organ

英文詞源

organ

organ: [13] Greek órganon meant ‘tool, implement, instrument’. It was a descendant of the Indo-European base *worg- (source also of English work). Latin took the word over as organum, and in the post-classical period applied it to ‘musical instruments’. At first it was a very general term, but gradually it narrowed down to ‘wind instrument’, and in ecclesiastical Latin it came to be used for a musical instrument made from a number of pipes.

When English acquired it, via Old French organe, it was in the intermediate sense ‘wind instrument’ (in the 1611 translation of Psalm 150, ‘Praise him with stringed instruments and organs’, organ still means ‘pipe’), but by the end of the 17th century this had died out. The sense ‘functional part of the body’ goes right back to the word’s Greek source. The derivative organize [15] comes via Old French from medieval Latin organizāre.

This originally denoted literally ‘furnish with organs so as to form into a living being’, and hence ‘provide with a co-ordinated structure’.
=> organize, orgy, work

organ (n.)

fusion of late Old English organe, and Old French orgene (12c.), both meaning "musical instrument," both from Latin organa, plural of organum "a musical instrument," from Greek organon "implement, tool for making or doing; musical instrument; organ of sense, organ of the body," literally "that with which one works," from PIE *werg-ano-, from root *werg- "to do" (cognates: Greek ergon "work," orgia "religious performances;" Armenian gorc "work;" Avestan vareza "work, activity;" Gothic waurkjan, Old English wyrcan "to work," Old English weorc "deed, action, something done;" Old Norse yrka "work, take effect").

Applied vaguely in late Old English to musical instruments; sense narrowed by late 14c. to the musical instrument now known by that name (involving pipes supplied with wind by a bellows and worked by means of keys), though Augustine (c. 400) knew this as a specific sense of Latin organa. The meaning "body part adapted to a certain function" is attested from late 14c., from a Medieval Latin sense of Latin organum. Organist is first recorded 1590s; organ-grinder is attested from 1806.