- 1
To addle someone is to confuse them so they cannot think properly — as if their mind has gone soft. It is a slightly old, verb. Older speakers and colourful writing still use it (“the heat addled him”); many younger people would just say confuse or mess with your head. Though actually, the living centre of the word is the adjective addled: an addled brain, addled with drink, addled by too little sleep. That picture comes from eggs. An addled egg is a bad egg, rotten inside, that will not hatch. People then said a person’s wits were addled — gone off, like the egg. The “confuse” verb grew from that rotten-egg sense, not the other way round. It has nothing to do with adding numbers.
使糊塗、搞昏頭（現在更常看到 addled，形容頭腦不清；和「臭掉、孵不出的蛋」是同一個詞）
組成From Middle English adel, “rotten,” from Old English adel / adela, wet filth — mire, dung, stale liquid — from West Germanic *adal and Germanic *adalaz / *adalô (cattle urine, liquid manure). Cousins in Frisian, Low German, and Scandinavian still mean urine or liquid manure. English kept “gone bad” and moved it onto eggs, then onto minds.
原始詞典資料8 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
addleadj詞源 1/ˈæ.dəl/
- 1
Having lost the power of development, and become rotten; putrid.
- addle eggs
- Pan. Troilus! Why, he esteems her no more than I esteem an addle egg. Cres. If you love an addle egg as well as you love an idle head, you would eat chickens i' the shell.
- 2
Unfruitful or confused; muddled.
- addle brains
- Thus far the Poet, but his brains grow Addle; / And all the reſt is purely from this Noddle.
addlenoun詞源 1/ˈæ.dəl/
- 1
obsoleteLiquid filth; mire.
addleverb詞源 1/ˈæ.dəl/
- 1
To make or become addled; to muddle or confuse.
- to addle someone's brain
- The same female bard—descended, possibly, from those terrible old Scalds who seem to have existed for the express purpose of addling the brains of mankind when they begin to investigate languages—made a standing pretence which greatly assisted in forcing me back to a number of hideous places that I would by all means have avoided.
- 2
To cause fertilised eggs to lose viability, by killing the developing embryo within through shaking, piercing, freezing or oiling, without breaking the shell.
- Their eggs were addled.
- The term shocking or addling trout and salmon eggs is applied to the process of turning the infertile eggs white so they can be separated from the fertile ones. Actually, this amounts to nothing more than agitating the eggs enough to rupture the yolk membrane in the infertile eggs, which causes them to turn white.
addlenoun詞源 1/ˈæ.dəl/
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An unwise or intellectually impaired person.
addleverb詞源 2/ˈæ.dəl/
- 1
To earn, earn by labor; earn money or one's living.
- ADDLINGS, wages. "Poor addlings," small pay for work. "Hard addlings," money laboriously acquired. "Saving's good addling," as the well known saying, "a penny saved is a penny gained."
- ADDLE. To earn. "It's weel-addled" – well-earned. "Addle nowt an' ware at t' end on 't, an' tha'll soin ha' to leuk raand t' corners." – Earn nothing and spend hard, and you'll soon come to poverty.
- 2
To thrive or grow; to ripen.
- Kill ivy, or else tree will addle no more.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。