the descendants of calidārium were late Latin caldāria ‘pot’, which produced French chaudière (possible source of English chowder) and Vulgar Latin *caldario, which passed into Anglo-Norman, with a suffix indicating great size, as caudron ‘large cooking pot’.

In English, the l was reintroduced from Latin in the 15th century.
=> calorie, chowder, nonchalant
causeway: causeway: [15] Etymologically, a causeway is a road paved with limestone. In late Middle English, the word was causey way, causey coming via Anglo-Norman *cauce from Vulgar Latin *calciāta, an adjective derived from Latin calx ‘limestone’ (source also of English chalk, calcium, and calculate). The simple form causey ‘causeway, path’ survived dialectally well into the 20th century, and its French relative chausée, ‘road’ is still very much alive.
=> calcium, calculate, chalk
cell: cell: [12] Cell has branched out a lot over the centuries, but its original meaning seems to be ‘small secluded room’, for it comes ultimately from an Indo-European base *kel-, which is also the source of English conceal, clandestine, and occult. It came into English either via Old French celle or directly from Latin cella ‘small room, storeroom, inner room of a temple’, and at first was used mainly in the sense ‘small subsidiary monastery’.

It is not until the 14th century that we find it being used for small individual apartments within a monastic building, and the development from this to ‘room in a prison’ came as late as the 18th century. In medieval biology the term was applied metaphorically to bodily cavities, and from the 17th century onwards it began to be used in the more modern sense ‘smallest structural unit of an organism’ (the botanist Nehemiah Grew was apparently the first so to use it, in the 1670s).

A late Latin derivative of cella was cellārium ‘group of cells, storeroom’; this was the source of English cellar [13], via Anglo-Norman celer.
=> apocalypse, cellar, clandestine, conceal, hall, hell, hull, occult