英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

absent [absent 词源字典]: absent: [14] Absent is based ultimately on the Latin verb ‘to be’, esse. To this was added the prefix ab- ‘away’, giving Latin abesse ‘be away’; and the present participial stem of abesse was absent-. Hence, via Old French, the adjective absent and the noun absence. It has been conjectured, incidentally, that the present stem used for Latin esse was a descendant of Indo-European *sontos ‘truth’, from which English sooth comes.
[absent etymology, absent origin, 英语词源]
accent: accent: [14] Accent was originally a loantranslation from Greek into Latin (a loantranslation is when each constituent of a compound in one language is translated into its equivalent in another, and then reassembled into a new compound). Greek prosōidíā (whence English prosody) was formed from pros ‘to’ and ōidé ‘song’ (whence English ode); these elements were translated into Latin ad ‘to’ and cantus ‘song’ (whence English chant, cant, cantata, canticle), giving accentus.

The notion underlying this combination of ‘to’ and ‘song’ was of a song added to speech – that is, the intonation of spoken language. The sense of a particular mode of pronunciation did not arise in English until the 16th century.
=> cant, cantata, canticle, chant
accident: accident: [14] Etymologically, an accident is simply ‘something which happens’ – ‘an event’. That was what the word originally meant in English, and it was only subsequently that the senses ‘something which happens by chance’ and ‘mishap’ developed. It comes from the Latin verb cadere ‘fall’ (also the source of such diverse English words as case, decadent, and deciduous).

The addition of the prefix ad- ‘to’ produced accidere, literally ‘fall to’, hence ‘happen to’. Its present participle was used as an adjective in the Latin phrase rēs accidēns ‘thing happening’, and accidēns soon took on the role of a noun on its own, passing (in its stem form accident-) into Old French and thence into English.
=> case, decadent, deciduous
adjacent: adjacent: [15] Adjacent and adjective come from the same source, the Latin verb jacere ‘throw’. The intransitive form of this, jacēre, literally ‘be thrown down’, was used for ‘lie’. With the addition of the prefix ad-, here in the sense ‘near to’, was created adjacēre, ‘lie near’. Its present participial stem, adjacent-, passed, perhaps via French, into English.

The ordinary Latin transitive verb jacere, meanwhile, was transformed into adjicere by the addition of the prefix ad-; it meant literally ‘throw to’, and hence ‘add’ or ‘attribute’, and from its past participial stem, adject-, was formed the adjective adjectīvus. This was used in the phrase nomen adjectīvus ‘attributive noun’, which was a direct translation of Greek ónoma épithetos.

And when it first appeared in English (in the 14th century, via Old French adjectif) it was in noun adjective, which remained the technical term for ‘adjective’ into the 19th century. Adjective was not used as a noun in its own right until the early 16th century.
=> adjective, easy, reject
adolescent: adolescent: [15] The original notion lying behind both adolescent and adult is of ‘nourishment’. The Latin verb alere meant ‘nourish’ (alimentary and alimony come from it, and it is related to old). A derivative of this, denoting the beginning of an action, was alēscere ‘be nourished’, hence ‘grow’. The addition of the prefix ad- produced adolēscere.

Its present participial stem, adolēscent- ‘growing’, passed into English as the noun adolescent ‘a youth’ (the adjective appears not to have occurred before the end of the 18th century). Its past participle, adultus ‘grown’, was adopted into English as adult in the 16th century.
=> adult, alimentary, alimony, coalesce, coalition, proletarian, prolific
adventure: adventure: [13] Adventure derives ultimately from a Latin verb meaning ‘arrive’. It originally meant ‘what comes or happens by chance’, hence ‘luck’, but it took a rather pessimistic downturn via ‘risk, danger’ to (in the 14th century) ‘hazardous undertaking’. Its Latin source was advenīre, formed from the prefix adand venīre ‘come’. Its past participle stem, advent-, produced English advent [12] and adventitious [17], but it was its future participle, adventura ‘about to arrive’, which produced adventure.

