eerie

英文词源

eerie

eerie: [13] Eerie seems to come ultimately from Old English earg ‘cowardly’, a descendant of prehistoric Germanic *arg-, although the connection has not been established for certain. It emerged in Scotland and northern England in the 13th century in the sense ‘cowardly, fearful’, and it was not until the 18th century that it began to veer round semantically from ‘afraid’ to ‘causing fear’. Burns was one of the first to use it so in print: ‘Be thou a bogle by the eerie side of an auld thorn’. In the course of the 19th century its use gradually spread further south to become general English.

eerie (adj.)

also eery, c. 1300, "timid, affected by superstitious fear," north England and Scottish variant of Old English earg "cowardly, fearful, craven, vile, wretched, useless," from Proto-Germanic *argaz (cognates: Old Frisian erg "evil, bad," Middle Dutch arch "bad," Dutch arg, Old High German arg "cowardly, worthless," German arg "bad, wicked," Old Norse argr "unmanly, voluptuous," Swedish arg "malicious"). Sense of "causing fear because of strangeness" is first attested 1792. Finnish arka "cowardly" is a Germanic loan-word.