| 词汇 | nylon |
| 词源 | nylon. Though it was first mass-produced during World War II and hurt our enemy Japan’s silk industry, nylon is not an acronym of “Now You Lousy Nips,” as the old story goes. Formerly a trademark, nylon is an arbitrary name with no meaning, though the symbols NY in its chemical formula may have suggested the word. There also could have been a link with the earlier rayon or even with cotton. In any case, the Du Pont company coined the word in 1938. The most pop- ular use of the word has been in women’s nylon stockings. Somehow the English word nylon has taken on a disreputable meaning among Serbo-Croatians, as Bill Bryson asserts in The Mother Tongue (1990), “so that a nylon hotel is a brothel.” See rayon. |
| 随便看 |
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。