- garrison
[garrison 词源字典] - garrison: [13] The notion underlying garrison is of ‘protection’. Its ultimate source was Germanic *war-, denoting ‘caution’, which also produced English ward, warn, wary, and the -ware of beware. This produced the verb *warjan ‘protect, defend’, which Old French borrowed as garir (the related garer gave English garage). From it was derived the Old French noun garison ‘defence, protection’, from which English borrowed garrison. The concrete senses ‘fortress’, and hence ‘detachment of troops in such a fortress’, developed in the 15th century.
=> beware, garage, ward, warn, wary[garrison etymology, garrison origin, 英语词源] - garter
- garter: [14] The ultimate source of garter was probably an unrecorded Gaulish word meaning ‘leg’ (related to Welsh gar ‘leg’). It was borrowed into Old French at some point and used as the basis of the noun garet, which (in relation to people) meant ‘place where the leg bends, knee’. From this in turn was derived Old French gartier ‘band just above or below the knee’, source of English garter.
The British Order of the Garter dates, according to the medieval French chronicler Jean Froissart, from around 1344. The story of its origin, not recorded until over 250 years later and never authenticated, is that while the Countess of Salisbury was dancing with King Edward III, her garter fell off; the king picked it up and put it on his own leg, remarking somewhat cryptically in Anglo-French ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ – ‘Shamed be he who thinks evil of it’, and named the order of knighthood which he founded after this very garter.
- garth
- garth: see yard
- gas
- gas: [17] We get gas from a Flemish pronunciation of Greek kháos ‘chasm, void’ (a derivative of Indo-European *ghəw- ‘hollow’, and source of English chaos [15]). The Flemish chemist J B van Helmont (1577–1644) used the Greek word to denote an occult principal, supposedly an ultra-refined form of water, which he postulated as existing in all matter.
The sound of Greek kh is roughly equivalent of that represented by Dutch and Flemish g, and so the word came to be spelled gas. Its modern application to any indefinitely expanding substance dates from the late 18th century. The derivative gasoline, source of American English gas ‘petrol’, dates from the late 19th century.
=> chaos - gash
- gash: [16] Greek kharássein meant ‘sharpen, engrave, cut’ (it gave English character). It was borrowed into Latin as charaxāre, which appears to have found its way into Old Northern French as garser ‘cut, slash’. English took this over as garse, which survived, mainly as a surgical term meaning ‘make incisions’, into the 17th century. An intermediate form garsh, recorded in the 16th century, suggests that this was the source of modern English gash.
=> character - gasket
- gasket: [17] Although it has never been established for certain, it seems likely that gasket may have originated as a word meaning ‘little girl’ – namely French garcette. This is a diminutive of grace ‘girl’, the feminine form of gars ‘boy’ (whence garçon). It is used figuratively for a ‘small rope’, and was originally borrowed into English in the 17th century as gassit, used as a nautical term for a ‘small rope for attaching a furled sail to a mast’.
Modern English gasket, first recorded in the early 17th century, seems to be an alteration of this. The main present-day sense ‘joint seal’ (originally made from tow or plaited hemp) developed in the early 19th century.
- gastric
- gastric: [17] Grek gastér meant ‘stomach’ (it was related to Greek gráō ‘gnaw, eat’ and Sanskrit gras- ‘devour’). It was used as the basis of the modern Latin adjective gastricus ‘of the stomach’, which English acquired via French gastrique. Derivatives include gastronomy ‘culinary connoisseurship’ [19], originally a French coinage, and gastropod ‘mollusc’ [19], literally ‘stomach-foot’ (from the ventral disc used by molluscs as a ‘foot’).
- gate
- gate: Of the two English words gate, only one survives in general use. Gate ‘doorlike structure’ [OE] comes from a prehistoric Germanic *gatam, whose other descendants, including Dutch gat ‘hole, opening’, suggest that it originally denoted an ‘opening in a wall’ rather than the ‘structure used to close such an opening’. Irish has borrowed it as geata.
The other gate ‘way, path’ [13] now survives only in street-names, particularly in the North of England (for instance, York’s Micklegate and Coppergate); its other main meaning, ‘way of walking’, has been partitioned off since the 18th century in the spelling gait. It was borrowed from Old Norse gata ‘path, passage’, which comes ultimately from prehistoric Germanic *gatwōn.
- gather
- gather: [OE] Gather goes back ultimately to Germanic *gath- ‘bring together, unite’ (which also produced English good). From it was derived *gadurī (source of English together), which in turn formed the basis of a verb *gadurōjan. Its offspring include Middle High German gaten ‘come together’, Old Frisian gadia ‘unite’, and Old English gaderian, whence modern English gather. It also produced German gatte ‘husband, spouse’, originally ‘companion’.
=> good, together - gaudy
- gaudy: [16] Middle English had a colour term gaudy-green ‘yellowish-green’, which originally denoted ‘green produced by dye obtained from the plant dyer’s rocket, Reseda luteola’, a plant formerly known as weld [14]. The word weld came from a Germanic source which, borrowed into Old French, produced gaude – whence English gaudy-green. It has been claimed that this gaudy soon lost its literal meaning ‘produced from weld-dye’, and came to be interpreted as ‘bright’.
