英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

act [act 词源字典]: act: [14] Act, action, active, actor all go back to Latin agere ‘do, perform’ (which is the source of a host of other English derivatives, from agent to prodigal). The past participle of this verb was āctus, from which we get act, partly through French acte, but in the main directly from Latin. The Latin agent noun, āctor, came into the language at about the same time, although at first it remained a rather uncommon word in English, with technical legal uses; it was not until the end of the 16th century that it came into its own in the theatre (player had hitherto been the usual term).

Other Latin derivatives of the past participial stem āct- were the noun āctiō, which entered English via Old French action, and the adjective āctīvus, which gave English active. See also ACTUAL.
=> action, active, agent, cogent, examine, prodigal[act etymology, act origin, 英语词源]
address: address: [14] Address originally meant ‘straighten’. William Caxton, for example, here uses it for ‘stand up straight’: ‘The first day that he was washed and bathed he addressed him[self] right up in the basin’ Golden Legend 1483. This gives a clue to its ultimate source, Latin dīrectum ‘straight, direct’. The first two syllables of this seem gradually to have merged together to produce *drictum, which with the addition of the prefix ad- was used to produce the verb *addrictiāre.

Of its descendants in modern Romance languages, Italian addirizzare most clearly reveals its source. Old French changed it fairly radically, to adresser, and it was this form which English borrowed. The central current sense of ‘where somebody lives’ developed in the 17th and 18th centuries from the notion of directing something, such as a letter, to somebody.
=> direct
almanac: almanac: [14] One of the first recorded uses of almanac in English is by Chaucer in his Treatise on the astrolabe 1391: ‘A table of the verray Moeuyng of the Mone from howre to howre, every day and in every signe, after thin Almenak’. At that time an almanac was specifically a table of the movements and positions of the sun, moon, and planets, from which astronomical calculations could be made; other refinements and additions, such as a calendar, came to be included over succeeding centuries.

The earliest authenticated reference to an almanac comes in the (Latin) works of the English scientist Roger Bacon, in the mid 13th century. But the ultimate source of the word is obscure. Its first syllable, al-, and its general relevance to medieval science and technology, strongly suggest an Arabic origin, but no convincing candidate has been found.
also: also: [OE] Also was a late Old English compound formed from all ‘exactly, even’ and swa ‘so’; it meant ‘in just this way, thus’, and hence (recalling the meaning of German also ‘therefore’) ‘similarly’. These two uses died out in, respectively, the 15th and 17th centuries, but already by the 13th century ‘similarly’ was developing into the current sense ‘in addition’. As came from also in the 12th century. In Old English, the notion of ‘in addition’ now expressed by also was verbalized as eke.
=> as
appoint: appoint: [14] Appoint came from the Old French verb apointier ‘arrange’, which was based on the phrase a point, literally ‘to a point’. Hints of the original meaning can still be found in some of the verb’s early uses in English, in the sense ‘settle a matter decisively’, but its main modern meanings, ‘fix by prior arrangement’ and ‘select for a post’, had become established by the mid 15th century.
=> point
bailiff: bailiff: [13] Latin bājulus meant literally ‘carrier’ (it is probably the ultimate source of English bail in some if not all of its uses). It developed the metaphorical meaning ‘person in charge, administrator’, which passed, via the hypothetical medieval adjectival form *bājulīvus, into Old French as baillif, and hence into English.
=> bail
bluestocking: bluestocking: [18] The term bluestocking ‘female intellectual’ derives from the gatherings held at the houses of fashionable mid-18th- century hostesses to discuss literary and related topics. It became the custom at these not to put on full formal dress, which for gentlemen included black silk stockings. One habitué in particular, Mr Benjamin Stillingfleet, used to wear greyish worsted stockings, conventionally called ‘blue’.

This lack of decorum was looked on with scorn in some quarters, and Admiral Boscawan dubbed the participants the ‘Blue Stocking Society’. Women who attended their highbrow meetings thus became known as ‘Blue Stocking Ladies’ (even though it was a man who had worn the stockings), and towards the end of the century this was abbreviated to simply bluestockings.
bogey: bogey: [19] Bogey is one of a set of words relating to alarming or annoying manifestations of the supernatural (others are bogle, bug, bugbear, and possibly boggle and bugaboo) whose interconnections are difficult to sort out. A strand common to most of them is a northern origin, which has led some to suggest an ultimate source in Scandinavia – perhaps an ancestor of Norwegian dialect bugge ‘important man’ (which has also been linked with English big) might lie behind Middle English bugge, originally ‘scarecrow’ but later used for more spectral objects of terror.