In the Romance languages in which it subsequently developed (Italian avventura, Spanish aventura, and French aventure, the source of Middle English aventure) the d disappeared, but it was revived in 15th – 16thcentury French in imitation of Latin. The reduced form venture first appears in the 15th century.
=> adventitious, avent, venture
affluent: affluent: [15] The meaning ‘rich’ is a fairly recent development for affluent; it is first recorded in the mid 18th century. Originally the adjective meant simply ‘flowing’. It came, via Old French, from Latin affluent-, the present participle of affluere, a compound verb formed from the prefix ad- ‘towards’ and fluere ‘flow’ (the source of English fluid, fluent, flux, fluctuate, and many other derivatives).
=> fluctuate, fluent, fluid, flux
agent: agent: [15] Latin agere, a verb of great semantic breadth (‘drive, lead, act, do’), has been a prolific source of English words. Its past participle, āctus, produced act, action, active, actor, actual, cachet, and exact, while other parts of its paradigm lie behind agile, agitate, ambiguous, coagulate, cogent, cogitate, examine, exigent, exiguous, and prodigal.

Its most obvious offspring, however, are agent (literally ‘(person) doing something’) and agency, formed from the Latin present participial stem agent-. Agere itself is of considerable antiquity, being related to other Indo-European verbs such as Greek ágein ‘drive, lead’, Old Norse aka ‘travel in a vehicle’, and Sanskrit ájati ‘drives’.
=> act, agile, ambiguous, cachet, cogent, demagogue, exact, examine, prodigal
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
antecedent: antecedent: see ancestor
apparent: apparent: see appear
assent: assent: see sense
authentic: authentic: [14] Etymologically, something that is authentic is something that has the authority of its original creator. Greek authentikós was a derivative of the noun authéntēs ‘doer, master’, which was formed from autós ‘self’ and the base -hentēs ‘worker, doer’ (related to Sanskrit sanoti ‘he gains’). The adjective’s original meaning in English was ‘authoritative’; the modern sense ‘genuine’ did not develop fully until the late 18th century. (Greek authéntēs, incidentally, was pronounced /afthendis/, and was borrowed into Turkish as efendī, source of English effendi [17].)
=> effendi
belligerent: belligerent: see rebel
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.
cement: cement: [13] Latin caementa meant ‘stone chips used for making mortar’; etymologically, the notion behind it was of ‘hewing for a quarry’, for it was originally *caedmenta, a derivative of caedere ‘cut’ (from which English gets concise and decide). In due course the signification of the Latin word passed from ‘small broken stones’ to ‘powdered stone (used for mortar)’, and it was in this sense that it passed via Old French ciment into English.
=> concise, decide
cent: cent: [16] Centum is the Latin word for ‘hundred’ – indeed both come ultimately from the same Indo-European source, *kmtóm. It first appeared in English in the form cent in the phrase per cent (originally used apparently by the financier Sir Thomas Gresham in a letter of 1568: ‘the interest of xij per cent by the year’); this was probably borrowed from Italian per cento (it is not a genuine Latin phrase). The use of cent for a unit of currency dates from the 1780s, when it was adopted by the newly founded USA; its status as one hundredth of a dollar was officially ordained by the Continental Congress on 8 August 1786.
=> century
centre: centre: [14] The word centre came originally from the spike of a pair of compasses which is stuck into a surface while the other arm describes a circle round it. Greek kéntron meant ‘sharp point’, or more specifically ‘goad for oxen’ (it was a derivative of the verb kentein ‘prick’), and hence was applied to a compass spike; and it was not long before this spread metaphorically to ‘mid-point of a circle’. The word reached English either via Old French centre or directly from Latin centrum. The derived adjective central is 16th-century.
=> eccentric
century: century: [16] Latin centuria meant ‘group of one hundred’ (it was a derivative of centum ‘hundred’). Among the specialized applications of this general sense, the most familiar to us today is that of a division of the Roman army consisting originally of a hundred soldiers (the title of its commander, centurion [14] – Latin centuriō – derives from centuria). When English took the word over, however, it put it to other uses: it was first applied to ‘period of 100 years’ in the early 17th century, while ‘score of 100 or more in cricket’ comes from the mid 19th century.
=> cent, centurion
client: client: [14] The original status of a client was rather lowly: he was someone who was at another’s beck and call, and dependent on them. The word comes from Latin cliēns, an alteration of an earlier cluēns, the present participle of the verb cluēre ‘listen, follow, obey’; hence someone who was cliēns was always listening out for another’s orders, unable to take independent action (in ancient Rome it meant specifically a plebeian under the protection of a nobleman).

