quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- grape[grape 词源字典]
- grape: [13] Not surprisingly, given the northerliness of the British Isles, English does not have its own native word for ‘grape’. In Old English it was was called wīnberige, literally ‘wineberry’, and the Old French word grape which Middle English borrowed as grape meant ‘bunch of grapes’, not ‘grape’. It was probably a derivative of the verb graper ‘gather grapes’, which itself was based on the noun grape ‘hook’ (a relative of English cramp, crampon, and grapnel [14]).
The underlying notion is of a bunch of grapes being gathered with a sort of pruning hook. (The use of a word that originally meant ‘bunch’ for ‘grape’ is in fact fairly common: Czech hrozen, Romanian stugure, German traube, and Lithuanian keke all follow the same pattern, as does French raisin, source of English raisin.)
=> cramp, crampon, grapnel[grape etymology, grape origin, 英语词源] - grape (n.)
- mid-13c., "a grape, a berry of the vine," also collective singular, from Old French grape "bunch of grapes, grape" (12c.), probably a back-formation from graper "steal; grasp; catch with a hook; pick (grapes)," from a Frankish or other Germanic word, from Proto-Germanic *krappon "hook," from a group of Germanic words meaning "bent, crooked, hooked" (cognates: Middle Dutch crappe, Old High German krapfo "hook;" also see cramp (n.2)). The original notion thus perhaps was "vine hook for grape-picking." The vine is not native to England. The word replaced Old English winberige "wine berry." Spanish grapa, Italian grappa also are from Germanic.