Dandelion
It is not very obvious what the origin of the word is, but knowing that the German equivalent is Löwenzahn might help. Of course, dandelion means just that, ‘tooth of lion’, derived from French dent de lion (cf. Spanish diente de león and Italian dente di leone). Curiously, in modern French, the current word is not word dent de lion, but pissenlit.
Dark horse
A dark horse is an unexpected winner. The phrase comes from horse racing, where a horse is called dark if its ancestry is unknown. The origin of the phrase is not clear. The phrase was soon transferred to politicians who stood for an election. The first American presidential dark horse was James Polk, who won the 1844 Democratic nomination only on the eighth ballot and went on to become President. (Ammer 2006: 96)
Day
A day is not necessarily the same as a day . “It takes the earth a day to revolve around the sun” is perhaps the clearest example of day meaning a period of 24 hours. This is also what we mean when we say “I’ll be seeing her in three days”, but not when we say “He’s been working all day”. In this case, we mean day excluding the night, restricting it to the time between morning and night, from sunrise to sunset, as in “When I woke up it was already day”, which would be absurd if used in the former sense. We are hardly aware of this distinction, but we make the distinction nevertheless. Otherwise, frequent misunderstanding would occur. Incidentally, Russian has two different words for these two different, although related meanings.
Dead duck
In dead duck, the same plosive occurs at the end of the first part and at the beginning of the second part. In normal speech, this results in one long consonant. In very careful speech, the first consonant may be said with a plosion just like the second, but that would sound rather pedantic. Similar cases are blackcurrant, lamppost, biscuit tin or bird droppings. (Davis 2004: 89)
Deadline
The first deadline was literally a deadline. It appeared during the American Civil War. An inspection report said: “A railing around the inside of a stockade and about 20 feet from it constitutes the ‘dead-line’, beyond which the prisoners are not allowed to pass.” The report was written by a Confederate Officer. The commander of the infamous camp was later tried and hanged for war crimes. Not until the early 20th century did deadline come to mean a time limit. (O’Conner 2010: 76)
Deer
The word sounds rather like German Tier, and that is no coincidence. It is the same word, and deer, until Early Middle English, used to mean what Tier still means, ‘animal’ in general (cf. Gramley/Pätzold 1992: 35). It then began to specialise and take on the present meaning of ‘forest animals with antlers and hooves’. The meaning of the word is now narrower, and that is what the linguist says to describe the process, narrowing of meaning, a particular type of semantic change.
Dime
Dime is a word which shows how old words are used for new purposes. Originally, it meant the 10% which you paid as a tithe for the church. Then, from 1788, it came to be used to refer to the American 10-cent-coin. (Murphy 2018: 80)
Dire
The word dire, which dates from the sixteenth century, is rarely heard today except in fixed phrases like dire necessity or dire straits. They are sometimes used ironically but often describe a genuine difficulty, as in “The stockmarket crash left him in dire straits financially.” (Ammer 2006: 103)
Disease
Today, we hardly realize that disease consists of dis- and ease. Although it is a derived word, it is not fully compositional any more. Its meaning cannot be extracted from its constituent parts. The way we pronounce it, it seems to consist of di- and sease. (cf. Bybee 2015: 205)
Disgruntled
If you are dissatisfied, you are not at all satisfied, if you are dishonest, you are not at all honest, but what if you are disgruntled? You should be not at all *gruntled but that word does not exist. Then how can you be disgruntled? The explanation lies in the prefix dis-. Although it usually makes a word negative, in some old words it is used as an intensifier. Thus, disannul is to actually annul and dissever is to actually sever, not its opposite. This is also the case with disgruntled, which is based on the verb gruntle, which in its turn is based on the word grunt. So somebody who is disgruntled is somebody who, albeit figuratively, grunts repeatedly. (Quinion 2009: 127-9)
Disk
The English word disk comes from Latin discus. The English word discus also comes from Latin discus. And so does dish. And desk. And dais. One may consider discus a successful export. (cf. Gramley/Pätzold 1992: 15)
Dish
