- timber
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[timber 词源字典] - timber: [OE] Timber originally denoted a ‘building’ – the Lindisfarne Gospels of around 950 translated Mark 13:1 (‘See what manner of stones and what buildings are here’) as ‘See what stones and what timber’. It comes from a prehistoric Germanic *timram, whose German descendant zimmer ‘room’ has remained closer to its semantic roots (but German zimmermann means ‘carpenter’).
And this in turn went back to Indo-European *demrom, a derivative of the base *dem-, *dom- ‘build’, from which English also gets dome, domestic, etc. The sense ‘building’ gradually developed into ‘building material’, then ‘wood used for building’, and finally ‘wood’ in general.
=> dome, domestic[timber etymology, timber origin, 英语词源] - timber (n.)
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- Old English timber "building, structure," in late Old English "building material, trees suitable for building," and "trees or woods in general," from Proto-Germanic *timran (cognates: Old Saxon timbar "a building, room," Old Frisian timber "wood, building," Old High German zimbar "timber, wooden dwelling, room," Old Norse timbr "timber," German Zimmer "room"), from PIE *deme- "to build," possibly from root *dem- "house, household" (source of Greek domos, Latin domus; see domestic (adj.)).
The related Old English verb timbran, timbrian was the chief word for "to build" (compare Dutch timmeren, German zimmern). As a call of warning when a cut tree is about to fall, it is attested from 1912 in Canadian English. Timbers in the nautical slang sense (see shiver (v.2)) is from the specialized meaning "pieces of wood composing the frames of a ship's hull" (1748).
The timber-wolf (1846) of the U.S. West is the gray wolf, not confined to forests but so-called to distinguish it from the prairie-wolf (coyote).