maroon

英文词源

maroon

maroon: English has two distinct and completely unrelated words maroon. The one denoting ‘brownish red’ and ‘firework’ [16] has had a chequered semantic history, as its present-day diversity of meanings suggests. It comes ultimately from medieval Greek máraon ‘sweet chestnut’, and reached English via Italian marrone and French marron (as in marrons glacés).

It was originally used for ‘chestnut’ in English too, but that sense died out in the early 18th century, leaving behind the colour term (an allusion to the reddish brown of the chestnut’s inner shell) and ‘firework, exploding projectile’ (perhaps a reference to the shape of such devices). Maroon ‘abandon’ [17] comes from the noun maroon. This originally meant ‘runaway slave’, and comes via French from American Spanish cimarron.

The most widely accepted derivation of this is that it was based on Spanish cima ‘summit’, a descendant of Latin cyma ‘sprout’, and that it thus denotes etymologically ‘one who lives on the mountain tops’.

maroon (n.)

"very dark reddish-brown color," 1791, from French couleur marron, the color of a marron "chestnut," the large sweet chestnut of southern Europe (maroon in that sense was used in English from 1590s), from dialect of Lyons, ultimately from a word in a pre-Roman language, perhaps Ligurian; or from Greek maraon "sweet chestnut."

maroon (v.)

"put ashore on a desolate island or coast," 1724 (implied in marooning), earlier "to be lost in the wild" (1690s); from maron (n.) "fugitive black slave in the jungles of W.Indies and Dutch Guyana" (1660s), earlier symeron (1620s), from French marron, said to be a corruption of Spanish cimmaron "wild, untamed," from Old Spanish cimarra "thicket," probably from cima "summit, top" (from Latin cyma "sprout"), with a notion of living wild in the mountains. Related: Marooned.