This sounds like an innocent Anglo-Saxon word, but it isn’t. It’s Latin. It is derived from the Latin word discus (just like fish is derived from piscis). When the word was adopted, /sk/ was changed into / S /. This process is called palatalization. It is a natural enough process. It can be heard in the speech of anyone who tries to pronounce /sk/ after having had too much drink. Curiously, this change in pronunciation only took place in words which were adopted early. Later, the /sk/ sound was preserved. This is how we know that dish was borrowed earlier than, for example, school. (Crystal 2005: 59)
Dog
Words are said to consist of two sides, form and meaning. One side, the form, can be represented using letters or phonetic symbols, dog or /dog/ for a dog. But what about the meaning side? Often it is represented by a picture, in this case the picture of a dog. This is perfectly legitimate, but also misleading. Meaning is hardly anything physically perceivable but rather a mental concept which we share with other speakers of our language. Take the sentence: ‘Our neighbours have a dog that barks all night’. It is of course possible that the addressee of the sentence actually knows the neighbours’ dog, but what if he doesn’t? Which image could there be in his mind? Will it be the image of a shepherd’s dog or a Chihuahua , will it be big or small, grey or black? Quite obviously, none of all this and, at the same time, all of this is somehow lumped together into an idea. So meaning must be present in other forms than that of mental images. Even if we explain what something is by pointing at an object – e.g. calling our Chihuahua and showing it to the visitor when asked what a Chihuahua is – we do not explain what our mental concept is but rather leave it to the visitor to work out for himself what the concept is. (Erickson & Gymnich, 2006: 30-1)
Dollar
In American English, the short open vowel of got or pot has the vowel of far of British English. That is why certain loanwords which contain this vowel are spelt with and not, as in the original ,with . One of these words is dollar, which is derived from German Taler, another is boss, which is derived from Dutch bass. (Leisi 1985: 223)
Doping
The word dope first appears in English in 1851. In was used to refer to a stupid person. It then, becoming a verb, developed a new sense: ‘administer a substance to a person (or a horse) in order to dope that person (or horse), i.e. to stupefy them. That is to say, the word meant quite the opposite of what it means today. The word’s etymology is not clear, with two hypotheses competing with each other. It could derive from Dutch doop, a sauce (a word related to German taufen) or it could derive from dop, a dialect word in a South-African language. This word was used to refer to a drink, an alcoholic drink which was drunk in order to stimulate body and mind in certain rituals. (Glocker 2009: 32-33, Møller 2015: 145-147)
Down
When you go down, you go down a hill, etymologically speaking, as this is what down originally meant (cf. the Sussex Downs in England). The adverb down is a weakened form of Old English of dune, so when you go down you come ‘off the hill’ or ‘off the height’. That means that downhill is really a tautology, literally meaning ‘downdown’. (Forsyth 2016: 26-27)
Dunce
Duns is a market town in Scotland, and a dunce is someone who is slow at learning. They are really related. How come? Are the inhabitants of Duns a bit slow in the uptake? Not at all. Duns was the home town of the medieval Scottish philosopher Duns Scotus. He was not a poor learner at all, quite the contrary. He became one of the outstanding philosophers and theologians of his age, and a brilliant commentator on some of the most disputed questions of his time. His commentaries became textbooks at universities. His followers were known as dunsmen, and this came to stand for somebody of great sophistication. During the Renaissance, they were censured by humanists and religious reformers, their teachings were attacked for their needless complexity and they were attacked for their unwillingness to accept reform. This is how gradually the word, which was shortened to duns or dunce, acquired negative connotations and came to mean ‘somebody who is slow at learning’. I wonder what the people of Duns make of it. They are probably too bright to mind. (cf. Flavell & Flavell 2005: 86-8)
Dynasty
The word is pronounced differently in different varieties of English. In Britain, it usually has the kit vowel, in America the price vowel. Under the influence of the American TV series, it came to be pronounced with the price vowel in the 1980s in New Zealand, but now it is reverting to the traditional kit