cosmos

英文词源

cosmos

cosmos: [17] Cosmos is a learned borrowing from Greek kósmos. The underlying meaning of this was ‘order’, and it appears originally to have been applied to the world and the universe by Pythagoras and his school in reference to the orderliness of creation. In the mid 20th century the word provided a useful linguistic distinction between Western and Soviet activities in space, cosmonaut (from Russian kosmonavt) contrasting with astronaut.

Somebody who is cosmopolitan [19] is literally a ‘citizen of the world’, from Greek kosmopolítēs, a compound of kósmos and polítēs. From Greek kósmos ‘order’ was derived the verb kosmein ‘arrange, adorn’. This in turn provided the basis of the adjective kosmētikós ‘skilled in adornment’, which passed into English as cosmetic [17].
=> cosmetic, cosmopolitan

cosmos (n.)

c. 1200 (but not popular until 1848, as a translation of Humboldt's Kosmos), from Latinized form of Greek kosmos "order, good order, orderly arrangement," a word with several main senses rooted in those notions: The verb kosmein meant generally "to dispose, prepare," but especially "to order and arrange (troops for battle), to set (an army) in array;" also "to establish (a government or regime);" "to deck, adorn, equip, dress" (especially of women). Thus kosmos had an important secondary sense of "ornaments of a woman's dress, decoration" (compare kosmokomes "dressing the hair") as well as "the universe, the world."

Pythagoras is said to have been the first to apply this word to "the universe," perhaps originally meaning "the starry firmament," but later it was extended to the whole physical world, including the earth. For specific reference to "the world of people," the classical phrase was he oikoumene (ge) "the inhabited (earth)." Septuagint uses both kosmos and oikoumene. Kosmos also was used in Christian religious writing with a sense of "worldly life, this world (as opposed to the afterlife)," but the more frequent word for this was aion, literally "lifetime, age."