That sense is preserved in such English expressions as ‘client state’. The word’s more modern senses have developed through ‘person on whose behalf a lawyer acts’ in the 15th century to simply ‘customer’ in the 17th century.
cogent: cogent: see squat
comment: comment: [15] In Latin, a commentum was originally ‘something invented or devised’. It was derived from the verb comminiscī ‘devise, contrive by thought’, a compound formed from the prefix com- ‘with’ and a base *men- (this also produced Latin mens and mentiō, source respectively of English mental and mention). It was used in the 7th century by the Spanish theologian Isidore in the sense ‘interpretation, annotation’, and it was with that meaning rather than the original ‘contrivance’ that the word passed eventually into English.
=> mental, mention, mind
complacent: complacent: see complaisant
compliment: compliment: [17] Compliment and complement, so often confused, are in effect doublets. They come from the same ultimate source, Latin complēmentum, a noun derived from complēre ‘fill up, finish’ (source of English complete and accomplish). English borrowed complement direct from Latin in the 14th century in the sense ‘fulfilment, accomplishment’, and by the 16th century this had developed the more specific metaphorical meaning ‘fulfilment of the obligation of politeness’ – hence ‘polite words of praise’.

But then in the 17th century came competition in the form of compliment, also meaning ‘polite words of praise’. This also came from Latin complēmentum, but along a circuitous route via Vulgar Latin *complimentum, Spanish cumplimiento, and French compliment. It gradually took over from complement in this ‘flattering’ sense, while complement went on to develop its leading current meaning, ‘counterpart’, in the 19th century.
=> accomplish, complement, complete, comply, expletive, plenary, plenty
condiment: condiment: see recondite
congruent: congruent: [15] Etymologically, triangles that are congruent ‘come together’ or ‘agree’ – that is, are similar. The word comes from congruēns, the present participle of Latin congruere ‘come together, meet, agree’. This was a compound verb formed from the prefix com- ‘together’ and a verb, *gruere, not found elsewhere (some have linked it with Latin ruere ‘fall’ – ultimate source of English ruin – in which case congruere would have meant literally ‘fall together’, but others have seen a connection with Greek zakhrēēs ‘attacking violently’). Incongruous is a 17thcentury adoption from Latin incongruus.
consent: consent: [13] The notion underlying ‘giving one’s consent’ is ‘feeling together’ – that is, ‘agreeing’, and hence ‘giving approval or permission’. The word comes from Old French consente, a derivative of the verb consentir. This was a descendant of Latin consentīre ‘agree’, a compound verb formed from the prefix com- ‘together’ and sentīre ‘feel’ (source of English sense, sentence, sentiment, etc). Consensus, originally the past participle of Latin consentīre, was borrowed into English in the 19th century.
=> consensus, sense, sentence, sentiment
content: content: The adjective and noun content come ultimately from the same source, but as their divergent pronunciations suggest, they reached English via different routes. Their common original is Latin contentus, past participle of continēre ‘hold together, enclose, contain’ (source of English contain, continent, continue, and countenance). The more recent borrowing, the noun content [15], comes directly from medieval Latin contentum, and retains the original meaning of the Latin verb.

The adjective content [14], however, comes via Old French content, and reflects a metaphorical change in the Latin past participle from ‘contained’ via ‘restrained’ and ‘self-restrained’ to ‘satisfied’.
=> contain, continent, continue, countenance, retentive
continent: continent: [14] Continent comes via Old French from Latin continēns, the present participle of continēre ‘hold together, enclose, contain’ (source of English contain). From the beginning it meant in general ‘exercising self-restraint’; of the more specific senses, ‘chaste’ developed in the 14th century and ‘able to retain urine and faeces’ apparently in the early 19th century.