Others, however, noting Welsh bwg, bwgan ‘ghost’, have gone with a Celtic origin. Of more recent uses of bogey, ‘policeman’ and ‘nasal mucus’ seem to have appeared between the two World Wars, while ‘golf score of one stroke over par’ is said to have originated at the Great Yarmouth Golf Club in the 1890s, when a certain Major Wellman exclaimed, during the course of a particularly trying round, that he must be playing against the ‘bogey-man’ (a figure in a popular song of the time). Bogie ‘undercarriage’ [19] is a different word (of if anything obscurer origin than bogey).
bowl: bowl: Bowl ‘round receptacle’ [OE] and bowl ‘ball used in bowls’ [15] come from different sources. The former (Old English bolle or bolla) comes ultimately from the Germanic base *bul-, *bal-, which was also the source of English ball, balloon, and ballot. The Middle Dutch form corresponding to Old English bolle was bolle, which was borrowed into English in the 13th century as boll, initially meaning ‘bubble’ but latterly ‘round seed-head’.

The other bowl was originally simply a synonym for ball, but its modern specialized uses in the game of bowls, and the verbal usage ‘deliver the ball’ in cricket and other games, had already begun their development in the 15th century. The word came via Old French boule from Latin bulla ‘bubble’, which also lies behind English boil, bull (as in ‘papal bull’), bullion, bullet, bulletin, and bully (as in ‘bully beef’), as well, perhaps, as bill.
=> ball, balloon, ballot; boil, bull, bullet, bulletin, bully
bug: bug: [14] Originally, bug meant ‘something frightening’ – and in fact one of the earliest known uses of the word was for what we would now call a ‘scare-crow’. It is one of a set of words (others are bogle and perhaps bugaboo) for alarming or annoying phenomena, usually supernatural, whose interrelationship and ultimate source have never been adequately explained (see BOGEY). Bug ‘insect’ [16] is probably the same word, although it has also been connected with Old English budd ‘beetle’. The meanings ‘defect’ (from the 19th century) and ‘germ’ and ‘hidden microphone’ (both 20th-century) all developed from ‘insect’.
candid: candid: [17] Originally, candid meant simply ‘white’; its current sense ‘frank’ developed metaphorically via ‘pure’ and ‘unbiased’. English acquired the word, probably through French candide, from Latin candidum, a derivative of the verb candēre ‘be white, glow’ (which is related to English candle, incandescent, and incense).

The derived noun candour is 18th-century in English. Candida, the fungus which causes the disease thrush, got its name from being ‘white’. And in ancient Rome, people who were standing for election wore white togas; they were thus called candidāti, whence English candidate [17].
=> candidate, candle, incandescent, incense
capital: capital: [13] Etymologically, capital is something that is at the top or ‘head’; it comes from Latin caput ‘head’. The various current English uses of the word reached us, however, by differing routes. The first to come was the adjective, which originally meant simply ‘of the head’ (Milton in Paradise lost wrote of the Serpent’s ‘capital bruise’, meaning the bruise to its head); this came via Old French capital from Latin capitālis, a derivative of caput.

The other senses of the adjective have derived from this: ‘capital punishment’, for instance, comes from the notion of a crime which, figuratively speaking, affects the head, or life. Its use as a noun dates from the 17th century: the immediate source of the financial sense is Italian capitale. The architectural capital ‘top of a column’ (as in ‘Corinthian capitals’) also comes from Latin caput, but in this case the intermediate form was the diminutive capitellum ‘little head’, which reached English in the 14th century via Old French capitel.
=> cattle, chapter, head
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.
caviare: caviare: [16] Caviare is of Turkish origin; it comes from Turkish khāvyār. It spread from there to a number of European languages, including Italian caviale and French caviar, many of which contributed to the rather confusing diversity of forms in 16th-, 17th-, and early 18th-century English: cavialy, cavery, caveer, gaveare, etc. By the mid-18th century caviare or caviar had become the established spellings. Ironically, although caviare is quintessentially a Russian delicacy, Russian does not have the word caviare; it uses ikrá.
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
cling: cling: [OE] The basic underlying sense of cling seems to be ‘stick, adhere’, but surviving records of the word in Old English reveal it only in the more specialized senses ‘congeal’ or ‘shrivel’ (the notion being that loss of moisture causes something to contract upon itself or adhere more closely to a surface). It is not really until the late 13th century that the more familiar ‘adhere’ (as in ‘a wet shirt clinging to someone’s back’) begins to show itself, and no hint that ‘clinging’ is something a human being can do with his or her arms emerges before the early 17th century.

