英文词源
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- faint
- faint: [13] Faint comes from Old French faint, which was originally the past participle of the verb faindre, feindre ‘pretend, shirk’ (whence English feign). This meant ‘pretended, simulated’, ‘lazy, shirking’, and ‘cowardly’, and all these senses were originally taken over by English. None now survives except the last, in the phrase faint heart, but in their place the underlying notion of ‘feebleness’ has produced ‘not bright, dim’ and ‘weak and dizzy’. The verb, based on the second of these, developed in the late 14th century. The variant spelling feint, used of printed lines, was introduced in the mid 19th century.
=> feign