The word’s noun use developed from the Latin phrase terra continēns ‘continuous land’ (for this sense of Latin continēre see CONTINUE). It was at first applied in the 16th century to any large continuous expanse of territory, and from the early 17th century specifically to any of the Earth’s major landmasses (the English use of ‘the Continent’ for mainland Europe is roughly contemporary with this).
=> contain, content, continue, countenance
convenient: convenient: [14] Convenient comes from Latin conveniēns, the present participle of convenire ‘come together, be suitable, agree’, a compound verb formed from the prefix com- ‘together’ and venire ‘come’ (a distant relative of English come). Convenient reflects the more figurative of convenire’s meanings, as ultimately does covenant, but its original literal sense ‘assemble’ is preserved in convene [15], convention [15], convent, and coven.
=> convent, convention, coven, covenant, venue
convent: convent: [13] Latin conventus meant ‘assembly’ (it was the past participle of convenire ‘come together’, source of English convenient), but as it passed via Anglo-Norman covent into English it acquired the specialized sense ‘religious community’ (in early use it was applied to communities of either sex, but since the end of the 18th century it has come to be used exclusively for a ‘house of nuns’).

Until the mid- 15th century the Anglo-Norman spelling covent was retained in English (it survives in Covent Garden, which was formerly a vegetable garden belonging to the monks of Westminster Abbey, and may also the the source of coven [16]).
=> convenient, coven, venue
crescent: crescent: [14] Crescent is one of a wide range of words (including create, crescendo, concrete, crew, accretion, croissant, increase, and recruit) bequeathed to English by the Latin verb crēscere ‘grow’. In the case of crescent, it came in the form of the present participial stem crēscent-, which passed into English via Old French creissant and Anglo-Norman cressaunt.

Its use in the Latin phrase luna crescens ‘waxing moon’ led later to its application to the shape of the new moon, hence the modern meaning of crescent. The modern French form croissant has given English the term for a crescent-shaped puffpastry roll [19], so named allegedly from its original manufacture following the defeat of the Turkish besiegers of Budapest in 1686, whose Muslim symbol was the crescent.
=> accretion, create, creature, crew, croissant, increase, recruit
current: current: [13] Current literally means ‘running’. It comes from Old French corant, the present participle of courre ‘run’, which in turn was descended from Latin currere ‘run’. This has been traced back to a prehistoric root denoting ‘swift movement’, which probably also produced car, career, carry, and charge. The Latin verb itself has a wide range of descendants in English, from the obvious courier [16] to the more heavily disguised corridor [16] (originally literally ‘a run’), occur and succour.

For the English offspring of its past participle cursus see COURSE. The sense ‘of the present time’ (first recorded in the 17th century) comes from the notion of ‘running in time’ or ‘being in progress’.
=> car, carry, charge, corridor, courier, course, occur, succour
debenture: debenture: [15] Debenture is simply an anglicization of Latin dēbentur, literally ‘they are due’, the third person plural present passive of the verb dēbēre ‘owe’. It supposedly arose from the practice of writing debentur on IOUs in the late Middle Ages. The English word originally signified such IOUs issued by the government or the Crown – certificates of indebtedness, to give them their formal designation – and it was not until the mid-19th century that the modern meaning, ‘unsecured bond backed by the general credit of a company’, came into use.
=> debt, due, duty
decent: decent: [16] Decent comes ultimately from Latin decere ‘be fitting or suitable’, close relatives of which have produced decorate, dignity, and (from Greek) orthodox. Its present participial stem decent- was acquired by English, either directly or via French décent.
=> dainty, decorate, dignity, orthodox
deficient: deficient: [16] Deficient was acquired from Latin dēficient-, the present participial stem of dēficere ‘undo, fail, leave, be lacking’, a compound verb formed from the prefix dē- ‘away’ and facere ‘do, make’ (a parallel formation lies behind English defeat). The past participial stem of the Latin verb, dēfect-, produced English defect [15], while its third person present singular dēficit was borrowed by English as deficit.
=> defeat, defect, deficit
delinquent: delinquent: see relic
denouement: denouement: [18] A denouement is literally an ‘untying of a knot’. It was borrowed from French (its first recorded use in English is by Lord Chesterfield in one of his famous letters to his son (1752)), where it was a derivative of dénouer ‘undo’. This was a compound verb formed from the prefix dé- ‘un-’ and nouer ‘tie’, which came ultimately from Latin nōdus ‘knot’ (source of English newel, node, nodule, and noose).
=> newel, node, nodule, noose
dent: dent: see dint
dentist: dentist: [18] Dentist was borrowed from French dentiste, and at first was ridiculed as a highfalutin foreign term: ‘Dentist figures it now in our newspapers, and may do well enough for a French puffer; but we fancy Rutter is content with being called a tooth-drawer’, Edinburgh Chronicle 15 September 1759. It was a derivative of French dent ‘tooth’, which goes back via Latin dēns to an Indo-European base *dont-, *dent-, source also of English tooth. Other English descendants of Latin dēns include dental [16] and denture [19].
=> indent, tooth
department: department: [15] English has borrowed department from French département on two completely separate occasions. Originally, in late Middle English, it was used for ‘departure’, but this died out in the mid-17th century. Then in the 18th century it was re-acquired in the different sense ‘distinct division’; Dr Johnson, in his Dictionary 1755, dismisses it as a French term.
détente: détente: [20] English originally acquired this word from French in the 17th century as detent, which denotes a catch that regulates the movement of a clock. French détente, which originally signified a device for releasing a crossbow string, came from the past participle of Old French destendre ‘release’, a compound verb formed from the prefix des- ‘apart’ and tendre ‘stretch’ (related to English tension).

