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can [can 词源字典]: can: [OE] English has two distinct words can. The verb ‘be able to’ goes back via Old English cunnan and Germanic *kunnan to an Indo- European base *gn-, which also produced know. The underlying etymological meaning of can is thus ‘know’ or more specifically ‘come to know’, which survived in English until comparatively recently (in Ben Jonson’s The Magnetick Lady 1632, for example, we find ‘She could the Bible in the holy tongue’).

This developed into ‘know how to do something’, from which we get the current ‘be able to do something’. The past tense could comes ultimately from prehistoric Germanic *kuntha, via Old English cūthe (related to English uncouth) and late Middle English coude; the l is a 16th-century intrusion, based on the model of should and would. (Canny [16] is probably a derivative of the verb can, mirroring a much earlier but parallel formation cunning.) Can ‘container’ appears to come from a prehistoric Germanic *kannōn-.
=> canny, cunning, ken, know, uncouth[can etymology, can origin, 英语词源]
prize: prize: English has four words prize. The one meaning ‘reward’ [16] is essentially the same word as price. This was originally pris, mirroring its immediate Old French ancestor pris. It became prise, to indicate the length of its vowel i, and in the 16th century this differentiated into price for ‘amount to pay’ and prize for ‘reward’. (Modern French prix has given English grand prix [19], literally ‘great prize’, first used for a ‘car race’ in 1908.) Prize ‘esteem’ [14] was based on pris-, the stem of Old French preisier ‘praise’ (source of English praise). Prize ‘something captured in war’ [14] comes via Old French prise ‘capture, seizure, booty’ from Vulgar Latin *prēsa or *prēnsa ‘something seized’.

This was a noun use of the past participle of *prēndere ‘seize’, a contraction of classical Latin praehendere (from which English gets prehensile, prison, etc). Another sense of Old French prise was ‘grasp’. English borrowed this in the 14th century as prize ‘lever’, which in due course was turned into modern English’s fourth prize, the verb prize, or prise, ‘lever’ [17]. Pry ‘lever’ [19] is an alteration of prize, based on the misapprehension that it is a third-person singular present form (*pries).
=> grand prix, price; praise; comprehensive, prison, reprehensible; pry
mirror (v.): "to reflect," 1590s, from mirror (n.). Related: Mirrored; mirroring. The Middle English verb mirouren (early 15c.) meant "to be a model" (for conduct, behavior, etc.), while miren (mid-14c., from Old French mirer) meant "to look in a mirror."