The word goes back to a prehistoric Germanic base *klingg-, whose variant *klengk- is the source of English clench [13] and clinch [16].
=> clench, clinch
courage: courage: [13] Modern English uses heart as a metaphor for ‘innermost feelings or passions’, but this is nothing new. Vulgar Latin took the Latin word cor ‘heart’ and derived from it *corāticum, a noun with just this sense. Borrowed into English via Old French corage, it was used from earliest times for a wide range of such passions, including ‘anger’ or ‘lust’, and it was not until the early 17th century that it became narrowed down in application to ‘bravery’.
=> cordial
cross: cross: [OE] When the Anglo-Saxons embraced Christianity they acquired cros, in the first instance from Old Irish cross. The word’s ultimate source was Latin crux, which may have been of Phoenician origin (although some have connected it with Latin curvus ‘bent’). (Crux itself was borrowed into English in the 18th century.) The cross’s shape formed the basis of the adjectival, adverbial, and verbal uses of the word, and also of across. (The notion of ‘crossing’ also lies behind cruise [17] a probable borrowing from the Dutch kruisen ‘cross’.) Derivatives of the Latin word include crucial [18], crucible [15], crucifix [13] (from late Latin crucifixus, literally ‘fixed to a cross’), crusade [16], and excruciate [16].
=> crucial, crucible, crucifix, crusade, excruciate
demure: demure: [14] Etymologically, someone who is demure is quiet and settled, not agitated. The word comes from demore, the past participle of Old French demorer ‘stay’ (source of English demur), and so semantically is a parallel formation to staid. One of its earliest recorded uses in English was actually to describe the sea as ‘calm’, and it was not until the late 17th century that its modern slightly pejorative connotations of coyness began to emerge.
=> demur
duck: duck: [OE] A duck is a bird that ‘ducks’ – as simple as that. It gets its name from its habit of diving down under the surface of the water. There is no actual record of an English verb duck until the 14th century, but it is generally assumed that an Old English verb *dūcan did exist, which would have formed the basis of the noun duck. It came from a prehistoric West Germanic verb *dukjan, which also produced German tauchen ‘dive’.

English is the only language which uses this word for the bird, although Swedish has the term dykand, literally ‘dive-duck’, which refers to the ‘diver’, a sort of large waterbird. Nor is it the original English word: the Anglo-Saxons mainly called the duck ened, a term which survived until the 15th century. This represents the main Indo-European name for the duck, which comes from an original *anə ti- and is found in Greek nessa, Latin anas, German ente, Dutch eend, Swedish and, and Russian utka.
ecology: ecology: [19] Interpreted literally, ecology means ‘study of houses’. The word was coined, as ökologie, by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel in the 1870s, on the basis of Greek oikos (as in economy). This means literally ‘house’, but Haeckel was using it in the wider sense ‘dwelling, habitat’. English adopted the word soon after its coinage, originally in the quasi- Latin form oecology.
=> economy
edit: edit: [18] Etymologically, someone who edits a newspaper ‘gives it out’, or in effect ‘publishes’ it. And that in fact is how the word was first used in English: when William Enfield wrote in his 1791 translation of Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae that a certain author ‘wrote many philosophical treatises which have never been edited’, he meant ‘published’.

This usage comes directly from ēditus, the past participle of Latin ēdere ‘put out, exhibit, publish’, which was a compound verb formed from the prefix ex- ‘out’ and dare ‘put, give’ (source of English date, donate, etc). In its modern application, ‘prepare for publication’, it is mainly a back-formation from editor [17], which acquired this particular sense in the 18th century. (French éditeur still means ‘publisher’, and the term editor is used in that sense in some British publishing houses.)
=> date, donate
ego: ego: [19] Ego is Latin for ‘I’ (and comes in fact from the same Indo-European base as produced English I). English originally acquired it in the early 19th century as a philosophical term for the ‘conscious self’, and the more familiar modern uses – ‘self-esteem’, or more derogatorily ‘selfimportance’, and the psychologist’s term (taken up by Freud) for the ‘conscious self’ – date from the end of the century.

