quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- ginger[ginger 词源字典]
- ginger: [OE] Few foodstuffs can have been as exhaustively etymologized as ginger – Professor Alan Ross, for instance, begetter of the U/non-U distinction, wrote an entire 74-page monograph on the history of the word in 1952. And deservedly so, for its ancestry is extraordinarily complex. Its ultimate source was Sanskrit śrngavēram, a compound formed from śrngam ‘horn’ and vẽra- ‘body’; the term was applied to ‘ginger’ because of the shape of its edible root.
This passed via Prakrit singabēra and Greek ziggíberis into Latin as zinziberi. In postclassical times the Latin form developed to gingiber or gingiver, which Old English borrowed as gingifer. English reborrowed the word in the 13th century from Old French gingivre, which combined with the descendant of the Old English form to produce Middle English gingivere – whence modern English ginger.
Its verbal use, as in ‘ginger up’, appears to come from the practice of putting a piece of ginger into a lazy horse’s anus to make it buck its ideas up.
[ginger etymology, ginger origin, 英语词源] - oestrus
- oestrus: [17] Greek oistros had an extraordinarily wide range of meanings, from ‘madness, frenzy’ through ‘sting’ to ‘gadfly’, and including also ‘breeze’. If, as has been suggested, it is related to Latin īra ‘anger’ (source of English ire [13]), Lithuanian aistra ‘passion’, etc, ‘frenzy’ is presumably the primary sense, but in fact English originally adopted it (via Latin oestrus) as the genus name for a variety of horsefly or botfly. ‘Sting’ was taken up, in the sense ‘impetus, goad’, as a learned borrowing in the mid-19th century (‘They too were pricked by the oestrus of intellectual responsibility’, John Morley, On Compromise 1874), but oestrus was not used for ‘period of sexual receptiveness in female animals’ (based of course on the notion of sexual ‘frenzy’) until the end of the 19th century.
The derived oestrogen dates from the 1920s.
=> ire - extraordinary (adj.)
- early 15c., from Latin extraordinarius "out of the common order," from extra ordinem "out of order," especially the usual order, from extra "out" (see extra-) + ordinem, accusative of ordo "order" (see order (n.)). Related: Extraordinarily; extraordinariness.
- tremendous (adj.)
- 1630s, "awful, dreadful, terrible," from Latin tremendus "fearful, to be dreaded, terrible," literally "to be trembled at," gerundive form of tremere "to tremble" (see tremble (v.)). Hyperbolic or intensive sense of "extraordinarily great or good, immense" is attested from 1812, paralleling semantic changes in terrific, terrible, dreadful, awful, etc. Related: Tremendously.
- waltz (n.)
- round dance performed to music in triple time, extraordinarily popular as a fashionable dance from late 18c. to late 19c., the dance itself probably of Bohemian origin, 1781, from German Waltzer, from walzen "to roll, dance," from Old High German walzan "to turn, roll," from Proto-Germanic *walt- (cognate with Old Norse velta), from PIE root *wel- (3) "to turn, revolve" (see volvox). Described in 1825 as "a riotous and indecent German dance" [Walter Hamilton, "A Hand-Book or Concise Dictionary of Terms Used in the Arts and Sciences"].
The music struck up a beautiful air, and the dancers advanced a few steps, when suddenly, to my no small horror and amazement, the gentlemen seized the ladies round the waist, and all, as if intoxicated by this novel juxtaposition, began to whirl about the room, like a company of Bacchanalians dancing round a statue of the jolly god. "A waltz!" exclaimed I, inexpressibly shocked, "have I lived to see Scotch women waltz?" ["The Edinburgh Magazine," April, 1820]