quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- chemical[chemical 词源字典]
- 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[chemical etymology, chemical origin, 英语词源] - consistent (adj.)
- 1570s, "standing firm, standing still," from Latin consistentem (nominative consistens), present participle of consistere (see consist). Modern sense of "agreeing" (with with) is first attested 1640s. Older sense survives in consistency. Related: Consistently.
- Daniel
- proper name, Hebrew, literally "God is my judge;" related to Dan, literally "he who judges," the tribe descended from Jacob's son of that name in Old Testament. Consistently in the top 15 names for boys born in the U.S. from 1972 through 2008.
- establishment (n.)
- late 15c., "settled arrangement," also "income, property," from establish + -ment. Meaning "established church" is from 1731; Sense of "place of business" is from 1832. Meaning "social matrix of ruling people and institutions" is attested occasionally from 1923, consistently from 1955.
- inconsistent (adj.)
- 1640s, "not agreeing in substance or form," from in- (1) "not, opposite of" + consistent. Related: Inconsistently.
- -or
- word-forming element making nouns of quality, state, or condition, from Middle English -our, from Old French -our (Modern French -eur), from Latin -orem (nominative -or), a suffix added to pp. verbal stems. Also in some cases from Latin -atorem (nominative -ator).
In U.S., via Noah Webster, -or is nearly universal (but not in glamour, curious, generous), while in Britain -our is used in most cases (but with many exceptions: author, error, senator, ancestor, horror etc.). The -our form predominated after c. 1300, but Mencken reports that the first three folios of Shakespeare's plays used both spellings indiscriminately and with equal frequency; only in the Fourth Folio of 1685 does -our become consistent.
A partial revival of -or on the Latin model took place from 16c. (governour began to lose its -u- 16c. and it was gone by 19c.), and also among phonetic spellers in both England and America (John Wesley wrote that -or was "a fashionable impropriety" in England in 1791).
Webster criticized the habit of deleting -u- in -our words in his first speller ("A Grammatical Institute of the English Language," commonly called the Blue-Black Speller) in 1783. His own deletion of the -u- began with the revision of 1804, and was enshrined in the influential "Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language" (1806), which also established in the U.S. -ic for British -ick and -er for -re, along with many other attempts at reformed spelling which never caught on (such as masheen for machine). His attempt to justify them on the grounds of etymology and the custom of great writers does not hold up.
Fowler notes the British drop the -u- when forming adjectives ending in -orous (humorous) and derivatives in -ation and -ize, in which cases the Latin origin is respected (such as vaporize). When the Americans began to consistently spell it one way, however, the British reflexively hardened their insistence on the other. "The American abolition of -our in such words as honour and favour has probably retarded rather than quickened English progress in the same direction." [Fowler] - drongo
- "A songbird with glossy black plumage and typically a long forked tail and a crest, found in Africa, southern Asia, and Australia", Mid 19th century: from Malagasy. sense 2 is said to be from the name of an Australian racehorse of the 1920s which consistently finished last or near last.