Derivatives include egoism [18], borrowed from French égoïsme, and egotism [18], perhaps deliberately coined with the t to distinguish it from egoism. And the acquisitions do not end there: alter ego, literally ‘other I, second self’, was borrowed in the 16th century, and the Freudian term superego, ‘beyond I’, entered the language in the 1920s.
=> i
ejaculate: ejaculate: [16] Etymologically, ejaculate means ‘dart out’. It comes from Latin ejaculārī, a compound verb formed ultimately from the prefix ex- ‘out’ and jaculum ‘dart, javelin’. This in turn was a derivative of jacere ‘throw’ (which itself combined with ex- to form ejicere, source of English eject [15]). The word’s original sense ‘throw out suddenly’ survived (or perhaps has revived) for a time in English, but essentially it has been for its metaphorical uses (‘emit semen’ and ‘exclaim’) that it has been preserved.
=> eject, jesses, jet, object, reject, subject
even: even: [OE] Even can be traced back to a prehistoric Germanic *ebnaz, although it is not clear whether it meant originally ‘flat, level’ or ‘equal, alike’ (both strands of meaning are still present in the word, the latter in such expressions as ‘get even with’ and ‘even number’, and also in its various adverbial uses, the former in ‘even keel’, ‘even light’, etc)
exaggerate: exaggerate: [16] Something that is exaggerated is literally ‘piled up’ out of all due proportion; indeed that is what it originally meant in English: ‘With their flipping and flapping up and down in the dirt they exaggerate a mountain of mire’, Philip Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses 1583. It was not really until the 17th century that the current sense ‘overemphasize’ came to the fore, although it was already present in the word’s Latin original. This was exaggerāre, a compound formed from the intensive prefix exand aggerāre ‘pile up’ (a derivative of agger ‘heap’).
fag: fag: English has three distinct words fag, none of whose origins is altogether clear. The oldest is the one which denotes ‘drudgery’. It is first recorded as a verb in the 16th century, meaning ‘droop, decline’; its more common noun uses, ‘hard boring work’ and ‘boy who does tasks for an older boy in a British public school’, appear to have developed in the late 18th century.

It is generally taken to have been originally an alteration of flag ‘lose vigour, droop’, although there is no conclusive proof of this. Fag ‘cigarette’ [19] is an abbreviation of fag-end [17], which originally meant generally ‘extreme end’. It was a compound formed from an earlier fag [15], whose underlying meaning seems to have been something like ‘piece hanging down loosely, flap’ (and which conceivably could be related to fag ‘drudgery’). Fag ‘homosexual’ [20] is short for faggot [13], a derogatory term applied to male homosexuals in American English since the early 20th century; the usage is probably based on the slightly earlier uncomplimentary use of the word for ‘woman’. Faggot means literally ‘bundle of sticks’, and comes via Old French fagot from Italian faggotto (which is used also for ‘bassoon’).

This in turn is a diminutive form of Vulgar Latin *facus, which was based ultimately on Greek phákelos ‘bundle’. The notion of applying a term for ‘bundle’ abusively to ‘women’ is perhaps echoed in baggage.
figure: figure: [13] Figure comes via Old French from Latin figūra ‘form, shape, figure’, a derivative of the same base (*fig-) as produced fingere ‘make, shape’ (whence English effigy, faint, feign, and fiction). Many of the technical Latin uses of the word, including ‘geometric figure’, are direct translations of Greek skhéma, which also meant literally ‘form, shape’, but the sense ‘numerical symbol’ is a later development. Also from the base *fig- was derived Latin figmentum ‘something created or invented’, from which English gets figment [15].
=> effigy, faint, feign, fiction, figment
fort: fort: [15] Etymologically, a fort is a ‘strong place’. The word comes either from Old French fort or from Italian forte, both noun uses of an adjective descended from Latin fortis ‘strong’. A similar semantic result, but achieved by derivation rather than conversion, can be seen in fortress [13], a borrowing from Old French forteresse, which goes back to Vulgar Latin *fortaritia, a derivative of Latin fortis. (The nearest native English equivalent of both words is stronghold.) Other words inherited by English from fortis include fortify [15], fortitude [15], the noun forte ‘strong point’ [17] (it was borrowed, despite its modern Italianate pronunciation, from French fort, and was subsequently remodelled on the French feminine form forte), and the musical direction forte ‘loud’ [18] (from Italian), which appears also in pianoforte.
=> force, fortify, fortress
frame: frame: [OE] Frame comes from the preposition from, whose underlying notion is of ‘forward progress’. This was incorporated into a verb framian in Old English times, which meant ‘make progress’. Its modern meaning started to develop in the early Middle English period, from ‘prepare, make ready’, via the more specific ‘prepare timber for building’, to ‘construct, shape’ (the Middle English transitive uses may have been introduced by the related Old Norse fremija).

