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apocalypse [apocalypse 词源字典]: apocalypse: [13] A ‘catastrophic event, such as the end of the world’ is a relatively recent, 20thcentury development in the meaning of apocalypse. Originally it was an alternative name for the book of the Bible known as the ‘Revelation of St. John the divine’, which describes a vision of the future granted to St John on the island of Patmos. And in fact, the underlying etymological meaning of apocalypse is literally ‘revelation’.

It comes, via Old French and ecclesiastical Latin, from Greek apokálupsis, a derivative of the verb apokalúptein ‘uncover, reveal’, which was formed from the prefix apo- ‘away, off’ and the verb kalúptein ‘cover’ (related to English conceal).
=> conceal[apocalypse etymology, apocalypse origin, 英语词源]
calcium: calcium: [19] Calcium was coined by the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy in 1808 on the basis of Latin calx ‘limestone’ (which is also the ancestor of English calcareous, calculate, calculus, causeway, and chalk). The Latin word probably came from Greek khálix, which meant ‘pebble’ as well as ‘limestone’.
=> calcarious, calculate, causeway, chalk
calculate: calculate: [16] Calculate comes from the past participial stem of the Latin verb calculāre, a derivative of the noun calculus, which meant ‘pebble’. This was almost certainly a diminutive form of Latin calx, from which English gets calcium and chalk. The notion of ‘counting’ was present in the word from ancient times, for a specialized sense of Latin calculus was ‘stone used in counting, counter’ (its modern mathematical application to differential and integral calculus dates from the 18th century).

Another sense of Latin calculus was ‘stone in the bladder or kidney’, which was its meaning when originally borrowed into English in the 17th century.
=> calcarious, calcium, calculus, causeway, chalk
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.
calf: calf: English has two distinct words calf, both of Germanic origin. Calf ‘young cow’ goes back to Old English cealf, descendant of a prehistoric West Germanic *kalbam, which also produced German kalb and Dutch kalf. Calf of the leg [14] was borrowed from Old Norse kálfi, of unknown origin.
calibre: calibre: [16] Calibre, and the related calliper, are of Arabic origin. They come ultimately from Arabic qālib ‘shoemaker’s last, mould’ (there is some dispute over the source of this: some etymologists simply derive it from the Arabic verb qalaba ‘turn, convert’, while others trace it back to Greek kalapoús, literally ‘wooden foot’, a compound formed from kalon ‘wood’, originally ‘firewood’, a derivative of kaiein ‘burn’, and poús ‘foot’).

English acquired the Arabic word via Italian calibro and French calibre. The original Western meaning, ‘diameter of a bullet, cannon-ball, etc’, derives from the Arabic sense ‘mould for casting metal’. Calliper [16], which originally meant ‘instrument for measuring diameters’, is generally taken to be an alteration of calibre.
=> calliper
calico: calico: [16] Calico, a plain cotton cloth, was originally Calicut-cloth. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was the main export of Calicut, now known as Kozhikode, a city and port on the southwest coast of India whose first European visitor was the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama (c. 1469–1524). In the 19th century Calicut was South India’s major port. (It has no connection with Calcutta.)
call: call: [OE] Essentially, call is a Scandinavian word, although it does occur once in an Old English text, the late 10th-century Battle of Maldon. It was borrowed from Old Norse kalla, which can be traced back via West and North Germanic *kal- to an Indo-European base *gol- (among other derivatives of this is Serbo-Croat glagól ‘word’, source of Glagolitic, a term for an early Slavic alphabet).
calligraphy: calligraphy: see kaleidoscope
calliper: calliper: see calibre
callisthenics: callisthenics: see kaleidoscope
callow: callow: [OE] Old English calu meant ‘bald’. Eventually, the word came to be applied to young birds which as yet had no feathers, and by the late 16th century it had been extended metaphorically to any young inexperienced person or creature. It probably came, via West Germanic *kalwaz, from Latin calvus ‘bald’.
=> calvary
calm: calm: [14] The underlying meaning of calm seems to be not far removed from ‘siesta’. It comes ultimately from Greek kauma ‘heat’, which was borrowed into late Latin as cauma. This appears to have been applied progressively to the ‘great heat of the midday sun’, to ‘rest taken during this period’, and finally to simply ‘quietness, absence of activity’. Cauma passed into Old Italian as calma, and English seems to have got the word from Italian.
calorie: calorie: see cauldron
calumny: calumny: see challenge
calvary: calvary: [18] Latin calvāria meant literally ‘skull’ (it was a derivative of calva ‘scalp’, which in turn came from calvus ‘bald’, source of English callow). It was therefore used to translate Aramaic gulgūtha, also ‘skull’, which was the name of the hill outside Jerusalem on which Christ was crucified (applied to it because of its shape).
=> callow
chemical: chemical: [16] Essentially chemical, and the related chemistry and chemist, come from alchemy with the initial al- dropped. Alchemy itself is of Arabic origin; al represents the Arabic definite article ‘the’, while the second element was borrowed from Greek khēmíā ‘alchemy’. Loss of al- seems to have taken place originally in French, so the immediate source of the English words was French chimiste and chimique (whence the now obsolete English chemic, on which chemical was based).

