| 词组 | sherbert, sherbet |
| 释义 | sherbert, sherbet We have had a few inquiries in recent years about the sherbert spelling of sherbet, which Merriam-Webster dictionaries recognize as a standard variant, but which many other people, it seems, regard as a misspelling. The basis for their opinion is that the second r is unetymological, the word being derived from Turkish or Persian words without it. The word was imported into English—along with the drink it named—in the 17th century. Derived from an exotic language with an exotic alphabet, it naturally had numerous spellings as an English word. Among fourteen shown in the OED (for the 17th century) are sherbet and sherbert, the only two in use today (not counting sorbet, which came from the same source through Italian). Sherbet became the established spelling in the 18th century. Sherbert has staged its comeback in the 20th century, apparently; at least we have no 18th- or 19th-century evidence for it. Its resurgence seems to parallel the more widespread use of the word in a new sense, "a flavored ice," which is now far and away the usual sense in American English. Curiously, our earliest evidence for sherbert is American, and our most recent evidence is heavily British. We leave you with two examples from British fiction. The first is English, and the compound terms are favorite sweets of schoolchildren. The second is Australian, and the sherbert there probably means "beer." • ... Rose had promised either twopenny sherbert fountains with liquorice suckers, or sherbert dabs — Margaret Drabble, The Needle's Eye, 1972 • We run down Bourke Street with McCarthy a balloon pumped up with sherberts —Barry Oakley, A Salute to the Great McCarthy, 1970 Sherbet is still the usual spelling. Probably more common than the sherbert spelling is the pronunciation it represents, \\\\'shǝr-bǝrt\\\\, which is also sometimes cited as an error, though it can be heard from educated speakers of English. |
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