| 释义 |
▪ I. ‖ bel, a. and formative.
Forms: 4–5 bele, 7 bell.
[a. F. bel, belle ‘beautiful, fair, fine’:—L. bell-um, -am. Naturalized in ME.; but after 1600 consciously French.]
†A. adj. Fair, fine, beautiful. Obs.
c1314Guy Warw. 68 Bele ost, Y bidde say thou me What may al this erning be. c1384Chaucer H. Fame 1796 Bele Isawde Ne coude hem noght of loue werne. c1475Babees Bk. (1868) 3 A Bele Babees, herkne now to my lore! [1605Chapman All Fooles Plays (1873) I. 136 With a Bell regard aduant mine eye.] 1678A. Behn Pat. Fancy ii. 253 If you are not the most *Bell Person I ever saw [? A pun on the name Isabella].
B. Used as a formative prefix in belfader, belsire, beldame, belmoder, grandfather, grandmother. The explanation of this use, which seems to be entirely English and unknown to French, is not clear; but it answers to the Eng. use of good in goodsire (gudscher, gutcher), gooddame (gudame), ‘godson or gosson filiolus,’ and ‘goddowter filiola,’ in Promp. Parv., which is again partly paralleled by the mod.F. bon-papa, bonne-maman, grandpapa, grandmamma. The French and English use of grand, in grandpère grandfather, grandsire, grand'mère grandmother, grandame, is capable of more obvious explanation; while the tendency to allow analogy to prevail over sense appears in the Eng. grandson as compared with F. petit-fils. Still further analogies in the parallel use of beau, belle, and good (though to express a different relationship) are presented by the F. beau-père father-in-law, belle-mère mother-in-law, beau-frère brother-in-law, etc., for which the north. Eng. and Sc. forms are good-father, good-mother, good-brother, good-sister, etc.
▪ II. bel, n. Electr. Communic.|bɛl|
[f. name of A. G. Bell (1847–1922), inventor of the telephone.]
A unit, equivalent to ten decibels (see decibel), used in the comparison of two levels of power in an electrical communication circuit. (Non-technical sense in quot. 1958.)
The bel as a unit of power level is defined logarithmically as N = log10 (P1/P2), where N designates the number of bels and P1 and P2 the two amounts of power.
1929W. H. Martin in Bell System Techn. Jrnl. VIII. 2 It was further suggested that the naperian unit be called the ‘neper’ and that the fundamental decimal unit be called the ‘bel’, these names being derived from..Napier..and Alexander Graham Bell. 1930Gloss. Terms Electr. Engin. (B.S.I.) 13 The bel is a unit used in the comparison of the magnitudes of power, voltages or currents at two different points in a network of lines or apparatus. 1937Nature 11 Sept. 447/1 The unit adopted..is the bel, which is a ratio signifying a 10-fold increase in intensity, power or energy. Two bels signify a 100-fold increase, three bels a 1000-fold increase, and so on. 1958K. Amis I like it Here vi. 70 Relaying a girls' choir at a volume of a couple of bels.
▪ III. bel
see bael; also obs. variant of bell. |