quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- command[command 词源字典]
- command: [13] Ultimately, command and commend are the same word. Both come from Latin compound verbs formed from the intensive prefix com- and the verb mandāre ‘entrust, commit to someone’s charge’ (from which we get mandate). In the classical period this combination produced commendāre ‘commit to someone’s charge, commend, recommend’, which passed into English in the 14th century (recommend, a medieval formation, was acquired by English from medieval Latin in the 14th century).
Later on, the compounding process was repeated, giving late Latin commandāre. By this time, mandāre had come to mean ‘order’ as well as ‘entrust’ (a change reflected in English mandatory). Commandāre inherited both these senses, and they coexisted through Old French comander and Anglo- Norman comaunder into Middle English commande.
But ‘entrust’ was gradually taken over from the 14th century by commend, and by the end of the 15th century command meant simply ‘order’. Commandeer and commando are both of Afrikaans origin, and became established in English at the end of the 19th century largely as a result of the Boer War. Commodore [17] is probably a modification of Dutch komandeur, from French commandeur ‘commander’.
=> commend, commodore, demand, mandatory, recommend, remand[command etymology, command origin, 英语词源] - daughter
- daughter: [OE] Daughter is an ancient word which goes back to Indo-European *dhughə tēr. Apart from Latin and the Romance languages (with filia and its descendants) and Celtic (Welsh has merch), all the Indo-European languages have inherited this form: Greek had thugátēr, Armenian dustr, Old Slavic dusti (whence Russian doch’), and Sanskrit duhitar-.
The prehistoric Germanic word was *dohtēr, which produced Gothic dauhtar, German tochter, Dutch dochter, Swedish dotter, Danish datter, and of course English daughter. It is not known where the Indo-European word ultimately came from, although correspondences have been suggested with Sanskrit duh- ‘milk’ and Greek teúkho ‘make’.
- dauphin
- dauphin: [15] The eldest sons of the French king were from 1349–1830 designated by a title which is essentially the same word as English dolphin. It was originally applied to the lords of the Viennois, an area in the southeast of France, whose coat of arms incorporated three dolphins. After the Viennois province of Dauphiné was sold by Charles of Valois to the French crown in 1343, the king gave it to his eldest son, and from then on all eldest sons inherited it along with the title dauphin.
=> dolphin - flail
- flail: [OE] Flail is a distant relative of flagellation [15]. Both go back ultimately to Latin flagrum ‘whip’. This had a diminutive form flagellum, which in prehistoric times was borrowed into West Germanic as *flagil-. It is assumed that Old English inherited it as *flegil (although this is not actually recorded), which, reinforced in Middle English times by the related Old French flaiel, produced modern English flail. Flagellation comes from the derived Latin verb flagellāre ‘whip’.
=> flagellation - 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 - glory
- glory: [13] Latin glōria had two separate descendants in Old French: glore, which produced modern French gloire, and glorie, which English took over via Anglo-Norman. The source of the Latin word, which is also the ancestor of Italian and Spanish gloria and Irish Gaelic glōir, is not known. The now obsolete English sense ‘pride’, inherited from Latin, is preserved in vainglorious [15].
- mad
- mad: [13] The underlying etymological meaning of mad is ‘changed’. It goes back ultimately to Indo-European *moitó-, a past participial form based on *moi-, *mei-, ‘change’ (source also of Latin mūtāre ‘change’, from which English gets mutate). Prehistoric Germanic inherited it, adding the collective prefix *ga- to form *gamaithaz, which passed into Old English as gemād ‘insane’. From this was derived the verb gemǣdan ‘madden’, whose past participle gemǣded eventually became a new adjective gemǣdd. By the Middle English period this had become amadd, and the reduced prefix aeventually disappeared, leaving mad.
=> mutate - strop
- strop: [OE] Strop has now narrowed down in meaning to the specialized ‘strip of leather for sharpening a razor’, but it used to be a much more general term for a leather band or loop. It goes back to a prehistoric West Germanic word that was probably an adoption of Latin stroppus ‘strap, band’. That in turn may well have come from Greek strophos ‘twisted band’, from strephein ‘turn’.
Old French had estrope from the same West Germanic source, and that probably reinforced the English word in the 14th century. Scottish pronunciation turned strop into strap [17], and that has now inherited most of the general functions of strop in English at large. As for stroppy ‘bad-tempered and uncooperative’, first recorded in 1951, no convincing link with strop ‘leather strip’ has ever been established (strop ‘fit of stroppiness’ is a back-formation from stroppy).
One suggestion is that it may be a radically stripped-down version of obstreperous.
- sun
- sun: [OE] Not surprisingly, considering the central importance of the sun to human life, the word for it in the vast majority of modern European languages goes back to a common Indo-European source – *sāu- or *su-. These variants have however differentiated into several distinct camps. The *sāu- form adopted an -lsuffix, and evolved into Greek hélios (source of English heliotrope), Latin sōl (whence French soleil, Italian sole, and Spanish sol, not to mention English solar, solarium, etc), Welsh haul, and Swedish and Danish sol.
The *suform with an -l- ending has given Russian solnce, Czech slunce, Serbo-Croat sunce, etc. But the modern West Germanic languages have inherited the *su- form with an -n- suffix, giving German sonne, Dutch zon, and English sun.
=> heliotrope, solar, solarium - Sunday
- Sunday: [OE] Sunday is part of the general system of naming days of the week after heavenly bodies inherited by the Germanic peoples from the ancient Mediterranean world. The Romans called the day diēs sōlis ‘day of the sun’, which in translation has become German sonntag, Dutch zondag, Swedish söndag, Danish söndag, and English sunday. Welsh retains the term (dydd sul), but the Romance languages have gone over to variations on ‘Lord’s day’ (French dimanche, Spanish domingo, etc).