Other etymologists, however, favour the explanation that gaudy comes from gaud ‘joke, plaything’ [14], which was adapted from Old French gaudir ‘rejoice’, a descendant of Latin gaudēre ‘delight in’ (from which English gets joy).
- gauge
- gauge: see engage
- gauntlet
- gauntlet: The gauntlet of ‘run the gauntlet’ has no etymological connection with gauntlet ‘glove’ [15]. The latter was borrowed from Old French gantelet, a diminutive form of gant ‘glove’. This was originally a Germanic loanword, with surviving relatives in Swedish and Danish vante ‘glove’. As for ‘running the gauntlet’, it was to begin with ‘running the gantlope’, in which gantlope signified ‘two lines of people armed with sticks, who attacked someone forced to run between them’.
This was borrowed in the 17th century from Swedish gatlopp, a descendant of Old Swedish gatulop ‘passageway’; this was a compound noun formed from gata ‘way’ (related to English gate, gait) and lop ‘course’ (related to English leap and lope). Under the influence of gauntlet ‘glove’, English changed gatlopp to gantlope, and thence to gantlet (now restricted in use to an ‘overlapping section of railway track’) and gauntlet (as in ‘run the gauntlet’).
=> gait, gate, leap, lope - gauze
- gauze: [16] Many terms for various types of fabric come from the name of a place they were originally associated with, from obvious derivatives such as damask from Damascus to more obscure associations like denim from Nîmes in France, and gauze appears to be no exception. It was borrowed from French gaze, which is generally assumed to have been named after Gaza, a city in medieval Palestine which was closely associated with the production of gauze.
- gay
- gay: [13] English borrowed gay from Old French gai, an adjective of uncertain origin connected by some with Old High German gāhi ‘sudden, impulsive’. ‘Happy’ is its ancestral meaning, stretching back to Old French gai. The 20thcentury sense ‘homosexual’, which first came into general use in the 1950s, can probably be traced back to the 17th-century meaning ‘sexually dissolute’.
By the early 19th century it was being applied specifically to the world of prostitution, and it seems not unlikely that male prostitutes and their male clients could have been the vector for the present-day usage. A reported 1868 song by the US female impersonator Will S. Hays was supposedly called ‘The Gay Young Clerk in the Dry Goods Store’, but it is not entirely clear what ‘gay’ is supposed to have meant here, and the earliest reliable printed record of the ‘homosexual’ sense is from 1933.
The adjective underwent a further semantic flipflop in the early 21st century, when kids’ slang commandeered it, paradoxically, for ‘sad’.
- gaze
- gaze: [14] Gaze is probably of Scandinavian origin, although its precise antecedents have never been pinned down. Swedish has a dialect verb gasa ‘gape, stare’, which may be related, and it could be connected in some way with Old Norse gá ‘heed’, source of a Middle English verb gaw ‘gape, stare’, which may lie behind modern English gawk [18].
These suggestions fit semantically, for the earliest use of gaze in English was in the sense ‘gawp, stare’; only gradually was this over-taken by the politer ‘look intently’. Gazebo [18] probably originated as a ‘humorous’ quasi-Latin coinage based on gaze, using the Latin first person singular future suffix -ēbō, as if gazebo meant ‘I shall gaze’.
=> gazebo - gazette
- gazette: [17] If the Sun or the Mirror were called the 22p, they would be echoing the origins of the word gazette. In Renaissance Venice, a ‘newspaper’ was termed casually gazeta de la novita (gazeta for short), literally a ‘pennyworth of news’ – for a gazeta was the name of a small Venetian copper coin (probably a diminutive form of gazza ‘magpie’).
Italian took the word over as gazzetta, and passed it on to English via French. The verbal use of gazette, ‘announce a military promotion officially’, arises from the practice of printing such announcements in the British government newspaper, the London Gazette (first published in the 17th century). The derived gazeteer [17], ultimately from Italian gazzettiere, originally meant ‘journalist’.
Its current sense ‘index of places’ was inspired by Laurence Echard’s The Gazetteer’s; or a Newsman’s Interpreter: Being a Geographical Index 1693.
- gear
- gear: [13] The etymological meaning of gear is roughly ‘that which puts one in a state of readiness’ – hence ‘equipment, apparatus’. Its ultimate source is prehistoric Indo-European *garw-, which also produced the now obsolete English adjective yare ‘ready’ and (via Germanic, Italian, and French) garh [16]. A derivative *garwīn- passed into Old Norse as gervi, which English borrowed as gear. The mechanical sense of the word developed in the 16th century.
=> garb - geezer
- geezer: [19] Originally, a geezer seems to have been ‘someone who went around in disguise’. The word probably represents a dialectal pronunciation of the now obsolete guiser ‘someone wearing a masquerade as part of a performance, mummer’. This was a derivative of guise [13], which, together with disguise [14], goes back ultimately to prehistoric Germanic *wīsōn, ancestor of archaic English wise ‘manner’.
=> disguise, guise, wise - gel
- gel: see jelly
- gelatine
- gelatine: see jelly
