- 1
A contraption is a machine or a bit of equipment, but the word already smiles at it. It looks homemade, odd, or too clever — as if it might not really work, or might work in a funny way. You would not call a new hospital scanner a contraption unless you meant to be rude. You might call a student’s wild homework robot a contraption, with a kind laugh. Informal, and common in American English; British English uses it too, with the same slightly comic feel. Though actually it does not have to be broken. It only has to look unlikely.
古怪裝置；怪機器
組成Nobody is quite sure. It shows up in English in the early 1800s. People have guessed it mixes contrive (to invent) with trap and -tion, or that it sits near construction, or that it blends contrivance and adaption. Some dictionaries also ask you to compare an old Scots word, cantrip, for a bit of trickery. Treat the origin as unsettled.
原始詞典資料2 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。
contraptionnoun/kənˈtɹæp.ʃən/
- 1
A machine that is complicated and precarious.
- 2
derogatoryAny object.
- “Yes, sir, if that was the language of love, I'll eat my hat,” said the blood relation, alluding, I took it, to the beastly straw contraption in which she does her gardening, concerning which I can only say that it is almost as foul as Uncle Tom's Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, which has frightened more crows than any other lid in Worcestershire.
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。