At first this whole group of words continued to be used in the same sense as its progenitor alchemy; it is not really until the 17th century that we find it being consistently applied to what we would now recognize as the scientific discipline of chemistry.
=> alchemy
diabolical: diabolical: see devil
ecclesiastical: ecclesiastical: [15] In classical Greek, an ekklēsíā was an ‘assembly’ (the word was derived from ekkalein, a compound verb formed from the prefix ek- ‘out’ and kallein ‘call’). With the introduction of Christianity, it was adopted as the term for ‘church’, and an ekklēsiastés, originally ‘someone who addressed an assembly’, became a ‘preacher’ or ‘priest’. The derived adjective, ekklēsiastikos, passed into English via either French or Latin.
empirical: empirical: [16] Despite their formal resemblance, empirical and empire are completely unrelated. Empirical comes ultimately from the Greek adjective émpeiros ‘skilled or experienced in’, a compound formed from the prefix en- ‘in’ and peira ‘attempt, trial’ (a relative of English expert, peril, pirate, and repertory). From this were derived successively the noun empeiría ‘experience’ and empeirikós, which English acquired via Latin empiricus.
=> expert, peril, pirate, repertory
escalate: escalate: [20] Escalate is a back-formation from escalator [20], which was originally a tradename for a moving staircase first made in the USA around 1900 by the Otis Elevator Company. This in turn seems to have been coined (probably on the model of elevator) from escalade [16], a term in medieval warfare signifying the scaling of a fortified wall, which came via French and Spanish from medieval Latin scalāre, source of English scale ‘climb’. Escalate originally meant simply ‘ascend on an escalator’; the metaphorical sense ‘increase’ developed at the end of the 1950s.
ethical: ethical: [17] The underlying meaning of Greek ēthos was ‘personal disposition’. It came ultimately from prehistoric Indo-European *swedh-, a compound formed from the reflexive pronoun *swe- ‘oneself’ and dhē- ‘put’ (from which English gets do). Gradually the meaning broadened out to ‘trait, character’ and then ‘custom’, or in the plural ‘manners’ or ‘morals’.

English acquired it, in the sense ‘distinctive characteristic’ (based on the usage of Aristotle), in the 19th century. The Greek derived adjective ēthikós entered English, via Latin ēthicus, as ethic in the 16th century. This had largely been replaced by ethical by the end of the 17th century, but it has survived as a noun (as in ‘the work ethic’), which actually predates the adjective in English by about two hundred years.

