candlewick的词源
英文词源
- snuff
- snuff: English has three words snuff, all probably going back ultimately to a prehistoric Germanic base *snuf-, imitative of the sound of drawing air noisily in through the nose. Snuff ‘powdered tobacco for inhaling’ [17] was borrowed from Dutch snuf. This was probably short for snuftabak, etymologically ‘sniff-tobacco’, which in turn was derived from Middle Dutch snuffen ‘sniff, snuffle’, source of English snuff ‘sniff’ [16].
That base *snuf- also produced English snuffle [16], probably borrowed from Low German or Dutch snuffelen, and snivel [14], which may go back to an unrecorded Old English *snyflan; and sniff [14], if not directly related, was certainly similarly inspired by the sound of sniffing. Snuff ‘put out a candle’ was derived in the 15th century from the noun snuff ‘burnt candlewick’ [14].
The origins of this are not known, but the fact that the now obsolete verb snot was once used for ‘put out a candle’ as well as ‘blow one’s nose’ suggests that this snuff too may ultimately have connections with the inner workings of the nose (possibly a perceived resemblance between an extinguished candlewick and a piece of nasal mucus), and with the base *snuf-. Snuff it ‘die’ is first recorded in the late 19th century.
=> snivel - taper
- taper: [OE] Taper is ultimately the same word as paper. Both go bach to Latin papyrus ‘papyrus’. This was used among other things for a ‘candlewick made from papyrus’, and hence for a ‘candle’. It seems to have been borrowed in this sense into Old English as *papur, and by a process known as dissimilation (in which one of a pair of similar speech sounds is changed, so as to break up the pair) it became tapur. The verb taper ‘become narrower’, which emerged in the 16th century, is an allusion to the shape of the candle.
=> paper, papyrus
中文词源
candle, 蜡烛。-wick, 灯芯。
该词的英语词源请访问趣词词源英文版：candlewick 词源，candlewick 含义。
