【编者按】威廉希尔app 英语四六级频道为大家收集整理了“2012大学英语四级词汇复习技巧”供大家参考，希望对大家有所帮助!
1. Where Words About Human Beings Come From
ACHIEVE：to come to a head
This seems like a simple word,but its history is extremely complicated.The word achieve derives,if you can believe it,from the Latin phrase ad caputvenire,which literally meant”to come to a head.”Sometimes the Romans used it in the gloomy meaning”to die.”Later on Old French took over the phrase adcaput,”to a head” and built on it the verb achever,”to finish,”and this passed into English as achieve.In Chaucer’s day,and even up to the time of Queen Elizabeth,achieve could still mean”to die”or”to kill”Shakespeare used it in this sense in one of his plays,as”Bid them achieve(“kill”)me and then sell my bones.”Along with achieve the Old French developed the word meschever,in English mischief,which in the beginning meant to overwhelm with destruction,and both of these words still have in them the original sense of the Latin caput,or”head.”For when you have achieved something,you have”brought it to a head,”haven’t you?But should you get into mischief,things have been”brought to a bad head”(Latin mis-,”bad”),and those who perpetrated the mischief are apt to come to grief. Thus,when Merlin,the wise man of Arthurian legend,said:”Synne draweth bothe man and woman to myschebouse ends,”he was using the word in its early and stronger sense.
ADEPT:originally an alchemist