The noun frame was derived from the verb in the 14th century. Incidentally, if the connection between from and frame should seem at first sight far-fetched, it is paralleled very closely by furnish, which came from the same prehistoric Germanic source as from.
=> from
garage: garage: [20] As the motor-car age got under way at the start of the 20th century, a gap opened up in the lexicon for a word for ‘car-storage place’. English filled it in 1902 by borrowing French garage. The first references to it show that the term (station was an early alternative) was originally applied to large commercially run shelters housing many vehicles – the equivalent more of modern multi-storey car parks than of garages (the Daily Mail, for example, on 11 January 1902, reports the ‘new “garage” founded by Mr Harrington Moore, hon. secretary of the Automobile Club … The “garage”, which is situated at the City end of Queen Victoria-street, has accommodation for 80 cars’, and Alfred Harmsworth, in Motors 1902, wrote of ‘stations or “garages” where a number of cars can be kept’).

It was not long, however, before individual houses got more personalized garages, and the application to an establishment where vehicle repairs are carried out and fuel sold soon followed. The French word garage itself is a derivative of the verb garer, which originally meant ‘dock ships’. It comes from Old French garer ‘protect, defend’, a loanword from Old High German warōn (to which English ward, warn, and the -ware of beware are related).
=> beware, ward, warn
grub: grub: [13] Grub ‘dig’ comes ultimately from prehistoric Germanic *grub-, perhaps via Old English *grybban, although no record of such a verb has actually come down to us (the related Germanic *grab- gave English grave, while a further variant *grōb- produced groove [15]). The relationship of grub ‘dig’ to the various noun uses of the word is far from clear. Grub ‘larva’, first recorded in the 15th century, may have been inspired by the notion of larvae digging their way through wood or earth, but equally it could be connected (via the idea of ‘smallness’) with the contemporary but now obsolete grub ‘short, dwarfish fellow’ – an entirely mysterious word. Grub ‘food’, which dates from the 17th century, is usually said to have been suggested by birds’ partiality for grubs or larvae as part of their diet.

And in the 19th century a grub was also a ‘dirty child’ – perhaps originally one who got dirty by digging or grubbing around in the earth – which may have been the source of grubby ‘dirty’ [19].
=> grave, groove
hurry: hurry: [16] The earliest known occurrences of the verb hurry are in the plays of Shakespeare, who uses it quite frequently. This suggests that it may have been a word well known to him in his native West Midland dialect, but it is not clear whether it is identical with the horye that occurs in a 14th-century Middle English poem from the same general area. A possible relative is Middle High German hurren ‘move quickly’.
husk: husk: [14] Etymologically, a husk is probably a ‘little house’. It seems to have been adapted from Middle Dutch hūskijn, a diminutive form of hūs ‘house’ – the notion being, of course, that it ‘houses’ seeds or fruits. The derivative husky was coined in the 16th century; its use for ‘hoarse’ comes from the idea of having dry husks in the throat (the husky dog [19] is an entirely different word, probably an alteration of Eskimo).
=> house
hymn: hymn: [13] For the ancient Greeks, a húmnos was a ‘song of praise’ – but not necessarily a religious one. It could be used to celebrate the deeds of heroes as well as to compliment the gods. However, the Greek Septuagint uses it to render various Hebrew words meaning ‘song praising God’, and it was this meaning that was carried via Latin hymnus and Old French ymne into English as imne (the spelling hymn is a 16thcentury latinization).
imbecile: imbecile: [16] Etymologically imbecile means ‘without support’, hence ‘weak’. It came via French from Latin imbēcillus, a compound adjective formed from the prefix in- ‘not’ and an unrecorded *bēcillum, a diminutive variant of baculum ‘stick’ (from which English gets bacillus and bacterium). Anyone or anything without a stick or staff for support is by extension weak, and so the Latin adjective came to mean ‘weak, feeble’. This broadened out to ‘weak in mind’, and was even used as a noun for ‘weak-minded person’, but English did not adopt these metaphorical uses until the late 18th century.
=> bacillus, bacterium
jet: jet: English has two distinct words jet. The older, which denotes a type of black stone used in jewellery [14], comes via Old French jaiet and Latin gagātēs from Greek gagátēs, which denoted ‘stone from Gagai’, a town in Lycia, in Asia Minor, where it was found. The jet of ‘jet engines’ [16] goes back ultimately to a word that meant ‘throw’ – Latin jacere (from which English also gets inject, project, reject, etc).

