oestrus

英文词源

oestrus

oestrus: [17] Greek oistros had an extraordinarily wide range of meanings, from ‘madness, frenzy’ through ‘sting’ to ‘gadfly’, and including also ‘breeze’. If, as has been suggested, it is related to Latin īra ‘anger’ (source of English ire [13]), Lithuanian aistra ‘passion’, etc, ‘frenzy’ is presumably the primary sense, but in fact English originally adopted it (via Latin oestrus) as the genus name for a variety of horsefly or botfly. ‘Sting’ was taken up, in the sense ‘impetus, goad’, as a learned borrowing in the mid-19th century (‘They too were pricked by the oestrus of intellectual responsibility’, John Morley, On Compromise 1874), but oestrus was not used for ‘period of sexual receptiveness in female animals’ (based of course on the notion of sexual ‘frenzy’) until the end of the 19th century.

The derived oestrogen dates from the 1920s.
=> ire

oestrus (n.)

see estrus.