英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

acne [acne 词源字典]: acne: [19] It is ironic that acne, that represents a low point in many teenagers’ lives, comes from acme, ‘the highest point’. The Greeks used akme, which literally meant ‘point’, for referring to spots on the face, but when it came to be rendered into Latin it was mistransliterated as acnē, and the error has stuck. (Acme comes, incidentally, from an Indo-European base *ak- ‘be pointed’, and thus is related to acid, edge, and oxygen.)
=> acid, acme, edge, oxygen[acne etymology, acne origin, 英语词源]
filibuster: filibuster: [16] Filibuster and freebooter [16] are doublets: that is to say, they come from the same ultimate source, but have subsequently diverged. Freebooter ‘pirate’ was borrowed from Dutch vrijbuiter, a compound formed from vrij ‘free’ and buiter ‘plunderer’ (this was a derivative of buit ‘loot’, to which English booty is related).

But English was not the only language to adopt it; French wanted it too, but mangled it somewhat in the borrowing, to flibustier. It was then handed on to Spanish, as filibustero. It is not clear where the 16th-century English use of the word with an l spelling rather than an r spelling (which is recorded in only one text) comes from. The French form flibustier was borrowed towards the end of the 18th century, and presentday filibuster came from the Spanish form in the mid-19th century.

The use of the term for ‘obstructing a legislature with an overlong speech’ (which has now virtually obliterated its former semantic equivalence to freebooter) originated in the USA in the 1880s.
=> booty, free, freebooter
alliterate (v.): "to use alliteration," 1776 (implied in alliterated), back-formation from alliteration, on analogy of obliterate. Related: Alliterating.
football (n.): open-air game involving kicking a ball, c. 1400; in reference to the inflated ball used in the game, mid-14c. ("Ãe heued fro Ã¾e body went, Als it were a foteballe," Octavian I manuscript, c. 1350), from foot (n.) + ball (n.1). Forbidden in a Scottish statute of 1424. One of Shakespeare's insults is "you base foot-ball player" [Lear I.iv]. Ball-kicking games date back to the Roman legions, at least, but the sport seems first to have risen to a national obsession in England, c. 1630. Figurative sense of "something idly kicked around, something subject to hard use and many vicissitudes" is by 1530s.

Rules of the game first regularized at Cambridge, 1848; soccer (q.v.) split off in 1863. The U.S. style (known to some in England as "stop-start rugby with padding") evolved gradually 19c.; the first true collegiate game is considered to have been played Nov. 6, 1869, between Princeton and Rutgers, at Rutgers, but the rules there were more like soccer. A rematch at Princeton Nov. 13, with the home team's rules, was true U.S. football. Both were described as foot-ball at Princeton.
Then twenty-five of the best players in college were sent up to Brunswick to combat with the Rutgers boys. Their peculiar way of playing this game proved to Princeton an insurmountable difficulty; .... Two weeks later Rutgers sent down the same twenty-five, and on the Princeton grounds, November 13th, Nassau played her game; the result was joyous, and entirely obliterated the stigma of the previous defeat. ["Typical Forms of '71" by the Princeton University Class of '72, 1869]
iterate (v.): 1530s, "to do again, repeat," back-formation from iteration, or else from Latin iteratus, past participle of iterare. Related: Iterated; iterating.
obliterate (v.): c. 1600, from Latin obliteratus, past participle of obliterare "cause to disappear, blot out, erase, efface," figuratively "cause to be forgotten," from ob "against" (see ob-) + littera (also litera) "letter, script" (see letter (n.)); abstracted from phrase literas scribere "write across letters, strike out letters." Related: Obliterated; obliterating.
reiterate (v.): early 15c., "repeat again and again," from Late Latin reiteratus, past participle of reiterare "to repeat," from re- "again" (see re-) + iterare "to repeat," from iterum "again" (see iteration). Related: Reiterated; reiterating.
tetragrammaton (n.): c. 1400, from Greek (to) tetragrammaton "(the word) of four letters," from tetra- "four" (see four) + gramma (genitive grammatos) "letter, something written" (see -gram). The Hebrew divine name, transliterated as YHWH, usually vocalized in English as "Jehovah" or "Yahweh."
transliterate (v.): "to write a word in the characters of another alphabet," 1849, from trans- "across" (see trans-) + Latin littera (also litera) "letter, character" (see letter (n.)). Related: Transliterated; transliterating.
mu: "The twelfth letter of the Greek alphabet (Μ, μ), transliterated as ‘m’", Greek.
nu: "The thirteenth letter of the Greek alphabet (Ν, ν), transliterated as ‘n’", Greek.