- would
- would: [OE] Would goes back to wold-, the Old English past tense of will. Its vowel is inherited from the Indo-European variant *wol- (as in German wollen ‘will, want’), rather than the *wel- that produced the English present form will. Its use as an auxiliary to form the conditional dates back to the Old English period.
=> will - -ance
- word-forming element attached to verbs to form abstract nouns of process or fact (convergence from converge), or of state or quality (absence from absent); ultimately from Latin -antia and -entia, which depended on the vowel in the stem word, from PIE *-nt-, adjectival suffix.
As Old French evolved from Latin, these were leveled to -ance, but later French borrowings from Latin (some of them subsequently passed to English) used the appropriate Latin form of the ending, as did words borrowed by English directly from Latin (diligence, absence).
English thus inherited a confused mass of words from French and further confused it since c. 1500 by restoring -ence selectively in some forms of these words to conform with Latin. Thus dependant, but independence, etc. - de-
- active word-forming element in English and in many words inherited from French and Latin, from Latin de "down, down from, from, off; concerning" (see de), also used as a prefix in Latin usually meaning "down, off, away, from among, down from," but also "down to the bottom, totally" hence "completely" (intensive or completive), which is its sense in many English words. As a Latin prefix it also had the function of undoing or reversing a verb's action, and hence it came to be used as a pure privative -- "not, do the opposite of, undo" -- which is its primary function as a living prefix in English, as in defrost (1895), defuse (1943), etc. Compare also dis-.
- disinherit (v.)
- mid-15c., from dis- "not" + inherit. Related: Disinherited; disinheriting. Replaced earlier desherit (c. 1300), from Old French desheriter.
- gentleness (n.)
- c. 1300, "inherited nature," from gentle + -ness. Meaning "freedom from harshness or violence" is from 1610s.
- grand-
- a special use of grand (adj.) in genealogical compounds, originally with the sense of "a generation older than," first attested c. 1200, in Anglo-French graund dame "grandmother," also grandsire (late 13c.), from such use of Old French grand-, which perhaps is modeled on Latin avunculus magnus "great uncle." The partly-anglicized grandmother, grandfather are from 15c. Other such words in European languages are formed with the adjectives for "old" or "best" (Danish bedstefar) or as diminutives or pet names (Greek pappos, Welsh taid). The French formation also is the model for such words in German and Dutch. Spanish abuelo is from Latin avus "grandfather" (from PIE *awo- "adult male relative other than the father;" see uncle), via Vulgar Latin *aviolus, a diminutive or adjective substitution for the noun.
The extension of the sense to corresponding relationships of descent, "a generation younger than" (grandson, granddaughter) is from Elizabethan times. The inherited PIE root, *nepot- "grandchild" (see nephew) has shifted to "nephew; niece" in English and other languages (Spanish nieto, nieta). Old English used suna sunu ("son's son"), dohtor sunu ("son's daughter"). - hereditament
- "inherited property," mid-15c., from Medieval Latin hereditamentum, from Latin hereditatem (see heredity).
- heritage (n.)
- c. 1200, "that which may be inherited," from Old French iritage, eritage, heritage, from heriter "inherit," from Late Latin hereditare, ultimately from Latin heres (genitive heredis) "heir" (see heredity).
- inherit (v.)
- c. 1300, "to make (someone) an heir," from Old French enheriter "make heir, appoint as heir," from Late Latin inhereditare "to appoint as heir," from Latin in- "in" (see in- (2)) + hereditare "to inherit," from heres (genitive heredis) "heir" (see heredity). Sense of "receive inheritance" arose mid-14c.; original sense is retained in disinherit. Related: Inherited; inheriting.
- inheritance (n.)
- late 14c., enheritaunce "fact of receiving by hereditary succession;" early 15c. as "that which is inherited," from Anglo-French enheritance, Old French enheritaunce, from enheriter (see inherit). Heritance "act of inheriting" is from mid-15c.
- original (adj.)
- early 14c., "first in time, earliest," from Old French original "first" (13c.) and directly from Latin originalis, from originem (nominative origo) "beginning, source, birth," from oriri "to rise" (see orchestra). The first reference is in original sin "innate depravity of man's nature," supposed to be inherited from Adam in consequence of the Fall. Related: Originally.
- patrimony (n.)
- mid-14c., "property of the Church," also "spiritual legacy of Christ," from Old French patremoine "heritage, patrimony" (12c.) and directly from Latin patrimonium "a paternal estate, inheritance from a father," also figurative, from pater (genitive patris) "father" (see father (n.)) + -monium, suffix signifying action, state, condition. Meaning "property inherited from a father or ancestors" is attested from late 14c. Figurative sense of "immaterial things handed down from the past" is from 1580s. A curious sense contrast to matrimony.
- Tay-Sachs
- fatal inherited disorder, 1907, named in German (1901) by German neurologist Henryk Higier (1866-1942) from names of British ophthalmologist Warren Tay (1843-1927) and U.S. physician and neurologist Warren Sachs (1858-1944) who had independently described it in 1881 and 1887 respectively.
- inheritable
- "Capable of being inherited", Late Middle English (formerly also as enheritable): from Anglo-Norman French enheritable 'able to be made heir', from Old French enheriter (see inherit).
- afibrinogenaemia
- "Absence of fibrinogen in the blood, usually resulting in impaired coagulation; an acquired or inherited condition characterized by this", 1940s; earliest use found in Journal of the American Medical Association. From a- + fibrinogen + -aemia, after German Afibrinogenämie.