A derivative of this was jactāre, which also meant ‘throw’. It passed via Vulgar Latin *jectāre into Old French as jeter, and when English took it over it was originally used for ‘protrude, stick out’: ‘the houses jetting over aloft like the poops of ships, to shadow the streets’, George Sandys, Travels 1615. This sense is perhaps best preserved in jetty ‘projecting pier’, and in the variant form jut [16], while the underlying meaning ‘throw’ is still present in jettison ‘throw things overboard’ and its contracted form jetsam.

But back with the verb jet, in the 17th century it began to be used for ‘spurt out in a forceful stream’. The notion of using such a stream to create forward motion was first encapsulated in the term jet propulsion in the mid 19th century, but it did not take concrete form for nearly a hundred years (the term jet engine is not recorded until 1943).
=> inject, jetsam, jettison, jetty, jut, project, reject, subject
leg: leg: [13] Shank was the word used in Old English for ‘leg’. Not until the late 13th was leg acquired, from Old Norse leggr. It goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *lagjaz, which may ultimately come from a source that meant ‘bend’. No other Germanic language any longer uses it for ‘leg’, but Swedish and Danish retain lägg and læg respectively for ‘calf’.
like: like: English has a diverse group of words spelled like, but they all come ultimately from the same source. This was prehistoric Germanic *līkam ‘appearance, form, body’ (source also of the lych- of English lych-gate [15], which originally signified the gate through which a coffin was carried into a churchyard). From it was derived the verb *līkōjan, which passed into English as like.

It originally meant ‘please’, but by the 12th century had done a semantic somersault to ‘find pleasing’. The same Germanic *likam produced English alike, literally ‘similar in appearance’, whose Old Norse relative líkr was borrowed into English as the adjective like [12]. Its adverbial and prepositional uses developed in the later Middle Ages. Also from Old Norse came the derived adjective likely [13].

English each and such were formed from the ancestor of like.
=> each, such
mandrake: mandrake: [14] The mandrake is a Mediterranean plant of the potato family with medicinal uses. Its name is an alteration of mandragora, which goes back via Latin to Greek mandragóras, a word probably of non- Indo-European origin. The change arose owing to an association with man (the mandrake has a large forked root which supposedly resembles a human being) and drake ‘dragon’ (an allusion to the root’s supposedly magical properties).
mosaic: mosaic: [16] Mosaic work is etymologically work ‘of the muses’. The word comes ultimately from Greek mouseion, which originally meant literally ‘place of the muses’, and has also given English museum. Somehow in medieval Latin it became altered to mūsaicus or mōsaicus, and passed via early modern Italian mosaico and French mosaïque into English as mosaic. It has no etymological connection, incidentally, with Mosaic ‘of Moses’ [17].
=> muse, museum
museum: museum: [17] Etymologically, a museum is a place devoted to the ‘muses’. It comes via Latin mūsēum ‘library, study’ from Greek mouseion ‘place of the muses’, a noun based on the adjective mouseios ‘of the muses’. This in turn was derived from mousa ‘muse’, source of English muse [14]. Other English words from the same source are mosaic and music. But muse ‘ponder’ is not related; it comes, like its first cousin amuse, from Old French muse ‘animal’s mouth’.
=> mosaic, muse, music
music: music: [13] Etymologically, music comes from the ‘muses’, Greek goddesses who inspired poets, painters, musicians, etc. The word traces its history back via Old French musique and Latin mūsica to Greek mousiké, a noun use of mousikós ‘of the muses’, an adjective derived from mousa ‘muse’. The specialization of the word’s meaning began in Greek – first to ‘poetry sung to music’, and subsequently to ‘music’ alone.
=> muse, museum
off: off: [OE] Off originated simply as the adverbial use of of. The spelling off, denoting the extra emphasis given to the adverb, began to appear in the 15th century, but the orthographic distinction between off for the adverb, and for prepositional uses associated with it (‘removal, disengagement’), and of for the ordinary preposition did not become firmly established until after 1600.
=> of
pantechnicon: pantechnicon: [19] The original Pantechnicon was a huge complex of warehouses, wine vaults, and other storage facilities in Motcomb Street, in London’s Belgravia. Built in 1830 and supposed to be fireproof, it was almost totally destroyed by fire in 1874. It seems originally to have been intended to be a bazaar, and its name was coined from the prefix pan- ‘all’ and Greek tekhnikón, the neuter form of tekhnikós ‘artistic’, denoting that all sorts of manufactured wares were to be bought there.

