英文词源
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Word of Random
- philately
- philately: [19] When a Monsieur Herpin, a French stamp-collector, was looking for an impressive and learned-sounding term for his hobby, he was hampered by the fact that the Greeks and Romans did not have postage stamps, and therefore there was no classical term for them. So he decided to go back a stage beyond stamps, to the days of franking with a post-mark. In France, such letters were stamped franc de port ‘carriage-free’, and the nearest he could get to this in Greek was atelés ‘free of charge’, a compound formed from a- ‘not’ and télos ‘payment’.
Using the Greek prefix phil- ‘loving, love of’ (as in philosophy and a wide range of other English words) he created philatélie, which made its first appearance in English in 1865.