But English-speakers, mistakenly associating it with detain [15] (a verb of completely different origin, via Old French detenir from Latin dētinēre ‘keep back’) completely reversed its meaning, applying to a restraining catch rather than a releasing one. French, the language of diplomacy, re-lent détente to English in the first decade of the 20th century in the sense ‘relaxation of international tension’.
=> tension
detergent: detergent: [17] A detergent is literally something that ‘wipes away’. The word comes from dētergent-, the present participial stem of Latin dētergēre, a compound verb formed from dē- ‘away’ and tergēre ‘wipe’ (its past participle produced English terse). English detergent originally meant simply ‘cleansing agent’ (used particularly in a medical or surgical context); the specific application to a cleanser made from synthetic chemical compounds (as opposed to soap, which is made from fats and lye) is a 20thcentury development.
=> terse
detriment: detriment: [15] Etymologically, detriment denotes damage caused by ‘wearing away’. The word comes via Old French from Latin dētrīmentum, a derivative of dēterere ‘wear away’ (whose past participle is the source of English detritus [18]). This was a compound verb formed from the prefix dē- ‘away’ and terere ‘rub’ (from which English gets attrition and trite). The generalized metaphorical sense ‘harm’ had already developed in classical Latin.
=> attrition, detritus, trite
different: different: [14] English acquired different via Old French different from different-, the present participial stem of Latin differre, a compound verb formed from the prefix dis- ‘apart’ and ferre ‘carry’ (related to English bear). Latin differre had two distinct strands of meaning that sprang from the original literal ‘carry apart, scatter, disperse, separate’: one was ‘put off, delay’, from which English gets defer; the other ‘become or be unlike’, whence English differ [14] and different. The derived indifferent [14] originally meant ‘not differentiating or discriminating’.
=> bear, dilatory
diligent: diligent: [14] The underlying meaning of diligent is ‘loving’. It comes via Old French diligent from the present participial stem of Latin dīligere ‘esteem highly, love’. This was a compound verb formed from the prefix dis- ‘apart’ and legere ‘choose’ (source of English elect, neglect, and select), and so originally meant literally ‘single out’. It gradually passed semantically via ‘love’ to ‘attentiveness’, ‘carefulness’, and finally ‘steady effort’.
=> elect, neglect, select
dissent: dissent: see sense
effervescent: effervescent: see fervent
efficient: efficient: see effect
effluent: effluent: [19] Effluent is that which ‘flows out’. The word comes from the present participle of Latin effluere, a compound verb formed from the prefix ex- ‘out’ and fluere ‘flow’ (source of English fluctuate, fluent, fluid, flux, and a host of derivatives). English originally acquired it as an adjective in the 18th century, but did not begin to use it in its present-day noun senses until the mid 19th century. From the same source come effluvium [17] and efflux [17].
=> fluctuate, fluent, fluid, flux