The plural usage ethics ‘science of morals’ dates from the beginning of the 17th century.
=> do
eucalyptus: eucalyptus: [19] Europeans first encountered eucalyptus trees in Australia at the end of the 18th century. The French botanist Charles Louis l’Héritier based its Latin name, which he coined in 1788, on the fact that its flower buds have a characteristic conical cover (the Greek prefix eumeans ‘well’ and Greek kaluptós means ‘covered’).
faucal: faucal: see suffocate
fiscal: fiscal: [16] Latin fiscus originally denoted a ‘small rush basket’, used for example for keeping olives in. Evidently, though, the main purpose to which it was put was as a purse, for it soon acquired the figurative sense ‘public purse, public revenue’. Hence the adjective fiscālis ‘of the imperial treasury’, which passed into English via French fiscal.
inimical: inimical: see enemy
local: local: [15] Latin locus meant ‘place’ (it became in due course French lieu, acquired by English in the 13th century, and was itself adopted into English as a mathematical term in the 18th century). From it was derived the verb locāre ‘place’, source of English locate [18] and location [16], and the post-classical adjective locālis, from which English gets local. The noun locale is a mock frenchification of an earlier local [18], an adoption of the French use of the adjective local as a noun.
=> lieu, locomotive, locus
optical: optical: [16] Greek optós meant ‘visible’ (it was presumably related to ophthalmós ‘eye’, source of English ophthalmic [17], and belonged to the general Indo-European family of ‘eye’/‘see’- words – including English eye itself – that goes back to the base *oqw-). From it was derived optikós, which has given English optic [16] and optical. Optician [17] originated as a French coinage.
=> ophthalmic
radical: radical: [14] Etymologically, radical means ‘of roots’. Its modern political meaning, based on the metaphor of fundamental change, going to the ‘roots’ of things, did not begin to emerge until the 18th century. The word was borrowed from late Latin rādīcālis, a derivative of Latin rādīx ‘root’ (source of English radish [OE] and probably related to root).
=> radish, ramify, root
rapscallion: rapscallion: see rascal
rascal: rascal: [14] Rascal has been traced back ultimately to Latin rādere ‘scratch’. Its past participial stem rās- (source of English erase and razor) formed the basis of a Vulgar Latin verb *rāsicāre. From this was derived the noun *rāsica ‘scurf, scab, dregs, filth’, which passed into Old Northern French as *rasque (its central Old French counterpart, rasche, may be the source of English rash).

And it could well be that this *rasque lies behind Old French rascaille ‘mob, rabble’, which gave English rascal (the English word originally meant ‘rabble’ too, but the application to an individual person emerged in the 15th and 16th centuries). Rapscallion [17] is an alteration of a now defunct rascallion, which may have derived from rascal.
=> erase, rapscallion, rash, razor
recalcitrant: recalcitrant: [19] People who are recalcitrant are etymologically ‘kicking back’ against whatever restrains or upsets them. The word was borrowed from French récalcitrant, a descendant of the present participle of Latin recalcitrāre ‘kick back’. This was a compound verb formed from the prefix re- ‘back, again’ and calcitrāre ‘kick’, which in turn was derived from Latin calx ‘heel’.
reciprocal: reciprocal: [16] English adapted reciprocal from Latin reciprocus ‘alternating’. This was a compound adjective based ultimately on the elements re- ‘back, backwards’ and prō- ‘for, forwards’.
scald: scald: [13] Scald comes ultimately from Latin calidus ‘hot’ (source also of English cauldron and chowder and related to calorie and nonchalant). From it was derived the verb excaldāre ‘wash in hot water’, which passed into English via Anglo-Norman escalder as scald.
=> calorie, cauldron, chowder, nonchalant
scale: scale: English has three separate words scale. The oldest, ‘pan of a balance’ [13], was borrowed from Old Norse skál ‘bowl, drinking cup’ (ancestor of Swedish skåal, from which English gets the toast skol [16]). This was descended from a Germanic base *skal-, *skel-, *skul-, denoting ‘split, divide, peel’, which also produced English scalp, shell, shelter, shield, skill, probably skull, and also scale ‘external plate on fish, etc’ [14].

