"D" Word Origins

daytime

Origin

A compound of "day" and "time," describing the daylight portion of the 24-hour cycle.

Dayton

Origin

A variant spelling of Deighton. * Most of the placenames are derived from the surname; or another place named Dayton, that in turn is derived from the surname.

daze

Middle English

From Middle English, related to Old Norse words meaning "to become weary" — the modern sense of confused or stunned developed from that root.

dazed

Old Norse

From Old Norse dasaðr, meaning "weary," which evolved in English into the sense of being stunned or confused.

dazzle

Origin

Formed from "daze" plus the "-le" ending that often signals a repeated or intensified action, as in "sparkle" or "twinkle."

dazzling

Origin

From dazzle plus the ending -ing, describing something that dazzles.

dBi

English

From decibel plus i for isotropic, the idealised reference antenna against which the gain is measured.

DC

English

An initialism, in the electrical sense of direct current and in the geographical sense of District of Columbia.

DDLG

English

An initialism of daddy dom/little girl.

DDoS

English

An initialism of distributed denial of service.

DDT

Origin

The wrestling move's name origin is debated, with several rival stories floating around in wrestling lore.

de

Latin

The nobility particle comes from Latin "de" ("from, of"), inherited into French. The Cyrillic letter name is borrowed from Russian.

de facto

Latin

From Latin de facto, literally 'from the fact' or 'from the deed'.

de minimis

Latin

From the legal maxim de minimis non curat lex, 'the law does not concern itself with trifles'.

de nada

Spanish

Spanish de nada, literally 'of nothing', from de 'of' and nada 'nothing'.

DEA

Origin

An abbreviation formed from the initials of "diethanolamine."

deacon

Latin

From Old English diacon, borrowed from Church Latin diaconus, going back to Greek diakonos, meaning "servant" or "minister".

deaconess

Origin

Inherited from Middle English dekenesse; equivalent to deacon + -ess.

deactivate

Origin

Built from de- ("reverse of") plus activate.

dead

Old English

From Old English dead, from a Proto-Germanic root also behind German tot and Dutch dood.

deadbeat

Origin · 1820

From dead plus beat, first used for an exhausted person in the 1820s; the debt-dodger sense emerged around the American Civil War.

deaden

Origin

From dead + -en. Compare Dutch doden (“to kill”), West Frisian deadzje (“to kill”).

deader

Origin

From dead plus the suffix -er.

deadhead

Origin

From dead + head. Some senses are derived from theater jargon (originally spelled dead head) for audience members admitted without paying, which probably arose in analogy to dead weight or deadwood in reference to their lack of contribution to revenue or in reference to their unenthusiastic (dead) response to performances. Perhaps even from Latin caput mortuum, alchemy term for distillation residue. As Paul Quinion writes: Similarly, the term was applied to a dull or lazy person, one who contributes nothing to an enterprise, only in the early years of the twentieth century, well after the theatrical and transport senses had become well established.

deadland

Origin

From dead + land.

deadline

Origin · 1900

Originally described a fixed boundary line — famously the line in American Civil War prison camps that guards would shoot prisoners for crossing. By the early 1900s the word had shifted to mean a time limit, first in publishing.

deadlock

Origin

From dead plus lock, originally describing a lock that can't be moved once set.

deadly

Old English

From Old English deadlic, built from dead plus -lic (the ancestor of -ly), literally "death-like".

deadpan

English

From dead in the sense 'lifeless, without movement' plus pan, old slang for the face.

deadstock

Origin

From dead + stock.

deadwood

Origin

A literal compound of dead and wood, later extended figuratively to useless people or things.

deaf

Ancient Greek

From Old English deaf, from a Proto-Germanic root related to Ancient Greek typhlos, "blind" — the same broad idea of a blocked sense.

deafen

Origin

From deaf + -en (verbal suffix). Compare Middle English deven, deaven (“to make deaf”), Old English ādēafian (“to deafen”) and Old English ādȳfan, Dutch verdoven (“to stupefy, deafen”), German betäuben (“to stun, stupefy, deafen”).

deafness

Old English

From Old English roots, formed from deaf plus the suffix -ness.

Deakins

Origin

See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.

deal

Old English

From Old English dael, meaning "part" or "share", related to dole.

dealer

Old English

From Old English daelere, built on deal plus -er, "one who deals".

dealership

Origin

From dealer plus the suffix -ship.

dealing

Old English

From Old English daeling, formed from deal plus -ing.

dealy

Origin

From deal + -y.

dean

Latin

From Anglo-Norman deen, ultimately from Latin decanus (originally "head of ten"), a doublet of the word doyen.

DeAndre

Origin · 1990

Formed by adding the prefix "De-" to the name Andre, following a naming pattern that also produced names like DeShawn and DeAngelo, especially popular from the 1990s onward.

Deane

Irish

As an English surname it is simply a spelling variant of Dean; as an Irish surname it can be an anglicized form of Mac an Deagánaigh, meaning "son of the deacon".

deanimate

Origin

From de- + animate.

Deanna

Origin · 1900

A twentieth-century variant of Diana, sometimes also treated as a feminine form of Dean.

Deano

Origin

From the name Dean plus the informal suffix "-o".

dear

Old English

From Old English diere, "of great value, precious, beloved", from a Germanic root shared with German teuer, "expensive".

Dearborn

Anglo-Norman

From an Anglo-Norman surname, originally meaning "of Arbornon".