| 词汇 | f |
| 词源 | F. F was the sixth letter in the Phoenician and Latin alpha- bets, as it is in ours. In both Phoenician and Hebrew its charac- ter was a peg. An F branded on a person’s left cheek in medieval times signified that he was a felon. F., following temperatures, has become the shortest and one of the most widely used epon- ymous symbols. In 1714 Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit perfected and manufactured the first practical mercury-in-glass ther- mometer, and invented the scale for measuring temperature that is named after him. Galileo had developed a faulty air- thermoscope long before this, and there were numerous con- tact thermometers employing alcohol in 1654, but Fahrenheit’s was the first fairly precise instrument of its kind. Even at that, his thermometric scale has had to be revised since he invented it—his thermometer being inaccurate enough for him to regard 96 degrees as the temperature of a healthy man. Today only two of his fixed reference points—32 degrees and 212 degrees, the freezing and boiling points of water under standard atmos- pheric pressure—are still used on the Fahrenheit scale. The in- ventor, a German born in Danzig, Poland, lived most of his life in Holland and England after being orphaned at 15. He was elected to Britain’s Royal Society before his death in 1736 when only 50 years old. See celsius scale. |
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英语词源词典收录了13259条英语词源词条，基本涵盖了全部常用英语词汇的起源、历史，是研究英语词汇或通过词源学英语的必备工具。