emotion

英文詞源

emotion

emotion: [16] The semantic notion underlying emotion – of applying ‘physical movement’ metaphorically to ‘strong feeling’ – is an ancient one: Latin used the phrase mōtus animā, literally ‘movement of the spirit’, in this sense. Emotion itself is a post-classical Latin formation; it comes ultimately from Vulgar Latin *exmovēre, literally ‘move out’, hence ‘excite’, a compound verb formed from the prefix ex- ‘out’ and movēre ‘move’ (source of English move).

In French this became émouvoir, and English borrowed its derived noun émotion, but at first used it only in the literal sense ‘moving, agitation’ (‘The waters continuing in the caverns … caused the emotion or earthquake’, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society 1758) and the metaphorically extended ‘political agitation or disturbance’ (a sense now preserved only in émeute [19], another derivative of French émouvoir).

It was not until the late 17th century that the sense ‘strong feeling’ really came to the fore. The back-formation emote is a 20th-century phenomenon, of US origin.
=> émeute, move

emotion (n.)

1570s, "a (social) moving, stirring, agitation," from Middle French émotion (16c.), from Old French emouvoir "stir up" (12c.), from Latin emovere "move out, remove, agitate," from assimilated form of ex- "out" (see ex-) + movere "to move" (see move (v.)). Sense of "strong feeling" is first recorded 1650s; extended to any feeling by 1808.