But it was its role as a furniture repository that brought it into the general language. Removal vans taking furniture there came to be known as pantechnicon vans, and by the 1890s pantechnicon was a generic term for ‘removal vans’.
=> architect, technical
penthouse: penthouse: [14] Penthouse has no etymological connection with house. It comes from Anglo- Norman *pentis, an abbreviated version of Old French apentis. This in turn went back to Latin appendicium ‘additional attached part’, a derivative of appendēre ‘attach’ (source of English append [15] and appendix [16]), which was a compound verb formed from the prefix ad- ‘to’ and pendēre ‘hang’ (source of English pending, pendulum, etc).

It arrived in English as pentis, and was used for a sort of ‘lean-to with a sloping roof’. A perceived semantic connection with houses led by the late 14th century to its reformulation as penthouse, but its application to a ‘(luxurious) flat on top of a tall block’ did not emerge until the 20th century.
=> append, pendulum
plain: plain: [13] Plain is etymologically the same word as plane in all its uses except the tree-name, and even that comes from the same ultimate source. This was Indo-European *plā- ‘flat’, which produced Greek platús ‘broad’ (source of English place, plaice, and platypus), Latin plānus ‘flat, clear’, and possibly English flat. The Latin word passed into English via Old French plain, but its original ‘flat’ senses have been hived off into the separately acquired plane, leaving only the metaphorically derived ‘clear’ senses. The Italian descendant of plānus has given English piano.
=> plane
plumb: plumb: [13] Plumb comes via Old French *plombe from Latin plumbum ‘lead’, a word of uncertain origin. Of its modern English uses, the verbal ‘sound the depths’ comes from the use of a line weighted with lead (a plumb line) to measure the depth of water and the adverbial ‘exactly’ from the use of a similar line to determine verticality. Related words in English include aplomb; plumber [14] (originally simply a ‘worker in lead’, but eventually, since water pipes were once made of lead, a ‘pipe-layer’); plummet [14] (a diminutive form coined in Old French); and plunge [14] (from the Vulgar Latin derivative *plumbicāre ‘sound with a plumb’).
=> aplomb, plumber, plummet, plunge
poll: poll: [13] ‘Head’ is the original and central meaning of poll, from which all its modern uses have derived. The ‘voting’ sort of poll, for instance, which emerged in the 17th century, is etymologically a counting of ‘heads’, and the poll tax is a ‘per capita’ tax. The verb poll originally meant ‘cut someone’s hair’, a clear extension of the notion of ‘top’ or ‘head’ (the derived pollard [16] denotes an ‘animal with its horns removed’ or a ‘tree with its top branches cut off’); this later developed to ‘cut evenly across’, which is what the poll of deed poll means (originally it was a legal agreement cut evenly across, signifying that only one person was party to it – agreements made between two or more people were cut with a wavy line).
=> pollard
premise: premise: [14] Premise comes via Old French premisse from medieval Latin praemissa, a noun use of the past participle of Latin praemittere ‘send ahead’. This was a compound verb formed from the prefix prae- ‘before’ and mittere ‘send’ (source of English admit, commit, mission, transmit, etc). It first entered English as a technical term in logic, in which its underlying meaning is of a proposition ‘set before’ someone.

But it was also used in the plural as a legal term, meaning ‘matters stated previously’. In a conveyance or will, such ‘matters’ were often houses or other buildings referred to specifically at the beginning of the document, and so the term premises came to denote such buildings.
=> admit, commit, mission, permit, submit, transmit