mallet

英文词源

mallet

mallet: [15] Latin malleus meant ‘hammer’ (it may be related to Latin molere ‘grind’, and to Russian mólot and Polish młot ‘hammer’). It passed into Old French as mail, of which the derivative maillet eventually reached English as mallet. Mail itself was borrowed into English as maul ‘hammer’ [13], but it now survives only as a verb (which originally meant ‘hit with a hammer’).

The Latin verb derived from malleus was malleāre ‘hit with a hammer’, from which ultimately English gets malleable [14]. And the Italian descendant of malleus, maglio, was combined with a word for ‘ball’, palla, to form the name of a croquet-like game, pallamaglio; via French this passed into English as pall-mall [17], remembered in the London street-names Pall Mall and The Mall (whence the use of mall [18] for a ‘walkway’ or ‘promenade’, and latterly for a ‘shopping precinct’).
=> mall, malleable, maul, pall-mall

mallet (n.)

late 14c., from Old French maillet "mallet, small wooden hammer, door-knocker," diminutive of mail, from Latin malleus "a hammer," from PIE *mal-ni-, from root *mel- (1) "soft," with derivatives referring to softened material and tools for grinding (cognates: Hittite mallanzi "they grind;" Armenian malem "I crush, bruise;" Greek malakos "soft," mylos "millstone;" Latin molere "to grind," mola "millstone, mill," milium "millet;" Old English melu "meal, flour;" Albanian miel "meal, flour;" Old Church Slavonic meljo, Lithuanian malu "to grind;" Old Church Slavonic mlatu, Russian molotu "hammer").