This second scale was borrowed from Old French escale, which itself was acquired from prehistoric Germanic *skalō – another derivative of *skal-. Its modern German descendant, schale, is the probable source of English shale [18]. The third scale, which originally meant ‘ladder’ [15], came from Latin scāla ‘ladder’, a descendant of the same base as Latin scandere ‘climb’, from which English gets ascend, descend, scan, and scandal. (In modern French scāla has evolved to échelle, whose derivative échelon has given English echelon [18].) The modern meanings of the word, variations on the theme ‘system of graduations used for measuring’, are metaphorical extensions of the original ‘ladder, steps’.

Its use as a verb, meaning ‘climb’, goes back to the medieval Latin derivative scālāre.
=> scalp, shell, shelter, shield, skill, skol, skull; shale; ascend, descend, echelon, scan, scandal
scallion: scallion: see shallot
scalp: scalp: [13] Scalp originally meant ‘top of the head, cranium’; it was not used for the ‘skin on top of the head’ until the 17th century. It is not altogether clear where the word came from, but its resemblance to Old Norse skálpr ‘sheath, shell’ and the fact that it first appeared in Scotland and the north of England suggest that it was borrowed from a Scandinavian language. Its ultimate ancestor was no doubt the Germanic base *skal-, *skel-, *skul-, source also of English shell and probably skull.
=> scale, shell, skull
scalpel: scalpel: see sculpture
technical: technical: [17] Greek tékhnē denoted ‘skill, art, craft, trade’ (it may have come from the Indo- European base *tek- ‘shape, make’, which also produced Greek téktōn ‘carpenter, builder’, source of English architect and tectonic [17]). From it was derived the adjective tekhnikós, which passed into English via Latin technicus as technic (now obsolete) and technical. Technique [19] comes from a noun use of the French adjective technique ‘technical’. From the same source come technicolour [20], based on the trademark Technicolor (registered in 1929), and technology [17].
=> architect, technique, tectonic, text
umbilical: umbilical: [16] Umbilical was borrowed from medieval Latin umbilīcālis, a derivative of Latin umbilīcus ‘navel’. This went back ultimately to the Indo-European base *onobh-, a variant of which, *nobh-, produced English navel [OE].
=> navel
vertical: vertical: [16] Latin vertex originally meant ‘whirl’ (it was derived from vertere ‘turn’, source also of English verse, version, etc, and was itself borrowed into English in the 16th century). It came to be applied metaphorically to the ‘spiral of hair on top of the head’, and was then extended further to ‘highest point’. From it was derived late Latin verticālis, which passed into English via French vertical.

It originally denoted ‘of the highest point in the sky, the zenith’, and since this is directly overhead, by the 18th century vertical had come to be used for ‘perpendicular’. Also from vertere came Latin vertīgō ‘whirling’, borrowed into English as vertigo ‘dizziness’ [16].
=> verse
ahistorical (adj.): "without reference to or regard for history," 1950, from a- (2) "not" + historical.
alchemical (adj.): 1580s; see alchemy + -ical.
allegorical (adj.): 1520s, from French allégorique, from Latin allegoricus, from Greek allegorikos (see allegory). Earlier form was allegoric (late 14c.). Related: Allegorically.
alphabetical (adj.): 1560s, from alphabet + -ical. Related: Alphabetically.
analytical (adj.): 1520s, from Medieval Latin analyticus (see analytic) + -al (1). Related: Analytically.
anarcho-syndicalist: also anarchosyndicalist, 1911, from anarcho-, comb. form of anarchist (adj.) + syndicalist (see syndicalism). Earlier anarchist syndicalist (1907). Related: Anarcho-syndicalism.
anatomical (adj.): 1580s; see anatomy + -ical.
anatomically (adv.): 1640s, from anatomical + -ly (2). Anatomically correct, of dolls and meaning "with genitalia," is attested 1968, perhaps 1967, American English, in reference to Petit Frère, an imported French boy doll.
anthropological (adj.): 1825, from anthropology + -ical. Related: Anthropologically.